See captivating seagull’s-eye view of six whales cruising, cavorting off California coast
A video taken Wednesday captured a mesmerizing view of six whales migrating south off the Southern California coast.
Shot by Newport Coastal Adventure, a whale-watching tour company, the drone video shows six whales traveling to Mexico, and apparently having a good time along the way.
The whale migration can usually be viewed in Southern California from late November to April.
“As many as 22,000 individual gray whales are now making the annual migration down to the warm lagoons in Baja, Mexico for breeding and calving purposes,” Jessica Roame, marine education program manager with Newport Landing Whale Watching, said in a news release.
Because the whales are all headed in the same direction, they often travel together like the group of six whales on the video.
“Occasionally when we see large groups of gray whales all headed down the coast together, we’ll see courting behaviors by the males to the females in the group,” such as rolling whales and belly-to-belly contact,” Roame said.
Gray whales have the longest migration of any mammal, traveling 12,000 round trip from their feeding grounds in the Arctic to their calving grounds in Mexico.
Naturalist and photographer Kristin Campbell was onboard for the wondrous sighting.
“We had an awesome experience on our whale-watching boats today as six south-bound migrating gray whales appeared about five miles off the coast of Newport Harbor,” she said in an email. “We noticed some of the whales rolling around, touching bellies and one whale proceeded to breach up to seven times right in front of us. You can even see beautiful rainbows reflecting from their spouts. We call them ‘rainblows.’”
