[caption id="attachment_1415" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="MV Kittiwake with Breaching Whale by Ernie Westle"]
The Kittiwake is our 32 foot boat. It is a plain boat, named after a plain seabird in the gull family. Accordingly, its values are often underestimated. The Kittiwake is my favorite boat because of its intimate atmosphere; we only book 13 people at a time. It is also our 'adults only' boat, so one is assured a peaceful ride. Despite the absence of an inner cabin, it is warm as the structure of the boat creates a vacuum, sucking air off the stern, so one stays warm while not just watching, but smelling the pine trees pass by. People on the Kittiwake contentedly stare at the sun glinting off the water and find the peace that they crave.
As soon as we arrived on scene we saw orcas mating, truly an appropriate thing to point out on the 'adults only' Kittiwake. We also saw them breaching, cartwheeling, and lunging. There were several calves in the group and everywhere you looked there was a looming fin of an adult male; a relief because quite recently, there were only 11 adult males for a population of 85 or so. This led to a limited amount of inbreeding, a trend we hope will be reversed as teenage males reach their prime.
The Northern Resident Community, who spends almost every single day during the summer in Johnstone Strait, BC, does not breed within their own pods, so we believe ours have done so out of necessity. From the year 1965 to 1975, live capture, the capture of marine mammals for aquariums and theme parks, killed a large sector of our males. The Northern Residents were comparatively untouched, as the Southern Residents were easier to capture because of their close proximity to mainland United States and Canada. Live capture is the #1 reason the Southern Resident Community was listed as endangered in November of 2005. Other reasons are a lack of salmon (their main food source) and toxins in our waters.
Lauren Sands
Naturalist
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