May 2021

Here is your May 2021 sightings map for the Salish Sea! Again, it's very red with all those Bigg's killer whales out there!

Through May we're on a streak of more than 70 consecutive days with reports of Bigg's in the Salish Sea. Beyond that, the number of reports of different groups of whales has surged through May just like it did in April, with twice as many reports in May 2021 as in May 2020. This puts us well on pace for 2021 for be yet another record year for the presence of Bigg's in the Salish Sea.

Meanwhile, Southern Residents were absent for the entire month of May for the third time on record and the second consecutive year. While we haven't gone a day without Bigg's since March, we've surpassed seven weeks and counting without the Southern Residents in inland waters. If the trend of the last few years continues to hold, we likely have a few more weeks to go before their return. This is all primarily due to the collapse of the Fraser River spring Chinook salmon runs, leading the whales to go elsewhere to find a spring and early summer source of prey. We hope the fact that they don't come in here even to search means they have found some place successful, but we have not heard any tips on the whereabouts of any of the three pods in quite some time!

Finally, even though technically outside the Salish Sea at Swiftsure Bank, we included the interesting observation from Marine Ecology and Telemetry Research of members of G-Pod of the Northern Resident Community. They conducted 19 days of on the water surveys in part to look for Southern Residents, but while they collected data on six cetacean species, the Southern Residents were not to be found.