Hang with the locals
Get up close and personal with the whales of Depoe Bay
By Michael Edwards
For the TODAY
One hundred yards from the bluff where the cold Pacific breakers batter and bend the sea palms, wave power propels a common murre skyward into the morning mist. The murre flies low and fast over the ocean towards its boisterous breeding colony fussing atop Pirate Cove’s guano-plastered boulders. Within earshot of the murre colony, a gray whale’s pungent exhalation signals the start of summer. The mottled gray and barnacle-laden whale melts into the waves, surfaces and breaths again. Kelp drapes over the whale’s knuckles, its scarred fluke rises and slips below the white caps. The 40-foot-long, 80,000-pound behemoth glides through kelp and swarms of mysid shrimp. The whale opens its mouth and coordinates its 2,000-pound tongue and its baleen to trap mysids and expel sea water. By day’s end, the whale will have eaten a ton of mysid shrimp and other species of zooplankton.
Prior to the advent of industrial whaling in the 1800s, an estimated 100,000 gray whales thrived in the nearshore waters of the Pacific Coast. Within 100 years, the gray whale population teetered on the brink of extinction. The species’ fidelity to Baja’s calving lagoons, near-shore migration routes and frequented feeding grounds off of the Alaskan coast made gray whales easy targets for whalers. Because of the hard-fought Save the Whales campaign in the 1970s and 1980s, a moratorium on industrial whaling was implemented in 1985 and instead of going extinct, whale populations have since increased. The whaling moratorium coupled with the protections of their offshore waters has led to the current gray whale population reaching 19,260. A small subpopulation of those gray whales spend their summers in Depoe Bay.
The Eastern North Pacific gray whale population spends the winter months in the warm calving lagoons of Baja Mexico. The lagoons are a pleasant environment in which to birth whale calves, however, these warm waters are also food deserts. To satisfy their massive caloric requirements, most gray whales migrate north to feeding grounds in the Arctic. In the Bering and Chukchi Seas, gray whales spend the long summer days dredging the muddy sea floor for amphipods. Three hundred slightly more svelte gray whales, members of the Pacific Feeding Group, forgo the traditional Arctic feeding grounds for the fecund near-shore waters of the Pacific Northwest. On the Pacific Northwest’s shallow rocky sea floors, dense bull kelp forests proliferate and with the rapid kelp growth, mysid shrimp swarm in the billions.
Marine biologist Carrie Newell calls the members of the feeding group, “smart whales” because the swim from Mexico to Oregon only takes a month while the trip from Mexico to Alaska takes two.
Leigh Torres and her team of scientists from Oregon State University perform field studies on the conveniently located whales. Fecal samples that Professor Torres calls “biological gold” provide scientists with abundant data about the whales. Two important fecal findings suggest that whales generate higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, when they are subjected to anthropogenic noises like boat motors, and they ingest a lot of plastics, both big and small.
During a 2022 Science on Tap event at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, Professor Torres identified a few practical ways that citizens can help gray whales.
First, because gray whales feed close to land, excessive noise and injury causing boat strikes can be minimized if boaters slowed their speeds within a mile of shore. Second, plastics are everywhere and their impact on wildlife is profound. Fisherfolk who police their tackle and beach walkers who fill up bags of plastic during their beach strolls can help to make the ocean a safer place for whales and other coastal critters.
My first whale memory was implanted in 1983, during a whale watching field trip in Southern California. I remember locking, almond-sized eye to baseball-sized eye, with a spy hopping gray whale while in the back of the boat, the cool third grade kids vomited Taco Chalupa into the ocean. Forty-plus years on, the site of whales still generates excitement, tears and laughter.
Seeing whales never gets old.
In Depoe Bay, the dirt path that runs along the bluff south of the Pirate’s Cove Scenic View Public Access will put you within view of whales. Bring your binoculars. The Oregon State Parks Whale Watching Center is a great place to find out more about the Pacific Feeding Group. The center is open from Wednesday through Sunday from 10 am to 3 pm. Interpretive rangers are on duty to answer questions. If you are interested in seeing the whales up close from the deck of a boat, Depoe Bay has several whale watching options including Whale Research and EcoExcursions run by the marine biologist Carrie Newell.