Chatham Strait and Pavlov Bay, Southeast Alaska

One of the great adventures of life is to see huge whales doing something very few people ever get to see: bubble-net feeding! The first humpback whales we saw today were lunge-feeding and traveling. This is, they would surface, blow, and lunge forward with open mouths near the surface. This behavior lasted till after breakfast, when more whales joined the group. But later in the morning we caught up with more of these behemoths, which we observed for hours.

The humpback whale is a medium-sized cetacean, up to 45 feet in length, and around 40 tons in weight. They pertain to a group of whales called the baleen whales, and this species is a rorqual. The baleen, similar to fine brushes, hangs from the upper jaw, and is used to let the water that was taken into the mouth with the food (krill or small fish) run out, retaining the prey.

But the great surprise came later, when we observed a group of about 12 humpbacks whales bubble-net feed. In this type of feeding, they synchronously dive, and arriving below the schooling fish (probably herring today), start making a curtain of small bubbles around the group of selected fish, thus encasing them. One then starts making a melancholy song, stronger by the second, until at one moment they all lunge up through the mass of captured fish towards the surface. They hit it with gaping mouths, partly coming out of the water. The prey, captured behind the curtain of baleen, is then swallowed.

In the afternoon we visited Pavlov Bay, where a salmon river is intersected by a weir, and fish are counted and weighed, prior to being released. It is at this point where brown bears congregate to feed on the abundant salmon. On this occasion we saw pink salmon. Various bears were seen in the area, all being brown (in the interior they are called grizzlies), as Chichagof Island is one of the ABC islands (together with Admiralty and Baranof) where only brown bears are to be found. Black bears are present on the smaller islands and on the mainland. Various groups of hikers walked along the river and ocean side, learning about the different rocks and plants.