Humpback whales: Up there on my list of favorite species to hang out with.

Orcas will always be my first love, but humpbacks have definitely climbed near the top of my list of favorite species to hang out with. Part of this appreciation has come from our time on the water out of Telegraph Cove, where not only do you see the same cast of characters from year to year, but often with incredible site fidelity, within the same few kilometers of their favorite feeding grounds from season to season. We got to see both lunge feeding and trap feeding!

This trip was no exception, as while our fieldwork was focused on killer whales, we also encountered over 15 individually recognizable humpbacks including some of our old pals like Ripple, Quartz, Inukshuk, Merge, and Conger. We also got to meet Guardian's 2026 calf, who was always full of energy and has already survived an encounter with killer whales, as evidenced by the rake marks on his flukes. We submit all of our humpback sightings to Happywhale, a community science project that has led to some incredible insights into this global species.

If you're also keen to learn more about humpbacks, we still have a few seats left in our fall Fluking Around with Humpbacks class that runs over the course of 8 weeks this fall. We will learn in depth about migration, calving, feeding, acoustics, and more from a series of expert lectures, will learn how to draw humpback whales, and in what promises to be an epic weekend, will spend two full days on the water with Maya's Legacy in search of the large congregations of humpback whales we see in the Salish Sea in the fall (and all the other incredible marine life that's around then, too!