May 2026

Summer is here and is already starting to fly by, but before we finish out the month of June, we want to circle back and provide our belated recap of May killer whale sightings in the Salish Sea. In many ways it reflected what we've come to expect in May by these two simple numbers: Bigg's killer whales present all 31 days of the month for the sixth consecutive year, and a total absence of Southern Residents for the fifth time in the last ten years.

Through reports and media shared by our partners across the Sailsh Sea we were able to verify 199 unique sightings of Bigg's killer whales in the month of May, with each sightings representing a unique group seen on a unique day. Each red dot on the map indicates the first sighting location for each group, giving a sense of the number of groups of whales utilizing the area month to month, but not representing everywhere each group traveled. These 199 sightings are a dip from the last two years, which were both over 200 unique sightings in the month of May, but still an overall uptick compared to what we were seeing in years prior, typically more about the 150 mark.

It's hard to pick highlights of the month for Bigg's because there were so many of them! A few include:

* T49A2 Jude and T51 Roswell - infamous for their stint in Barnes Lake, Alaska in 2023 - spending much of the month traversing the Salish Sea. T51 isn't seen here every year, and his visits are typically shorter than they were this spring.

* A new calf traveling with T124A1, given the designation T124A1B by Bay Cetology. T124A1's presumed first calf now travels with the T124A4s, so many eyes were on this family to see if this one would "stick" with its presumed mom. So far the answer is yes!

* The appearance of the T64Bs with the T65As, with the group taking up temporary residence in Puget Sound. The last time the T64Bs were in the Salish Sea was in May and June of 2022, also with the T65As!

May used to herald the start of the summer season for seeing Southern Residents in and around the San Juan Islands, but now it is the time of year they are least likely to be seen here. With declining spring returns of Chinook to the Fraser River, all three pods now spend more time on the outer coast, particularly in the Swiftsure Bank region, during the late spring and early summer; this allows them to encounter a wider variety of fish runs, rather than follow the formerly abundant Fraser Chinook more exclusively, as they used to do. Looking at the last five years from June through August, there's only a single month (June 2024) that we had Southern Residents present for more than half the days of the month. We are likely to only get brief visits from them until the fall.

We also had no reports of Northern Residents in the Salish Sea in May, which fits with long term patterns. It's usually not until mid-summer that we start getting reports of them in the northern Strait of Georgia. The gray dots on the map indicate cases where we were able to confirm the presence of killer whales, but could not ID them to ecotype.

We'll be back before too long with our June update to all of these numbers!