Whales in the Fog

When I got to Lime Kiln this morning, I didn’t have a good feeling about the day. I had missed the whales by ten minutes, and apparently it had been a very exciting passby. A few minutes later I saw a huge splash on the horizon – the second half of J pod was coming north behind the group I had missed. They passed us slowly and didn’t come very close to shore, but the hydrophones picked up some interesting sounds. Recently, J pod has taken to using a flat-frequency pulsed call that I can’t identify. It sounds something like S16, a common K pod call, and Jeanne Hyde and I are starting to wonder if J pod whales are imitating their K pod relatives. Listen to the clip below and leave a comment if the call sounds familiar to you. I also heard another strange call that I have now heard on three or four occasions. I've dubbed it the “human call” because the first time I heard it, I thought a person was making the sound! Listen to the second clip and let me know if you’ve ever heard this call (turn the volume up all the way to hear).

Around 9:30, we got word that the two J pod groups had met up to the north of us and were heading back down toward Lime Kiln. At this point, a thick blanket of fog had rolled in and we were relying on our ears to detect the whales. By the time they got to us, the whales had fallen into a resting pattern and were tightly bunched together. This is one of my favorite ways to see killer whales, and the experience was made all the more ethereal by the fog surrounding them. Some animals were still active and we could make out their profiles as they breached just beyond our view. It was strange to hear the huge splashes without being able to see what the whales were doing! At this point, the whales were vocalizing very little, as is common during resting. The group (which consisted of J pod and a few members of L pod) turned around one more time and drifted north with the flood tide.