The last day of July began with a continuation of calls and echolocation in Johnstone Strait, which had been heard throughout the evening of the 30th. At this point, it sounded like the A54s and A23s were somewhere around the entrance to Blackney Passage. By 12:30am, only the A1 calls of the A54s were heard in Johnstone Strait, but there was echolocation heard on the hydrophone in Blackfish Sound suggesting that the A23s silently slipped through Blackney Passage. This was confirmed minutes later by a few A5 calls coming in from Blackfish Sound. Meanwhile, the A54s remained in Johnstone Strait and started heading east.
The A54s moved in and out of the range of our hydrophones with calls being heard intermittently throughout the night. At 4:00am, some of the A54s decided that they needed a quick three-minute rub at Strider Rubbing Beach. After this, the A54s remained spread out around the Robson Bight (Michael Bigg) Ecological Reserve. At 6:00am, some of the A54s again partook in a brief rub at Strider Rubbing Beach. Calls and echolocation continued to be heard at varying levels of clarity, as they searched widely for fish.
The rising sun revealed that a dense fog had settled in overnight. While we caught a short glimpse of three orcas on our Robson Bight camera, likely some of the A54s traveling back west, the fog prevented us from following them more. For a while, the only thing we could see was an adorable sea lion hauled out just in front of our Robson Bight camera. Throughout the day, we joyfully watched as the sea lion returned to pose and rest on the rock in the sun.
Cloaked by the lingering fog, the A54s snuck into Blackney Passage around 11:20am with no calls to warn us of their proximity beforehand. Three members of the matriline travelled quite close to the Lab!. We followed them acoustically after they vanished into the fog heading north in Blackfish Sound.
Everything was quiet until more orcas–a mother and baby–entered Blackney Passage at 3:54pm. We suspect that this was a pair of Bigg’s orcas because they are known to travel silently, and they tend to take longer dives than Northern Residents. Due to their brief appearance and the poor angles at which we were photographing their dorsal fins, we were not able to identify them.
At 3:58pm, we received a report from Scotty that the A23s were entering Blackfish Sound. This western most hydrophone in the remote hydrophone network picked up their calls at 5:29pm. Members of A1 pod were with the A23s. A60, also known as “Fife,” entered Blackney Passage around 6:00pm traveling alone. He took a long dive early on this transit and then reappeared about a third of the way through Blackney Passage. Other members of his family entered several minutes later. Then the A54s followed closer to the Hanson Island side in a close group. The A23s, except for A60, were now moving tightly together with the A54s in one large group. It was hard to believe that they could travel so closely without swimming on top of one another, especially when some of the young orcas started tail lobbing. We followed the orcas on our remote Cracroft Point camera as they traveled east in Johnstone Strait. They stopped calling around 8:15pm, but we heard echolocation on one of the hydrophones in Robson Bight at 9:30pm indicating that they continued east silently.
The A23s and A54s started rubbing at Strider Rubbing Beach at 10:15pm. Continuing their trend for the evening, there were very few calls, only the loud chuffs of their bodies rubbing against the smooth pebbles, as well as several low groans, filling the hydrophones. The rub lasted until 10:51pm, when they disappeared off our acoustic network until the first day of August.
Words by Mary Margaret
