Give this video your full attention and make sure the volume is turned up…
Is that perhaps the most impressive animal noise in the world emerging from the most charismatic animal on the planet?
I think so.
It’s a magnificent sound…and sight…that was so very, very nearly lost for ever after Humpbacks were nearly harpooned out of existence. They are slow-moving coastal whales that were easy to hunt and could easily have gone the way of their cousins, the even bigger and even more lumbering North Pacific and North Atlantic Right Whales, which are only just hanging on by a thread with no more than a few hundred individuals left.
The history of Humpbacks in the east of Vancouver island is typical of all stories of whaling on an industrial scale: haunting, gripping, exasperating, compelling…
Two mini-anecdotes stick in the mind about the history of the Humpbacks of the Georgia Straight, between Vancouver and Vancouver Island.
The first concerned a whale enthusiast a hundred years ahead of his time, Captain J.A. Cates. He ran boat trips out of Vancouver in the early 1900s for passengers to enjoy the spectacle of twenty Humpbacks that visited the area in late summer. Just when he thought his business was about to take off, a whaling station was set up nearby and by 1908, despite his protests, all the whales had fallen victim to harpoons. Groan.
The new whaling ships and explosive harpoons were so ‘effective’ that after that time no great whales were seen in the sheltered waters of eastern Vancouver Island for nearly seventy years. None at all. Every time one nosed round from the Pacific it was eliminated.
They only started to cautiously peep back a decade or two after hunting Humpbacks was banned in 1966.
That leads nicely on to the second snippet that stuck in my mind.
In an article for the journal of the Vancouver Aquarium in 1985 about the history of Humpbacks in the area, author Bill Merelees finishes up ‘one day perhaps fifty years from now, ferry patrons may once again see the whales playing in the seas off Vancouver Island’. It is very poignant because he sounds as though he is desperate to see this happen, but doesn’t sound particularly hopeful that it will ever happen. .
But he was absolutely spot on. They HAVE returned, and in numbers more than anyone had dared to hope. Up to 500 come to this area to feed every summer. With a bit of luck Bill is still around to see that his tentative prediction has come true.
We were thrilled to see them every day on our kayak trip. A sequence of breaths fairly close together was followed by a deep dive which often threw those huge tail flukes into the air…nice.
The spontaneous quiet cheers that went up when we heard the distant blast of breath turned to an ‘ooooh’ of appreciation as the great tail heaved up out of the water before sliding out of sight.
It’s Orcas that are the local pin-ups and that really draw in the whale-watching crowds. There are Orca models and pics all round the towns. It is no doubt because they are showy and glam with those white flashes and that unfeasibly huge dorsal fin.
I, however, am more of a Humpback fan, maybe because they are the size of a bus and maybe because have been fortunate enough to spend a fair amount of time in their company on a couple of previous occasions. Both from the seat of a kayak, of course.
First a lunge-feeing whale off Cornwall in 2019 (apologies about dredging this one up again…yawn…regular readers. But here’s a pic to remind, you)
And secondly an absolutely extraordinary prolonged encounter with an inquisitive…though still huge… humpback calf, shepherded by its marginally more cautious mother, as it repeatedly passed just a few feet underneath our kayak in the icy waters of the Antarctic. Once upside down (the calf, not us…fortunately).
How it didn’t accidentally swat us with its twelve foot long flippers or fifteen foot wide tail flukes as it rolled over for a better look at us, I will never know.
We were sprayed by its blow however.
We saw approximately 25 Humpbacks from Eastern Vancouver Island at a variety of locations and viewed about a dozen from the kayaks. While camped on the islands we could hear their blows through the night, sometimes close enough to hear the inspiration of air through sizeable pipes after the explosive exhalation.
On a couple of occasions we heard a ‘crump’ like the sound of a distant naval gun as a Humpback breached and could see the gigantic splashes in the distance.
We witnessed one lunge-feeding event involving two Humpbacks. Having engulfed a mouthful of baitfish one stayed at the surface lying upside down with both pectoral fins sticking out of the water.
Fortunately most days were windless so while out on the water not many minutes went by when we couldn’t hear a blow of a whale, often too far away to see.
On one occasion a lot closer…
The Lone Kayaker 