In late March, a local whale biologist spotted something out of place in Sitka Sound. She’s still having a hard time believing it, but pictures suggest an incredibly rare sighting– a juvenile bowhead whale.
In late March, marine biologist Ellen Chenoweth was out doing something she’s done dozens of times before– looking for whales in Sitka Sound with a videographer and a Mt. Edgecumbe High School student.
“We kind of went out on the water hoping to find some bubble netters, and we poked around Kruzof [Island], the shoreline there, found a few whales, but you know, not really what we were hoping to see,” Chenoweth said. “We were actually turning to go home, and just trying to get any IDs that we could on the way back to town.”
They were in the middle of Sitka Sound, just south of Inner Point, when they saw a whale surface, but it didn’t look like the humpback or gray whales that frequent the area.
“I kept thinking that maybe I wasn’t seeing what I thought I was seeing,” Chenoweth said. “Was it a different part of the body than I was expecting? At one point, I was like, ‘Is that a tail? What am I looking at?’ But it was just the head bobbing at the surface.”
Chenoweth was able to snap two pictures of the whale’s head from different angles.
“Then it just kind of went down and disappeared,” she continued. “At the time, I just thought, you know, my brain isn’t processing this. I’m just not finding the bucket that this belongs in.”
The whale didn’t reemerge. So they tried another tactic to ID the whale by dropping a hydrophone in the water, but no luck.
Chenoweth took the photos back to her office. She’s a research faculty member of marine biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but she’s based in Sitka. It just so happened, her longtime mentor, whale biologist Janet Nielsen, was visiting from Glacier Bay. She agreed with Chenoweth- the photos looked weird. So Nielson sent them to her husband who works with gray whales. His response- not a gray whale. So the photo started making the rounds to whale researchers around the region.
“I kind of shyly sent it out to some people and was like ‘It’s probably just a weird gray whale, or an animal that just has a weird injury, or something that I’m not used to seeing…But what do you think?'” Chenoweth said.
Eventually the photos made it to marine biologist Kim Shelden at the Marine Mammal Laboratory for the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. A co-worker who specializes in North Pacific right whales poked her head in Shelden’s office one day and said ‘Hey, do you have time to come look at something fun?’
“And of course, I’m like, ‘Yes. Let me get away from a spreadsheet, then I’ll come right down the hall.’ And she had these two photographs up on her computer, and she asked me, ‘So what is it?'” Shelden said. “I said ‘ That’s a young bowhead.’ And she goes, ‘Is that so?’ It was really exciting to see that. And I was like, ‘Well, where is it?’ And when she Sitka Sound, I went, ‘Oh, not supposed to be there.'”
Shelden said while the photos didn’t show a lot, bowheads are easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for. Unlike right whales, their heads are smooth, and they have a very distinctive high arched lower jaw.
“So when their mouths are closed, I mean the nose, I’m gonna date myself a little bit here, looks like Jimmy Durante,” Shelden said. “The top of the rostrum is just really narrow, and then the big, huge lower jaws that comes up.”
Shelden said typically this time of year, bowhead whales are beginning their northern migration from the Bering Sea. She says it’s possible this whale, which seemed to be alone and, based on size, young, could have gotten lost in that process.
“As soon as that ice starts to recede in the spring, they’re heading north. So they’re going to be heading up to Utqiagvik, rounding the bend and heading toward Canada into the Beaufort Sea to be for the summer,” Shelden said. “So this young whale went the wrong way.”
Shelden said she only knows of one other bowhead sighting in the North Pacific. In 2016, a young bowhead was spotted about 200 miles south of Sitka in British Columbia, feeding with humpback whales in the area. It seemed healthy, but it too was farther south than it should have been.
It’s hard to know much about the condition of the juvenile bowhead whale near Sitka. That’s why Chenoweth is hoping Sitkans on the water will keep their eyes peeled. Any more sightings of the bowhead whale could provide helpful information for researchers.
“So we kind of want to know, is this whale healthy? If it is confused, could it be due to toxins or something like that?” Chenoweth said. “Just trying to understand these unusual sightings, because it does give us some insight into the rest of the population and changes in the ocean and how animals are adapting to those.”
Bowhead whales are endangered and protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. If a boater sees a bowhead whale the approach regulations are the same as other whales in the area. Maintain 100 yards of distance and do not approach the animal. If your vessel is turned off and the whale approaches you, that’s okay.
Editor’s Note: If you think you’ve spotted a bowhead whale in the Sitka area, email Ellen Chenoweth at emchenoweth@alaska.edu
