Just a day after the new year, whale watching enthusiasts were in awe after a once-in-a-lifetime sighting of a gray whale giving birth off the coast of Dana Point, California.
The Jan. 2 sighting started as a typical whale watching ride. However, as passengers sighted a whale, they spotted blood in the water surrounding it. Many said they thought the whale had been injured.
“For a minute, many of us thought it may be a shark or predatory event,” Matt Stumpf of Captain Dave’s Dolphin and Whale Safari told The Epoch Times. “But no, instead of the end of life, it was the beginning of a new one!”
Soon the boat’s captain and passengers were overjoyed to see a newborn calf come to the surface.
“The calf was awkwardly flapping its tail to swim. … The mom was helping it,” Capt. Dave’s owner Dave Anderson told The Epoch Times.
After surfacing, the newborn calf began learning how to swim and began bonding with its mother. According to the whale watching company, the mother brought her calf to the boats as if to say hello to the passengers.
The calf was about 15 feet in length and could gain over 50 pounds a day feeding on its mother’s milk. Adult gray whales are between 40 to 50 feet in length on average.
“Witnessing this gray whale birth was one of the best things I have ever seen,” Stumpf, of the whale watching company, said.
In a drone video posted by the company, the mother whale and the calf can be seen swimming toward the boat and then lightly nudging it. According to Anderson, this behavior is possibly due to the species’ ongoing interactions with humans in the lagoons in Baja California.
Gray whales are known to travel to the lagoons in Baja for reproduction, where water is warmer and calves are protected from predators. It is very unlikely to see calves off the Southern California coast this time of the year, Anderson said.
Though the calf appears to have been born early, Anderson said the pair should eventually arrive to Baja safely.
“The calf is viable and most likely will make it. There’s not a lot of killer whales between us and the lagoons,” he said.
Gray whales migrate annually along the U.S. west coast, swimming from the Bering and Chukchi seas near Alaska to mating and birthing lagoons of Baja and back again in a 10,000-to-12,000-mile round-trip.
The trip from Dana Point to the lagoons typically takes around a week for the whales. However, with a newborn calf in tow, it could be harder for the mother whale to navigate the journey, Anderson said.
“She’s got a little bit of a job ahead of her just getting her calf down to the lagoons where they’re safe,” he said.
