Mike in the Wild

It is well known that many whales migrate great distances from feeding grounds in cold waters closer to the poles to breeding grounds in the warmer waters of the tropics.  Some species like the humpback whale range throughout all the oceans and seas of the world while others like the gray whale have a much smaller range.   But all these species have the same story of near extinction due to over-hunting and then, more recently, some recovery thanks to a global effort to stop the slaughter. However the Atlantic populations of the gray whale were indeed hunted to extinction over two hundred years ago when mankind coveted its blubber for lamp oil and its baleen for corsets.  But the species survived in the Pacific with a small group hanging on near Russia, and a much larger one, with over twenty thousand individuals today, persevering on North America's western coast.  It was several individuals in this latter population that I recently had a chance to see on a boat trip out of San D