June 2025
We're somehow already at the halfway point for 2025, and with that comes our June Salish Sea killer whale sightings map (or orcas, if you prefer - but before commenting on that fact please read our FAQ linked at the bottom of this post!
The Bigg's killer whales continued to paint the Salish Sea red: the 239 unique sightings in the month of June is the most we have ever documented in a single month! We define a sighting as a unique group seen on a unique day, so each of these dots represented the first sighting location of a unique group, and not everything the whales traveled throughout the course of the day. In other words, you may very well have seen whales in a place not marked on the map!
With Bigg's present every day of June, this also means we have confirmed their presence in the Salish Sea for the first 180 days of the year for the first time ever. We keep thinking that surely their numbers cannot continue to rise, yet they continue to do so.
Many of our common Salish Sea matrilines were around last month, but we also had some more unusual visitors. Among them were the T46Cs, T69s, T85s, the T117s, and T172. T63 Chainsaw and his mom T65 Whidbey also came back from what has become a new tradition of a June visit, to the delight of many! And one new calf was documented: T46C5.
On the flip side, we went our second consecutive month with no Southern Residents in inland waters. This marks only the third June on record with no Southern Residents in the Salish Sea, and the second time there were no Southern Residents in May OR June consecutively, with the last time being in 2021.
We did, however, get some reports of their whereabouts. Several videos shared on the Orca Network Community Group in the second latter half of June documented members of all three pods out near Swiftsure Bank off the western end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Center for Whale Research also had some early July fieldwork scheduled for going out to Swiftsure and will likely have an update on that trip to share soon. So while they aren't here, they aren't far - and from the clues we have, it seems likely they may all be together!
Mid-summer also means the start of Northern Resident killer whale season. While they classically spend more time in the Johnstone Strait region, some of them do make forays into the northern reaches of the Strait of Georgia, particularly the A42s in recent years. They made their first appearance of the summer on June 29th, our lone yellow dot on last month's map!
We have never gone a July without Southern Resident presence, and we hope this won't be the first, but only time will tell on how long we wait have to wait for a visit from Js, Ks, or Ls. Meanwhile Bigg's sightings often take a bit of a dip in July, though not always; one version of the lore is that many of them make an exodus for some time in Alaska, then follow the harbor seal weaning period down the coastline. Even a dip in sightings, though, is not often a true lull - we fully expect them to continue to have a daily presence here!
For more on our sightings maps, you can check out our FAQ page HERE
