2006 Camp Update
By Caroline Armon
March 27th, 2006
Hola Everyone! Wow! March has whizzed by. We are having fun, laughter, stimulating conversations, great meals, sumptuous cakes, (made by Maldo – a true renaissance man – he drives the boats, can fix or build anything, and makes all our deserts using a mixer attached to a cordless drill!!) music & dancing here at Campo Cortez! Kids and kids at heart; wonder, interdidal walks, finding and holding octopi, bird identification and additions to our sightings list. We even had a special night sky presentation by an expert stargazing guest and were gifted a laser! We have celebrated 16th, 50th, 60th, and 80th birthdays, a 60-year wedding anniversary and honeymooners!! I am so inspired by all of the active 70 & 80 year old guests we’ve had!
Spring has arrived here in San Ignacio Lagoon, I see greenery all around me, and the most delicate flower blooms on the hardy coastal plants. I see mating pairs of brilliantly colored American Oystercatchers. Spring comes quietly and shows subtlety in the desert, you have to look closely. The temperature has finally warmed up, in the 80’s in the afternoons, although still chilly evenings and mornings. And I am not wearing my long underwear on my early morning walks! I think all of you in the northwest had some storms, we get the tail end down here, it was cooler and windier than usual for March.
Today is beautiful, sunny, northwest wind dying down as the sun heats up the land. The wind usually dies about noon, then we get an ocean breeze from the south – southwest in the afternoon, dies again at sunset. Sometimes the nights are calm and we can hear the whales breathing, right along with the coyotes yelping! I am enjoying a rare morning - we are in between guests.
There are 95 mother-calf pairs, plus 9 singles in the lagoon at the most recent census, 3-24-06, for a total of 199 whales. The numbers are up from previous years; almost double the pairs from last year, so that is good news! I wonder if they have finally stabilized from the die-off of 1999-2000, when the ice pack was slow to recede up north in the feeding grounds, and they were starving. It’s only the last 2 years that they have looked robust & healthy to me; previously they looked thin and bony… There were also a lot of single adults still here and mating into the first 2 weeks of March this year, longer than I’ve seen in previous years. The last sighting of 2! at the same time, “pink floyd’s”, was about a week ago, although I suspect it may have been juveniles practicing! So I wonder if that correlates with a recovery from the previous starvation, as well as they were later in arriving to the lagoon this year. There were only about 30 whales here in January. So, will there be a bumper crop of gray whale babies next year?!
Our trips on the water have been great! We have observed every behavior. The lagoon is a big nursery-elementary-middle school. (I think the calves graduate high school when the moms get them up to the feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi Seas.) We see days when many of the adult whales are all spy hopping, or breaching, then you start to see the calves breaching…although I think they are still working on their spy hops, it must take more agility! Many books and texts still say the grays don’t feed on the migration or in the lagoons, well they do; more like snacking than the feasting that goes on up north.! We see the mom’s teaching the babies how to suck up a mouthful of the bottom of the lagoon. The lagoon is very shallow in many places, and we see them on their side, pectoral fin and tail fluke above the water. Then they roll up and we see the mud circles on top of the water when they push with their large tongues the water and sediment through their baleen, swallowing the crustaceans and critters left. Much of the literature also says the gray whales don’t socialize. I think they may, in ways we are not familiar with, so don’t recognize. Besides, we are only seeing a small portion of their lives above the water… The really exciting thing this year is, we have observed about a week of the calves in tight groups, with their mom’s, playing with each other! I call it play because they were swimming together, rolling over each other, doing headstands and cartwheels over each other, touching each other; it was awesome to watch! In the same time frame, we also had a group of 3 to 5 young adults, that were interacting with each other and the boats, They didn’t seem to want to be touched, but stayed close to the boats, under and side to side, while simultaneously rolling and touching each other, but it did not appear to me to be courting or mating behavior. One day we drove very slowly up to a resting adult female, and just reached over to touch her. All whales, dolphins, and porpoises can’t go fully to sleep or they would drown, so they have adapted by resting one hemisphere of their brain at a time. Too cool! Anyway, she appeared to rest the entire time we touched and rubbed her, staying at the surface, taking a shallow breath intermittently. There were some windy and choppy, yet sunny afternoons, that did not stop the frolicking of the whales; they were actually surfing the swells and with the boats! Lately, it seems as though the whales have been practicing endurance swimming, getting ready for the big trip and the big oceans! Especially against the extreme tides we have been having with the waning moon. I am frequently asked about behavior patterns I have observed in my years here, and the only one I can say with certainty is that whichever way the tide- current is running, most of the whales will usually be swimming against it. So there has been serious swimming practice going on, then as the current slackens, a magical moment occurs when the whales approach the boats. The calves are bigger now, the mom’s seem relaxed, some enjoy the touch as much as the babies, so we have been interacting on every trip out lately! We have even been kissing the whales and checking out their baleen! I have noticed younger, maybe first time mom’s the last two years, who seem to have been touched as calves, because they are right at the boats getting their massages, sometimes seeking more attention than their babies! We still get the boat gently bumped by the whales and even get lifted and moved about, so we are ‘whale riding’ too! Maybe we are like a many tentacled rubber duck to the whales?! We also interacted with more single juveniles and young adults this year, as compared to previous years. I love the interactions and seeing people’s responses. It still takes my breath away to look into a whale’s eye while they are looking back at me. We have also enjoyed seeing bottlenose dolphins, sometimes playing with the whales, more sea turtles each year, and the occasional California sea lion. The other morning, slack tide, no current, water like glass, we happened upon a raft of hundreds of cormorants. I wonder if they were gathering for the flight north…
This really is a sacred, wild place, and I am grateful the newly formed Laguna San Ignacio Conservation Alliance has been able to buy conservation easements of 120,000 acres, on the south side of the lagoon. The goal is to raise $10 million to conserve 1 million acres. I think everyone who comes here has the experience of a lifetime, and so many have told me it has been life changing and healing for them.
I miss all of you, but I know the time is going to go fast and I will see you soon. Love Caroline
P.S. Guess what?! On the afternoon trip today, the calves were practicing spy hops!
On a sadder note, to my friends up north, I heard the news about Luna, our wayward Orca from L Pod that was killed, and I grieve with you. I was able to go to Rocky Point for part of an afternoon, and Cindy and I had our own memorial for Luna. She also told me Lolitta, who is the last survivor of the captures and also from L Pod, was dying in the Miami Seaquarium. So we shared our grief and colored shells that we tossed in the ocean, in remembrance of both Luna and Lolitta. We need to keep telling the whales’ stories…
Caroline Armon
Logs & Diaries -- Guest Comments -- Field Reports -- Gray Whale Census
