What’s it like to be a whale counter? California staffers brave fog, cold and kelp flies
On a blustery promontory north of San Simeon, pairs of paid staff members spend daylight hours squinting through the fog and sun at often choppy seas — trying to spot gray whales.
The whale counters work in three-hour shifts at their post at Point Piedras Blancas, sheltered by a temporary platform with a wind-blocking wall at their backs. They face south in order to catch whale moms and babies as they migrate north from Mexico to Alaska and Canada — the longest migration of any marine species on Earth.
The whales’ usual springtime swimming pattern aims them directly toward the point, making it an ideal location for the annual count at Piedras Blancas Light Station conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center. The tally takes two and a half months to complete.
Many of the cow-and-calf pairs will swim close to shore, trying to avoid predators.
Most of the males, which are much larger, swim farther out at sea, according to David Weller, director of the Marine Mammal and Turtle Division of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center. He is leading the Piedras Blancas whale tally this year for the first time.
“That offshore component is pretty much done for this season,” Weller said in late April.
“Today, we saw one whale on the ‘offshore highway,’ which is about what we’d expect” at this time of the year, he added.
What’s it like to count gray whales at Piedras Blancas?
What’s it like to count whales swimming past the Piedras Blancas lighthouse, a spectacular site about 5.5 miles from San Simeon?
According to Weller and other tally team members, the job can be wearying and potentially mind-numbing.
But it’s highlighted by moments of high excitement, especially when another species — such as a blue whale — swims past.
The weather at the lighthouse is often relentless.
On some days, whale counters encounter wind, cold and fog. When it’s sunny and warm, they face swarms of kelp flies; team members learn quickly to keep their mouths shut to keep out bugs.
To spot the gray whale pairs that are the crucial part of the spring count, team members put in eye-crossing hours that alternate between surf-to-horizon scans and balancing heavy binoculars on their noses.
Their daytime count is extrapolated into an estimated nighttime tally, because even though team members can’t see the leviathans in the dark, the whales swim past the point around the clock.
This year’s tally is complicated by not being able to use drone technology to help count the grays.
“Under the last (presidential) administration, an executive order was put into place stating that drones with any Chinese-made parts could not be flown over federal lands,” Weller explained. “Almost every drone made has some Chinese parts in it. So, we were shut down at the permit and permission level.”
He hopes that order will be rescinded soon, but it likely wouldn’t happen soon enough for this year’s tally.
Many of the talliers travel to San Luis Obispo County from outside of the area for the whale count. Weller lives in San Diego with his wife, Sarah.
Team tallies migrating moms and babies
As of April 30, the team had counted 65 pairs of whales from their Piedras Blancas post, Weller said.
By that date in 2019, the team had seen about 10 fewer pairs, which ultimately produced “one of the lowest counts” in the annual tally, Weller said.
There was no whale count at Piedras Blancas in 2020 because of strict COVID-19 pandemic restrictions during the tally period, which usually runs from late March to about the end of May, depending on the migration’s progress.
This year, the whale season seemed to get a late start, Weller said, so he expects the 2021 total will be “on par or a little higher than 2019’s.” The figure could skew lower if the migration’s “spigot slams shut,” he added.
There appear to be far fewer calves this year, “fewer than we would normally see,” Weller said.
That apparent drop corresponds to what scientists observed this season in Baja California lagoons during the whales’ overwintering, breeding and birthing time in the shallower, warmer water.
However, female whales with calves seen this season by scientists in Baja California and Piedras Blancas “seemed to be in really good condition,” Weller said.
“Only the females in really good shape are able to produce the calves and bring them up to the Arctic” to feed, he explained. “Only the fattest, most robust mothers are able to give birth and have their calves survive.”
He hypothesized that the nine dead gray whales that washed up in the San Francisco Bay Area this year may have been less hearty.
“The sheer number is relatively unusual” in that location, Weller said.
At that point in their migration, the skinnier whales are “likely to be hungry, so they stop over to find a snack,” he said. “In some cases, if they don’t find a snack, they end up dying. Gray whales are like Teslas. They need to stop by way stations when their batteries are low. This time of year, all their batteries are low.”
There are about 20,000 Eastern Pacific gray whales and they migrate twice a year, Weller said.
About 250 of the grays, however, have begun aggregating into a closer feeding area, he added, migrating from Mexico to a range between Humboldt, California, and Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
The so-called Pacific Coast Feeding Group of whales does its summer feeding there, dining on benthic invertebrates, ghost shrimp, swarming anthropods, herring spawn and larvae. “That group tends to be more dynamic in their feeding habits,” Weller said.
Scientist shares favorite interactions with cetaceans
Weller, who has more than 30 years of experience studying whales, dolphins and other species, started his marine science work as an undergraduate at the University of Hawaii on Oahu.
He recalled some of his favorite interactions with cetaceans.
The “first time I traveled to Russia,” he said, “we weren’t really sure there were any Western Pacific gray whales left there anymore.”
After years of negotiating for and getting permission to be there, Weller said, “we traveled to a remote field camp, finally got the Zodiac (boat) into the sea and then we saw our first gray whale there! After all the trials and tribulation, it was ‘Gosh, there’s actually a Western gray whale out there!’ ”
In another emotional moment, “I was on a catamaran in the Gulf of Mexico,” he recalled. “We were trying to put video cameras on sperm whales. I was on the forward tip of one of the catamarans, and a pygmy killer whale swam over to me, turned on its side, and stayed there looking at me for the longest time.
“I thought, ‘There’s really somebody home in there, checking me out while I’m checking him out.’ ”
“It was an eye-to-eye connection with another being, an alien being,” Weller said with a catch in his voice.
Why count marine mammals?
As the leader of the Piedras Blancas whale tallying team, Weller succeeded Wayne Perryman, who founded the whale count in 1994 and directed and participated in it for nearly three decades. Perryman retired in 2018.
Perryman and Weller had worked together on the count for more than a decade, Weller said with a chuckle, “so I had plenty of time to integrate myself into Wayne’s world.”
“(Perryman) set the standard, and I really want to do right by him,” said Weller said, who wants to honor the work done before while “slowly finding ways to use new techniques and ways to analyze the data.”
The data that whale counters collect “allows us to take action based on science,” Weller said.
“It has to do with management and policy” that can affect the health and breadth of the species,” he explained. “We can inform managers and decision makers, allowing them to make informed decisions that set in motion environmental policies and rules.”
Weller’s team at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center “does the science,” he said, while NOAA’s West Coast Regional Office “does the policy and management decisions” to be adopted by NOAA as a whole.
Weller also works closely with the International Whaling Commission, World Conservation Union, U.S. Marine Mammal Commission and a variety of national and international academic institutions on issues related to the conservation and management of endangered whale and dolphin populations.
He stressed the importance of keeping the public informed about marine mammals, Weller said.
“We need to get people excited about them,” he said, and engage “younger generations and highlight what the hope is for the future of these whales.”
This story was originally published May 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the team members who participate in the annual whale count as volunteers. They are paid staff members.
