When kids from Main Elementary school in Kodiak tried to tally gray whales swimming past Narrow Cape a few weeks ago, they couldn’t do it.
Too many to count!
The great gray whale migration — one of the most extraordinary journeys undertaken by animals between their breeding habitat and feeding grounds — has crested like a wave along the shores and headlands of southern Alaska and surged out the Aleutian Chain toward Arctic seas.
Journey North, the educational website that tracks spring movements of species like American robins and monarch butterflies, has issued its final gray whale update for the 2007 season.
“Most whales — even some moms and babies — have reached Alaska, about 5,000 miles north of the babies’ birthplace,” the site reported this week.
Final reports from Kodiak came from three school kids bused out to Narrow Cape:
On May 1, kids from Main Elementary tried to count the whales but there were too many! On May 3, students from North Star Elementary saw 2 small and 1 large whale playing the the breakwater for 4 hours. On April 23, students from East Elementary saw many whales from shore — lots of spouts and backs.
That’s not to say there still weren’t plenty of grays meandering along more southern shores.
Waiting to count the last moms and babies to pass California, biologist Wayne Perryman says, “We had 19 whales last week, bringing our cow/calf total to 113, still the 4th lowest in 14 years. We had only one pair by late afternoon yesterday, so it looks like the party is about over.”
The team counting grays on Santa Barbara Channel wrapped up the season on Mother’s Day, May 13. The tally? 572 northbound whales, including 52 calves on their first trip.
“It has been a wonderful fifteen weeks on Coal Oil Point in 2007,” writes Michael Smith. He speaks for all of us, too, when he says, “We wish all the whales, counted or not, safe passage.”
Each spring, gray whales journey north up the west coast of North America from Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Beginning in February, the whales leave the warm lagoons of Baja California on a 12,000 mile trip that ends only when they reach the Bering and Chukchi seas off Alaska.
Reaching 46 feet in length and weighing up to 33 tons, the animals are the only bottom-feeding whales, filtering invertebrates from muck through their yellow baleen. Once hunted to the brink of extinction, gray whales have rebounded in recent decades and may number more than 20,000 in the North Pacific.
Their annual journey from Mexico to the Bering Sea draws attention from all over the world. When they pass by Southcentral Alaska in April, they’re about halfway through their outbound leg in a 10,000-mile round trip, one of the longest animal migrations on the planet.
The grays have become the mid-spring harbinger of the ocean bloom and returning salmon. Killer whales pods have been converging on schools, sea lions have returned to rookeries, birds have scrambled to build nests. It’s a bird-and-mammal show on the coast.
[...] there are too many of them ? Gray whale migration reaches Arctic — Far North Science I wonder how much of the whale’s problems is due to the fact that they are well over the number [...]