August 2025

It's time for our August check in on killer whale sightings throughout the Salish Sea! First up, let's see how I fared on my predictions made at the end of July:

✅ The Southern Residents will be present for half a dozen days or less (They ended up being here for ZERO days!)

We will see the return of the:

✅ T18s, ❌ T34s/T37s, ✅ T60s, and ✅ T124Ds to the Salish Sea, none of which were seen here in July. (Using our tracking data from the previous years as a guide, I got this one 75% correct!

❌ The A42s will return to the northern Salish Sea and spend more than half the month of August there (Incredibly the A42s weren't in the northern Strait of Georgia at all in August!)

As you can see from all the red dots, each of which represents the first location of a unique group seen on a unique day, it was yet another big month for Bigg's killer whales. For the seventh year in a row, we were able to confirm the presence of Bigg's in the Salish Sea for every single day of August. There were a whopping 222 unique sightings over the course of the month, our second highest monthly total for the year after June.

Some Bigg's highlights for the month included the documentation of new calf T75B5, an extended visit from the T109As which included a regular circuit for almost a week of them going daily into Saanich Inlet and Cowichan Bay, and potentially a new split in the T46B matriline with the T46B2s splitting off for at least a few days, interestingly with T46B6!

This became the first official August on record with no Southern Resident killer whales in inland waters, which after following goose eggs in the months of May and June and just one 3-day visit in July makes this by far the summer season with the fewest days of their presence. (In 2020 they essentially weren't here in August, either, but were seen inbound in the western Strait of Juan de Fuca on the last day of the month.) The saving grace, if there is one, is that in recent years after the worst August numbers for Southern Residents, we have had the best Septembers in recent memory, so we hope to see the same again this year.

While I was wrong thinking the A42s of the Northern Resident killer whale community would return to the Salish Sea last month, there wasn't a total absence of NRKWs in the Strait of Georgia. Interestingly it was the other members of the A5 Pod - the A23s and A25s - that made their way as far south as Campbell River, represented by the yellow dots on the most northern part of the map.If you have additional questions about our sightings tracking, check out our FAQ page