July 2020

Here's our monthly look at killer whale presence in the Salish Sea for the month of July 2020. It's nice to see all those purple dots representing the 21 days of the month the Southern Residents were here, right on the 10-year average (though after they were present for only 2 days last July, it sure felt like a lot!).

53 of the 72 Southern Residents also paid us a visit in July, with just the K14s and the L12 and L54 sub-groups absent. It was also interesting to note that all the Ks and Ls who visited returned via the east side of Vancouver Island and Johnstone Strait, something that used to be common in the early 2000s but hasn't happened at all in recent years.

On the Bigg's killer whale side of things, this was the second July in a row where they were present somewhere in the Salish Sea on every single day of the month. There were many more sightings in the first half of the month, however, with later reports dominated by long stays in Puget Sound by the T37As, T46s, T65As, and T137s. A lot of those dots are overlapping so it's hard to see the real volume of the Puget Sound reports, but look at how deep they go into those very narrow inlets such as Hood Canal and Henderson Bay!

Overall, Bigg's killer whale reports are down significantly from last year, with 2020 tallying just 73% of the number of sightings year-to-date compared to 2019. It's hard to differentiate the impacts of COVID (and fewer people on the water and shorelines looking for whales) from an actual decline in visits from the whales, but we suspect it's some combination of both.