Humpback whales are one of the real success stories of the environmental movement. Having crept perilously close to extinction by the mid-1970s—there were only 450 of them in the South Atlantic then—their numbers have gradually rebounded in the ensuing years, largely thanks to the ban on hunting them imposed in the 1980s, as well as to efforts to restore their traditional habitats.
A recent paper found that the South Atlantic population now numbers around 25,000, a significant rebound that likely approaches historically normal levels.
Historians record that humpbacks were common in the North Pacific before the late 19th century, when whaling operations nearly hunted them to extinction as well. After the 1980s, their numbers also rebounded significantly, from a low of 1,200 to modern estimates of about 21,000.
Some of the waters they had previously visited on their migratory journeys up and down the Pacific Coast, including the Northwest’s Inside Passage and the Salish Sea, home of Washington's San Juan Islands, had not seen humpbacks with any kind of regularity at all until just the past decade. But now residents of the San Juans are seeing them with great frequency, the humpbacks apparently unperturbed by the presence of salmon-eating Southern Resident killer whales.
It’s been … amazing.
One night in 2016, I happened to catch three humpbacks singing to each other in the waters of Lime Kiln Lighthouse State Park, picked up by the OrcaSound hydrophone installed there, which runs 24/7 and is overseen by the fine folks at SMRU Consulting.
The singing went on for over an hour, and I only happened to tune in well after they had begun. In any event, it makes for an unusually symphonic recording: Played nonstop, it has a remarkably calming quality.
I’ve played this for a couple of scientists who agree with me that this isn’t a typical humpback-song recording as we’ve grown accustomed to hearing from places such as the waters in Hawaii, where the singing is more chorus-like and involves multiple singers. This one is different in that there’s a clear call-and-response kind of conversation between the two adults and the calf here; it’s possible they were teaching “the song”—the shared musical piece that you hear as a chorus in Hawaii (see here for a sample)—to their progeny.
Who knows for sure? Whales are still mostly a mystery to us, even to the scientists. The more we learn about them, the more we realize how little we actually know. Hope you enjoy listening to that mystery as much as I do.