November 2021

Often things in the whale sightings realm start to slow down in November, but not this year! You can see from our monthly map that there were still consistent reports all throughout the Salish Sea.

Look at all those purple dots! (Click to see the full image with the legend.) November officially became the 2021 month with the most days having the Southern Residents present, with all members of the population making at least one appearance. While they did make several forays into Puget Sound, they also made several circuits up to the the Strait of Georgia.

And while our impressive consecutive days streak with confirmed Bigg's in the Salish Sea ended in October, they still set a November high for number of days present. While some familiar fins were around including the T18s, T46s, and T101s, some less common visitors also spent some time here, including the T167s and most of the T68 family group (whose matriarch and oldest male son are notorious for being involved in the 2016 infanticide incident).

At this point the biggest question mark to end out the year is what kind of high mark we can set for Bigg's killer whale sightings, having surpassed 1000 confirmed sightings a few days ago, which busts open the previous record of 747 set in 2019. This is only one way to track the increasing presence of Ts in the Salish Sea, influenced not only by their growing population and the abundant prey for them here but also by observer effort and all the fantastic local sightings pages. Still, it's fun to see just how much reports have increased, and continue to increase!