By DANA TIMS/YachatsNews.com
Edith and Kent Hitchings were in Florence last Friday when the longtime whale-watchers checked a Facebook page that monitors orca sightings on the Oregon coast.
A family of orcas were spotted near Newport, someone reported, so they raced north.
“We made the guess that they might turn up into Yaquina Bay,” Edith Hitching told YachatsNews this week. “By the time we got to the jetty, we’d learned they had already traveled upriver. We knew they had to come back so we pulled in and waited.”
In ocean inlets, bays and rivers all along the Oregon coast, killer whales are making their highest-profile appearances in recent memory.
Killer whales were sighted a total of 15 times from April 22 to May 28, said Josh McInnes, a marine mammal researcher at the University of British Columbia. The sightings ranged from Brookings to Cannon Beach.
The family of four killer whales that drew scores of onlookers – and the Hitchings — when they swam into Yaquina Bay last week were likely hoping to take advantage of harbor seal pupping season.
McInnes, using multiple photographs submitted to a Facebook page he created titled Oregon Coast Killer Whale Sightings, was able to identify which individuals were in the group.
Dorsal fin notches, along with scars on the gray “saddle patch” just behind the fin, allows him to quickly calculate exactly which family-based grouping was creating all the stir. His identifications supported research showing that killer whales hunt in groups, most often led by a lead female.
With breathtaking specificity, he wrote of two different recently sighted groups.
“The first group was encountered off Depoe Bay and involved the T049As. This transient family is composed of the lead female TO49A (born in 1986), her adult son T049A1 (born in 2001), her other son T049A3 (born in 2011), another son T049A4 (born in 2014), daughter T049A5 (born in 2017 and newest calf T049A6 (born in 2022).”
Regarding the Yaquina Bay group, he added, “The second group was the T049Bs, who were sighted yesterday off Newport. T049B (born in 1992) is the younger sister of T049A, and she often travels with her offspring T049B2 (born in 2010), T049B3 (born in 2013) and newest calf T049B4 (born in 2020).”
All of these orcas are known as transient killer whales, which are by far the most frequent sub-species of killer whales to frequent Oregon’s inner-coastal waters, McInnes said. Transient killer whales, which feed on other mammals such as harbor seals, harbor porpoises and Steller sea lions, are believed to number more than 400 and are increasing every year.
Occasionally seen in Oregon waters are so-called offshore killer whales, which feed primarily on sharks and other fish. They have also been known to hunt gray whale calves in Monterey Bay and can be found in the open ocean stretching from the eastern Aleutian Islands of Alaska to southern California.
The third sub-species of orcas in the Northwest Pacific are southern resident whales. Their range centers on the coastal waters of southern Vancouver Island and the inland waters of Washington’s Salish Sea. The southern residents, which feed primarily on salmon, are listed as among the world’s most endangered species of marine mammals. As of 2020 only 72 individuals remained.
Reports help research
All sightings are important, McInnes said, because despite having lived in West Coast waters for millennia, much remains unknown about orcas – their behavior, habitat preferences and community structure.
“Each new sighting provides potentially vital information that we didn’t know before,” he said. “While we can identify many killer whales with great specificity, it’s also true that it frequently happens that the whales being sited are individuals we have never seen before.”
He cites two reasons why this has been such a big year for killer whale sightings.
For one, the main prey of transient killer whales is harbor seals. The fact that spring is their pupping season is undoubtedly drawing orcas in search of food.
Secondly, observer efforts have increased markedly. His Facebook “sightings” page has grown to nearly 4,000 followers, with many posting real-time reports of new glimpses of whales.
It was on that page that Leigh Torres, an associate professor in Oregon State University’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, learned Friday of the four killer whales passing Depoe Bay on their way to Newport.
Since she collaborates regularly with McInnes, she emailed him immediately. At the same time, her research assistant at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport grabbed a camera and raced to the Yaquina Bay jetty in hopes of capturing fresh images.
“All these sightings over the past month have been pretty exciting,” Torres said. “And what’s especially cool here is that you can view them from the shore pretty easily.”
First sightings for some
And that’s how the Hitchings, both retired state of Washington employees who have a house in Depoe Bay, joined the fast-growing group along the Yaquina Bay south jetty. It took awhile – the Hitchings later learned that the orcas had traveled about 2 1/2 miles upstream – but, eventually, they spotted one surface as they returned to sea.
Standing beside them was a woman who also had heard about the parade. Unlike the Hitchings, who have been whale-watching volunteers for 18 years, the woman confessed that she had never seen any type of whale before.
“I held out my hand and pointed to where she should look and she saw what I was pointing at,” Edith said. “And the elation from her was unbelievable. She started screaming and then cried. She had so many tears that she said she couldn’t see the whales anymore.”
That sort of soul-deep reaction is one that OSU’s Torres said makes various whale species so valuable in helping connect people with the ocean.
“Whales are pretty remarkable like that,” she said. “They are the gateway to marine conservation and ocean literacy and I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe it’s that they are mammals and people sense the similarities to us. They get to wonder and care more about the ocean in which they live.”
At the same time, Torres added, there was an unfortunate piece of the Yaquina Bay sighting that few seem to know about. It is why, in fact, the killer whales turned around where they did, likely before eating as much as they might have otherwise.
One of the various boats that began following the orcas upriver got far too close to the group, certainly well inside the 100-yard buffer required by federal law involving marine mammals. Killer Whales are famously skittish about intruders, especially when hunting.
“That boat forced them to change their behavior and turn around,” Torres said. “That more than likely disturbed a good feeding event.”
- Dana Tims is an Oregon freelance writer who contributes regularly to YachatsNews.com. He can be reached at DanaTims24@gmail.com