People Watching Orcas

I've given up trying to link to the Santa Barbara News Press, but I have borrowed these pictures from them that accompanied a short report on a pod of five orcas sighted in the Santa Barbara Channel earlier this week. The sightings were made and these pictures taken on a local whale-watching tour boat, the Condor Express.

As I posted last week lots of whales migrate through the Channel: grays, blues, and humpbacks predominate. Like them, orcas are not permanent residents here, but small numbers of them migrate through following the grays, as the captain of the Condor Express says, "kind of like the lions following the wildebeest." The number of orcas is so small that their sightings here are always newsworthy.

This pod apparently put on quite a show, playing "ping-pong" with the carcass of a harbor seal they had killed. The dead-tree version of the paper had a wonderful picture of one of them "spy-hopping" or tailing to keep his head and upper body above the water, so he could get a good look at the boat. The captain said he stayed up for about two minutes. I imagine some of the passengers may have looked appetizing.