February 2024

If there's one thing the whales like to do, it's prove me wrong! When posting our first couple maps of 2024, we highlighted that February is often the slowest month in the Salish Sea for orca sightings. It was not slow this year! We had orca reports every single day of the month and all three populations we track had higher sightings reported this year compared to last year.

The Bigg's killer whale reports were particularly remarkable, with numbers almost triple that of 2023. Common families like the T18s, T36s, T90s, T99s, T124As, and T137s each spent some time here but we also had visits from more uncommon Salish Sea visitors including the T30Bs, T85s, and T117Bs. On February 19th, we had 8 different groups of Bigg's confirmed throughout the Salish Sea - those are more like summer numbers!

Another highlight was new calf T100B3 being documented for the first time, and interestingly the calf's aunt T100E Tharaya has broken away from her mom's group for the second year in a row and is traveling instead with her sister T100B Freya.

Southern Resident reports were about on par with what we've come to expect for February, with Js making a couple of trips north into the Strait of Georgia and south into Puget Sound. K-Pod was also seen once in the Strait of Juan de Fuca but as far as we know, didn't come further into inland waters.

Northern Resident killer whales, however, were the other surprise for February. It's typical for the A42s to visit the Sunshine Coast in the winter, but this year they brought the rest of the A5 Pod - the A23s and A25s - with them. They were seen almost daily in the second half of February, and we'll have another map forthcoming to highlight the details of their visit a little bit further.

The last couple days of February were pretty quiet and the first few days of March have started out in similar fashion. Will we have a later than usual winter lull in orca reports? Or is this just the calm before the rise of "spring Ts" we usually start getting in March? It will be interesting to see how the rest of this month plays out!

Thanks as always to everyone who contributes sightings throughout the Salish Sea to allow us to track Salish Sea killer whales in this fashion!