New Whales

 My whale nerdom has intensified over the years, and now with the new boat, the opportunities have increased to venture out and look for them.  This year has introduced us to some new whales as well as visiting with some that we have known for years.

We named this whale Anan because we encountered it near Anan Creek on our way to spend the day at the Anan Wildlife Observatory.  There were 2 large whales and one smaller whale travelling together but this was the only good tail shot I got.  The smaller whale did a lot of breaching and seemed to be having a good time and enjoying life and the sunny day.

We later saw Anan with maybe the same two whales in September quite a long way from where we first saw them in July.

The top photo is of a new whale to us named Falco.  The whale Falco was with is a whale already known to us named Frisbee.

This is Ghost.  Ghost is maybe my favorite of "our" whales and is one of the first that I photographed and documented.  Ghost is very photogenic and always dives with tail high in the air giving lots of opportunities for pictures.  

Another already known whale named Halo that we recently saw with Ghost.

One more already known whale named Chuck that we also recently saw with Ghost, Halo, Frisbee, and a whale that I thought was new for us but upon investigating some old photos, we first saw in 2019.  That whale wasn't named yet so we named it Kash.

This is Kash.  Looking through some old photos, I realized that I had pictures of this whale from August of 2019 in a group of whales consisting of Ghost, Chuck, Razorback, and Stihl.  I find it very interesting that many of these whales are feeding and travelling together year after year.  I'd love to know why.  Are they related?  Friends?  Coincidence?  Another interesting fact is that most of the whales we see here around Wrangell and Southeast Alaska in general spend their winters in Hawaii particularly off of the west coast of Maui near Lahaina in the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary.  Summers in Southeast Alaska and winters in Hawaii sounds like an idyllic existence in my modern human mind although the whales have many dangers, obstacles, and effort to navigate for that lifestyle.  Many years ago now, one of our local shrimp fishermen lost several of his shrimp pots while they were set out to catch shrimp.  He had no idea what had happened to them and as losing gear is sometimes a result of commercial fishing, he just continued on with his season.  Several months later he was contacted by people in Hawaii who had disentangled a humpback from his missing shrimp gear!!  The whale had swam all the way from the Wrangell, Alaska vicinity to Hawaii while dragging the buoys, lines, and pots!  Fortunately, there are many whale lovers like myself who have been trained and volunteer to disentangle whales when they are found in need of assistance and there is a large community of whale disentanglers in Hawaii as well as a smaller group here in SE AK.  I travelled to Sitka, AK a few years ago to be trained in the techniques and strategies for whale disentanglement but fortunately have not had a chance to help.

This was a brand new whale for us and another photogenic one.  We named it Snow.

These aren't new whales but since I mentioned them in this post I figured I would include their pictures.  The top whale is Razorback and the bottom is Stihl.

How about some whale talk?  My inexpensive hydrophone and even more inexpensive speaker for it sure make a whale encounter even more incredible.

This next video is from this past April, according to the time stamp (I thought it was last winter), and is a short one that has two of my favorite sounds:  the breathing of a whale and Andrea's laugh.  This was a small humpback that was hanging out near town for several days and took advantage of the natural fish corral that the harbor makes to get a few meals of fish schooled up there.  Just two days ago I saw a small humpback very near to town for most of the day.  Maybe it is the same one?  I don't have photos of it and have not seen its tail yet but hope to soon.

The humpbacks are typically in our area well into November and even December before they begin the journey to Hawaii so I hope to have more encounters before 2021 ends!

Time Speeds Up

 

Looks like it has been literally almost one year since I last posted anything here, my how time seems to pick up speed the older you get!  For the few of you who read this and enjoy it, my apologies.  As Autumn loses its struggle to keep Winter at bay, I'll be more disciplined in putting some new stories here.

It was a decent summer this year of 2021, much, much, much, much better than the misery that was 2020.  2021 was also a year in which I was fortunate enough to find a very nice boat for sale at a price that I could manage which made it possible to get out and better enjoy the seas around me.  We photographed and named some new whales for us so I'll do a post about them and we ventured north in the boat to a new place for us that had the highlight of Andrea successfully fighting and landing a halibut that measured 75 and a half inches long and weighed somewhere around 225 - 230 pounds!

But, I'll start the first post of 2021 with an encounter we had just 3 days ago on one of the first sunny calm days we have had in nearly a month.  

