September 2022
Here is our September 2022 Salish Sea orca sightings map! We had confirmed Bigg's killer whale reports on 29 days out of the month, with September 26 being the day that ended our 175 consecutive day Bigg's streak. Both of the last two Septembers we had Bigg's every day of the month.
The total number of unique sightings was down a bit as well, with just over 100 Bigg's groups reported this year, while September 2021 saw more than 130 unique sightings. Is it possible our Bigg's boom is slowing down, or at least topping out? Perhaps, but year to date through September, 2022 is still up by more than 150 sightings compared to 2021!
Some notable Bigg's reports from September included the unusual splitting of the T18 matriline into two pairs, the prevalance of the T60 brothers, and visits from some uncommon matrilines to the Salish Sea including the T59As, T71Bs, T109As, and T109Bs. 42 year-old male T97 Gull also made his first confirmed visit to the Salish Sea of the year.
Meanwhile, we had Southern Resident killer whales confirmed present on 19 days of the month, more days than it felt like to be honest with many of the reports coming from the central or western Strait of Juan de Fuca! (They were also seen at Swiftsure Bank, as shown on the map, but this doesn't technically count towards the Salish Sea total.)
The month started out with a bang with J-Pod showing up on September 1 and hanging around every day through 9/9. It would be mostly J-Pod seen sporadically throughout the rest of the month as well; while K-Pod and the L12s made brief visits to Haro Strait, this is the first time in my memory at least that the majority of L-Pod didn't come in as far as the San Juan Islands in September. Additionally, no Southern Residents made a September foray into Puget Sound this year, something they've done at least once in recent years.
It's anybody's guess as to what caused the shift in Southern Resident patterns this September, though our money is nearly always on food availability. We hope feeding was just better further west, and that as the fall rains begin we start to see them coming in for the chum runs as they typically do in autumn.
Note on reading the map: Each dot represents the first location of a unique sighting of a group of whales on a given day, so this doesn't represent everywhere the whales traveled; instead it gives an overall sense of the number of unique whale sightings for the month. This time of year, with a lot more eyes on the water, we get a lot more in the way of documentation and IDs, but the few gray dots indicate "unknown ecotype", meaning killer whales were confirmed but it was not possible to confirm specific whale IDs.
