Mike in the Wild

Two visits to Maui and one to Oahu within eight months is a lot for even me, a person enamored with the Aloha State.  But I had never been to Maui during whale season, when thousands of humpback whales migrate to the surrounding waters for a winter of calving and mating.  While I was disappointed to discover that I had missed the peak of the season by a week, I was nonetheless thrilled to not only see dozens of the giant creatures but to even hear them.  Like when I visited the Big Island three years ago around the same time of year, the whales were easily visible from the shore.  The clouds of mist from their blows were usually the first sign they were present, often followed by their back and knobby dorsal fin cresting out of the water.  If the whales dived, their tail fins sometimes emerged high out of the water.   One evening at sunset on Charley Young Beach in Kihei, I watched a pair of whales far in the distance toward the community of Maalaea ha...

I had never been to Hawaii during the winter until my trip to the Big Island last month.  Of course the Aloha State lies in the tropics so exactly when you visit doesn't matter too much; there's always a pleasant day at the beach guaranteed somewhere on one of the islands.  However since humpback whales only choose the winter season to make their three thousand mile voyage there, you might want to book a February trip if these cetaceans are your must-see. Humpback whales range all over the world and feed mostly during the summer closer to the poles.  They birth their young and mate in tropical and semitropical waters like those near Hawaii.  This specific North Pacific population travels from Alaska and may number as many as ten thousand in any given season.  Maui claims to be the best island for seeing them, where almost any pull-off along the coastline-hugging highway between Maalaea and Lahaina guarantees a sighting.  I was destined not to be disappointe...

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...

Spectacular.  There's no other word I can use to describe my first-time encounter with humpback whales. Any winter visit to Cabo San Lucas at the tip of the Baja California Peninsula usually guarantees a sighting of these visiting ocean giants.  Many come close enough to shore for resort vacationers to even catch a glimpse from the beach.  Deep sea fishermen and cruise ship passengers frequently see them from their respective decks.  And whale watching tour groups regularly bring tourists in close proximity.  But my own up-close encounter was from aboard a Zodiac boat on a return trip from a coral reef snorkeling excursion. The little craft's crew had given us hope that we might run into some of these whales as sightings had just started that late November week.  Humpback whales range all over the globe and generally follow a pattern of feeding during the summer in polar regions while mating and birthing their young in tropical and semitropical waters l...