Nature’s World:  GRAY WHALES

by Susan Tweit

     Last April, Richard and I drove the length of Big Sur, the wild coast of central California. We stayed one night in a cabin perched on a point, high above a crescent-shaped cove with a bit of beach and a few dark rocks protruding from the surf.

     In the morning, we walked out on the bluff below our cabin. The fog had rolled in overnight, shrinking the world to just the cove far below.

     We watched sea otters—seeming so tiny from our height above the ocean—playing in the azure blue water. We laughed at the seals hauled out and snoozing on a rock like slabs of blubber.

     Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something big gliding along underwater just beyond the seal rock. I grabbed Richard’s arm: “Look! It’s a gray whale!” 

     We watched the whale swim along, its huge flippers stroking rhythmically. The water was so clear that we could see the ivory patches of sea lice and barnacles mottling its gray skin.

     The whale glided on, headed steadily north. As it turned out to sea to pass the point where we stood, it surfaced and blew out a thin column of water, breathing.

     In spring and fall, gray whales migrate along the Pacific Coast on their north-south paths. They are not large whales, reaching lengths of just 50 feet and weights of 20 to 40 tons, but these long-distance swimmers are easy to spot because they stick close to the coast. 

     Every fall, gray whales leave their feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi seas between Alaska and Siberia, and head for warm waters off Baja California. They swim around 100 miles a day on their 6,000-mile journey, rarely stopping to sleep or eat.

     After spending a few months in the shallow lagoons off the west coast of Baja California, where pregnant females give birth to three-quarter-ton calves, gray whales head north again. Males leave first, in December and January, when some late migrants are still coming south; females and their calves follow later.

     Gray whales’ habit of sticking to shallow coastal waters on their migration makes them a tourist attraction now, but it once rendered them relatively easy prey for hunters.

     Long before Europeans arrived, Native Americans ventured out in kayaks and other small boats to harpoon the migrating beasts. Native hunters apparently didn’t make much of a dent in the gray whale population, because these barnacle-crusted whales were abundant in the early 1700s in both the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans when commercial whaling began.

     Although gray whales weren’t the favorite catch of commercial whalers, since they yielded less oil per whale than sperms, humpbacks, and right whales, grays’ shallow-water habitat made them attractive targets. In the North Atlantic, they were killed off by the end of the eighteenth century.

     In the Pacific Ocean, gray whales were largely ignored until populations of more-desirable whales began to decline. By the mid-1800s, whalers discovered grays’ wintering grounds off Baja California, and the real slaughter was on.

     Enticed by thousands of whales gathered in shallow lagoons, whalers killed so many female whales and their calves that the water in the lagoons, according to contemporary accounts, ran red with whale blood.

     Not surprisingly, over the next few decades, Pacific gray whale populations dropped sharply. By the time gray whales were protected in 1946, only a few thousand remained along the entire Pacific Coast.

     After the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, gray whales were among the first species listed. The protection was just what they needed.

     By 1993, Pacific Coast gray whale populations had rebounded to around 21,000 animals, equal the numbers in pre-commercial-whaling days, and they were removed from the Endangered Species List.

     That foggy morning on the Big Sur coast, Richard and I watched the gray whale as it breathed, and then slipped silently under the surface of the ocean again, headed steadily for the distant Arctic. 

     In moments, the whale vanished from sight in the fog. We stood on the bluff for a while, keeping watch, but the cove remained empty of passing whales.

     We turned and went in to breakfast, having begun our day with the passing magic of a migrating whale.

   © 2003 Susan J. Tweit