Gorgeous Bird Sightings from Kurt Leipold on the 4/27 La Conner Cruise
Screenshots of Naturalist Emily’s Videos of Chainsaw and fellow T60’s as well as Schooner the Humpback
All naturalist notes from Emily Lekburg
Friday, May 2nd
Today is the first whale watch of the 2025 season!!
We have all been looking forward to hanging out with the whales again.
It was an absolutely beautiful day, and we started off by seeing our classic harbor seals and sea lion friends. We had no leads on where our cetacean friends could be, so we decided to head north over Orcas Island and past Patos. We stopped and looked at the lighthouse on Patos Island, and continued into Canada shortly after.
We were getting antsy trying to find any sort of sign, but we decided to start our trek back to Bellingham. We made our turn toward home, when only about 15 minutes later Casey slows the boat down and said that he found a group of Orcas!!
Everyone was so excited, and we got to watch a couple different family groups. One of them was also the legendary T63 Chainsaw! It turned out to be a fabulous day, with this surprise, and a perfect way to kick off the season!
Saturday, May 3rd
Today was another absolutely gorgeous day on the water!
We got the lucky opportunity to meet Schooner, a 4 year old humpback whale. Schooner has sustained an injury to their tail, as one fluke is fully severed. This could have been from entanglement or a vessel strike, but their injury has not stopped them!
Schooner made the full migration to Hawaii and back to the Salish Sea in just 44 days! Which just shows how resilient these animals can be. The scenario is sad in itself, but I have so much hope for this young whale.
After spending quite some time with that humpback, we decided to take a look at the Peapod Islands. We ended up seeing lots of seals, some eagles, as well as some frolicking sea lions!
Sunday, May 4th
We had no idea where today would take us, but we started with our Viti Island shuffle (our go to start point) to check out some birds and harbor seals! Pupping season will be starting soon for the harbor seals and I’m looking forward to seeing seal pups. There were also some sea lions taking a snooze on a nearby buoy so we stopped and wished them some sweet dreams as we went on our way.
There were reports of some whales north in Canada, but as we got to Boiling Reef we made the call that it wasn’t going to be an option based on weather and our range. It was very chunky up north, and so we had to change our game plan
As we were discussing, one of our passengers found a humpback whale!! This was super exciting and always fun when passengers find whales. We got to hang out with that gigantic critter for a long while before we started to head back, when we got a call about a gray whale. Of course we had to make it a double species whale whammy, and went to check it out. It gave us some amazing looks of its dorsal ridge and knuckles.
Monday, May 5th
This morning we saw a juvenile and a mature bald eagle on Viti Rocks, along with all of our other resident birds there. Including pigeon guillemots, cormorants, and gulls.
We went through the middle of the San Juans today, to change up our route toward a report of a big pod of whales. It is always so pretty and we really could not have asked for better weather.
We ended up watching a group of around 15 orcas! It was such an amazing experience. There were some young calves swimming alongside the moms. The water was perfectly calm, so we were able to see amazing detail under the water.
This was near Spieden Island, where many sea lions were hauled out on shore. We figured that these orcas must not have been hungry, because they completely ignored harbor porpoise, sea lions, and harbor seals that were swimming around them. It was a great way to end the first week of whale watching this summer.
