December 2025
Before we dive into our annual summary maps for 2025, we have one more monthly map to share with you summarizing December. Let's start by revisiting my predictions for the month; I didn't do so well!
❌ Js and Ks but not Ls will return with 14 or fewer days of total SRKW presence
I'm happy to be wrong on this one! All three pods made an appearance and were confirmed present on 16 days throughout the month
❌ T75 and T75A will show up
They are usually common Salish Sea visitors in December, but this year they were not reported
❌ The last whales I’ll see in 2025 will be the T60 brothers
T60D and T60E were around a lot towards the end of the year, but the last orcas I saw in 2025 ended up being a T-Party made up of T34s, T37, T37Bs, T65A5, T75Bs, and the T75Cs!
Bigg's killer whale sightings were down slightly in December 2025 compared to 2024, but we were still able to confirm their presence somewhere in the Salish Sea on 27 days out of the month. You can see from the map that the San Juan Islands were a hotspot! Each dot indicates the first sighting location of the day for a unique group of whales. In addition to the T Party noted above, other highlights for the month included a visit from the T250s and T252s (with a new calf!) and the T73As making a visit to the Salish Sea for the first time in a year and a half.
On the Southern Resident killer whale front, there was an amazing stretch of three days where members of L-Pod were seen off Powell River, J-Pod was seen near Nanaimo, and K-Pod in Puget Sound, with little to go on to figure out their travel patterns before and after those reports. It still astounds me how groups of 15-30+ whales can go undetected for days in the Salish Sea despite so many people keeping an eye and an ear out for them.
Speaking of Powell River, how about the fact they had all three populations pay a visit this month? Bigg's killer whales and both Northern and Southern Resident killer whales were seen from their shores in December. (As were other unidentified whales, which are indicated by the gray dots. These just indicate that killer whales were confirmed but were not identifiable into one of these three populations.)
The undisputed highlight of the month however was the documentation of a new calf in K-Pod who received the designation K47. As the smallest of the three Southern Resident pods and with the fewest breeding females, K-Pod births are few and far between. The last one was in 2022, and prior to that, 2011.
We will keep the monthly maps going in 2026, but next up will be a reflection on 2025 as a whole with some annual maps by population, a look at the overall take for the year compared to years prior, and a chance to make predictions for this year!
