Tag Archives: killer whales

kodiak kaleidoscope

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Kodiak July 2023. I got to see humpback whales right away, day one on the water. And also days two, four, six, and seven. Whale wealth!

 

Kodiak day two on the water brought even more whale wealth than day one. Humpbacks and killer whales. It was gratifying to hear “we’ve only ever seen them one other time in eighteen years of this survey.” I can’t take much credit but I did put in a special request.

Kodiak kaleidoscope:
Giant Pacific octopus
Rock greenling
Opalescent nudibranch
Sunflower sea star
Sea otter
Bald eagle
Tufted puffin
Not pictured but still helping fill my Kodiak wildlife bingo card: Dall’s porpoise, sea lion, harbor seal, and river otter, golden eagle. Not to mention all the rest of the fish, but we won’t say much about the fish, for they are data.
Did you know that one of the collective nouns for puffins is “an improbability of puffins?” I was delighted with not just pairs, but whole rafts, improbabilities, of puffins.
I’ll be back in August to what is quickly becoming another favorite place of mine on Earth.

killer whale week

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It’s been a big week.

This week I got my start date for my new job (July 5th), I finished my second semester—my first half—of my MFA program, and I saw killer whales in Yaquina Bay!

 

I managed to take a few terrible photos, and some rather poor videos, which I will cherish forever and always. How I love them. I spent an entire thirty-page submission writing about them during first semester, so it seemed fitting they would come help me celebrate the day I reached the halfway point! I tried to clip many frames of blurry, empty water, and skip to the pertinent parts, but apologize for causing anyone seasickness with my shaky cinematography.

 

This one is longer and retains more shakiness, but also shows an eye patch a time or two, which was completely awesome to see. I was fairly close. You can’t hear it in the video over the wind, but from where I was standing, I could hear their exhales each time they surfaced!

After work, I grabbed my camera and husband for a bay road drive date and he got to see a couple of them, too.

 

All of which is to say, a lot is going on behind the scenes, but I’m still here, and I still write things.