August 2020

Here is your Salish Sea orca sightings map for August 2020!

You can see lots of Bigg's killer whales, a couple visits from Northern Residents to the Campbell River area, and a conspicuous absence of the Southern Residents.

With this being the first August on record without the Southern Residents in inland waters there have been several questions raised of how we track sightings. First of all, historic records have been kept since 1976 with contributions from many various individuals and organizations. A summary of the data through 2014 can be found at this link (see Table 2 specifically for a month by month summary): http://www.int-res.com/articles/esr2018/37/n037p105.pdf‍

Since we formed in 2015, we have been keeping detailed records building on this amazing long-term sightings database. When we talk about "inland waters" we are primarily talking about the region south of Nanaimo and east of Sooke to stay consistent with where, historically, there has been long-term, consistent sightings effort. This year, thanks to citizen scientists throughout the region, we've been able to expand our tracking to include the northern Salish Sea proper up to Campbell River and, to a lesser extent, out west to the entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

While there were some sporadic reports of Southern Residents in the western end of Juan de Fuca this August, they never made it anywhere near as far in as Sooke, where we have consistent historic records. So while critics may point out the whales were technically "in" the Salish Sea when they were seen west of Port Renfrew (and our use of language on that perhaps isn't the best), we maintain that they were still completely absent from their historic core summer range. Here are the number of days the Southern Residents were present in inland waters east of Sooke in August going back the last few years:

2015: 29 days

2016: 23 days

2017: 2 days

2018: 10 days

2019: 17 days

2020: 0 days

As always, thanks to the literally hundreds of individuals that make this type of data tracking possible. This map is a result of all your reports - we just compile it!