Andrea and I, as well as Kash, her 10 month old Siberian Husky, went out boating with no real plan other than to enjoy the Sun, take some photos, drink some wine, and hope to see something cool in the way of wildlife or nature.  We decided to go between Wrangell Island and the mainland which isn't usually our preferred destination but we hadn't been that way in a while and I have a tree job to do there soon at a remote cabin so going that way would also give me the chance to see what that job will involve.

Here are a few pictures of the upcoming job.  We have to take out the tall Sitka Spruce  tree to the right of the cabin in these pictures.  The tree is big and leans out over the cabin a bit so we will have to climb it and take it apart in pieces.  This means climbing to close to the top, tying a climbing rope (line) and a lowering line to the tree, rappelling back down and then working my way back up cutting off the branches along the way.  Some of the branches will probably have to be lowered on the lowering line so they don't fall on the cabin and damage the roof or break windows.  Once the branches are all removed and I'm back at the top, the top of the tree will be cut off, topping the tree, and then I'll start working my way back down cutting pieces of the trunk of the tree off as I go.  Yes, it is scary sometimes, but with experience, skill, and extreme focus, it is done safely.

The route we took in the boat after visiting this cabin took us passed a small river called Aaron's Creek which is one of my favorite places in the area.  It is rugged, remote and about as untrammeled by humans as it gets.  It also has some amazing and unnamed mountains lining its valley.

If a person were to climb these mountains it would involve a very long day of extreme bushwacking through an area known for very large brown bears just to get to the base of one of them.  A helicopter would bypass all of that but in my thinking would be cheating.

I won't drag this first post out for too long so I'll get to the highlight of the day.  After nearly circumnavigating Wrangell Island without seeing anything too exciting, I decided to head away from Wrangell to a strait where whales are more likely to be.  When we rounded the point into Chichagof Pass, we immediately saw what looked like a whale spout in the near distance glistening in the sun.

We quickly realized the spouts were not big enough or tall enough to be from Humpbacks so we began to get excited that maybe, just maybe we had found some orcas.  As the unmistakable sight of a black dorsal fin rising out of the water came into view, we knew we were in luck!!  We soon counted 5 orcas travelling in a loosely organized pod that consisted of 3 females and 2 smaller young orcas.  I positioned the boat ahead of them so we could wait for them to pass by and hope that they would pass by close enough to get some good photos.  I have heard or read somewhere that splashing your hand in the water can get orcas to come closer and I had an orca encounter before in which I did that and think that maybe the splashing did work so I did it again.  A few minutes later, one of the orcas swam belly up right under the boat!!  The two young orcas seemed particularly energetic and kept slapping their tails on the water's surface and even breached a couple of times.

I didn't get many good pictures, orcas are harder to photograph than humpbacks (for me anyway) but I did get a slightly blurry photo of a marking on one of them that was good enough quality to use as an identifying mark.  Like the tails of humpback whales, orcas have unique markings near the base of their dorsal fins and on the gray saddle behind the dorsal fin.  This is how individuals are recognized by humans.  I have another photo of an orca from several years ago that has a white mark at the base of its dorsal fin that looks a lot like the shape of the state of West Virginia.

This orca was matched in the database that I submit my photos to and has been named Peaches by the person who has a previous sighting, an unfortunate name for such an incredible creature  I think we will call her Firefly because the mark reminds me of the ship from the sci-fi show of the same name. This identification also made it possible for me to find out that these are what are known as transient orcas.  I won't get into the details of what transient orcas are but it basically means they travel over big areas and are eaters of marine mammals like seals and sea lions not fish.  Transient orcas are also known as Biggs orcas after a biologist who was a pioneer of orca research (and because it seems like humans have to stick the name of someone who supposedly "discovered" something in nature that has existed and been known about by some for centuries).  We stayed with this group for about an hour enjoying their communications, the young ones energy, and just being in their presence before they swam out into more open water where it would be hard to anticipate where they would go making it hard to keep up with them in the boat.

That's enough mediocre photos.  On to the really cool stuff!

I keep an inexpensive hydrophone and even more inexpensive speaker in the boat for encounters just like this.  It makes a magical experience even more so.

In that video, I am fairly certain that the orca was right under the boat making those sounds because the hydrophone got pulled enough to knock over the speaker.

If you enjoyed those videos, go back to June 2019 in this blog and find the post titled Whale Language.  There are more recordings with the hydrophone from a different orca encounter while kayaking not far from where this one happened.