A “Humpback Comeback” is upon us here in the San Juan Islands. “Big Mama” the Humpback whale was one of the first of the many humpbacks that have been making their way back to the Salish Sea in recent years and she has brought her sixth calf with her.

In 1966 a moratorium on commercially hunting these giant, singing whales was put in place by the International Whaling Commission after they were hunted almost to extinction. Since then Humpbacks have made a slow but steady recovering and were recently removed from the Endangered Species list.

“The ‘Humpback Comeback’ continues, and Big Mama keeps leading the way,” explained Michael Harris, Executive Director of Pacific Whale Watch Association (PWWA), representing 36 operators in BC and Washington in a recent press release. “For whale watchers and researchers, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Each year we report record sightings of humpback whales in these waters, and then we top that record the next year. We’re just a few months now into 2016 and it’s already a humpback highway out there – showing up in new areas, doing things only humpbacks can do.”

Humpback whales migrate from Hawaii, Mexico and Central America to Alaska every spring and were hunted out locally by commercial whalers in the early 1900’s. Over the past few years though they’ve continued to “resurface in astonishing numbers, here, increasingly taking an inside passage through local waterways as they head north in the spring and then south in the fall,” according to a statement by the Pacific Whale Watch Association.

The resurgence of these whales is an extraordinary conservation success story, according to Harris. There are now believed to be 21,000 humpbacks in the eastern North Pacific, a huge jump from the estimated 1,500 before the ban on whaling was put into effect.