Mr & Mrs Western Bluebird sat on our fence today and brought us ... happiness.

We were celebrating four and a half pairs of (we think) Eastern North Pacific Gray whales traveling north: four Cow/calf pairs and a not-associated single.

In a recently published paper (Mate BR, Ilyashenko VY, Bradford AL, Vertyankin VV, Tsidulko GA, Rozhnov VV, Irvine LM. 2015 Critically endangered western gray whales migrate to the eastern North Pacific. Biol. Lett. 11: 20150071.), the authors described how some Western North Pacific Gray whales have ventured east from their territorial feeding waters to join the Eastern North Pacific southbound migration to Mexican lagoons. These whales then migrate northbound along the west coast of North America and turn left under the Aleutian Islands, westward across the Pacific, returning to their feeding waters in the longest confirmed annual, mammal-migration in the world. Perhaps one of today’s whales was a westerner.

In any case, we think it is reason to celebrate both the Bluebirds and the Gray whales!

Gray whales northbound (all) 9 | Calves 4 — 2015 Count 1036 | 059

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