Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Orca Residents of WA: Good & Bad News

Good morning, everyone.....

I just heard that there are 2 new calves to J-pod & L-pod this year. They are labeled J44 and L112. According to Ken Balcomb at the Center of Whale Research, they need to have a few more sightings to figure out who the mother, sister, aunt, grandma are. If these calves survive their first year, this will be good news for the population of the pods. YEAH!

Now onto the bad news.... There was just an announcement that L57; Faith is missing. Ken Balcomb said, "We'll wait until our summer encounters before counting him out". I remember this last summer when I was up there on San Juan Island and was out with Jim Maya, he had a call come in with a possible sighting of Faith. He was excited that we were going to possibly have a chance to see Faith if we could catch up to the group. Lets all hope this is not the case and that Faith will show up this year when the Residents make their return to the islands for the season.


An update on the whale count... My shift was rained out last Monday, February 9th. This past Monday, February 16th, my daughter had a holiday, so she was out of school, but come to find out, they were rained out anyway. However, they have had 13 sightings of Northern Migration of Gray Whales so far this season. Great news as last year, the first sighting was not until February 17th.

Hope everyone has a wonderful week...



1 comment:

  1. So good to hear from you and those beautiful whales! You have a great week too!

    Craig

    ReplyDelete