Where is Tahlequah? What we know about the mother orca and her calf

SEATTLE — This week, mother orca Tahlequah may have surpassed her 2018 tour of grief, when she carried her dead calf for 17 days and more than 1,000 miles.

Tahlequah was last seen still carrying her latest calf — dead since at least New Year’s Eve — on Jan. 10 off San Juan Island. That evening the southern resident family, part of J pod, headed west in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Tagging data and the acoustic records of the southern resident orcas’ vocalizations have revealed typical patterns for their seasonal foraging, said Brad Hanson, biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center.

Once the orcas leave for the strait, it becomes difficult to pinpoint them. It helps to know the southern residents’ typical behavior this time of year to figure where they might be.

J pod is one of the southern residents’ three family groups. They typically hunt for Chinook returning to B.C.’s Fraser River in September, then in October and November transition to eating Puget Sound salmon, especially coho and chum. When those runs are passed by in December, K and L pods travel the outer coast, ranging as far south as California. J pod in winter is typically at the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Tahlequah and the rest of her J pod crew also often travel back this way in winter, heading east in the straight then to the Strait of Georgia, almost to the Campbell River. But there’s no telling when or if that will happen.

But not knowing how she is — and whether she is still carrying the calf — is not the same thing as not caring.

“Tahlequah’s grief is heartbreaking,” poet Tim McNulty of Sequim wrote in an email. “The world shared her 17-day mourning for her last calf. Now she mourns again, away from our view. But Tahlequah’s grief transcends language and geographies. Maybe it strikes us so deeply because Tahlequah embodies a larger, unspoken grief for our own unraveling world.”

The southern residents are endangered, with only 73 members left. The main threats to their survival include lack of fish, especially Chinook salmon; pollution, which contaminates their food; and vessel noise that makes it harder for them to hunt. All of those threats are made worse by climate change, which is upending ocean food webs, depleting summer stream flows and warming stream temperatures. Those factors hurt salmon survival — and when salmon are scarce, the other threats the southern residents face are intensified.

Philosopher and author Kathleen Moore of Oregon State University said she witnesses Tahlequah’s second loss with a mix of awe and concern. “All I know is that grief is a measure of love,” Moore wrote in an email. “The greater the love, the more devastating the sorrow. If we had no love, we would feel no loss. This mother’s expression of grief is desperately dangerous. Can we infer that her baby means more to her than her own life itself? It’s a magnificent love that she carries.”

Julie Seitz of Federal Way followed Tahlequah’s journey in 2018. Today, the orca once again is in her thoughts and heart.

“She is a life,” she said of the baby orca Tahlequah lost. “We cared so much and the mother cared so much, when I think about her baby it brings tears to my eyes … I feel sad, I want to know how she is doing, I will feel sad in my heart until I hear more.

“I pray for her comfort and her healing.”

To her, Tahlequah’s mourning also is a gift to a human society in which grief can be awkward, rushed, even marginalized. When she lost two beloved elderly dogs, Seitz said she turned to art to comfort herself, making fabric urns for their ashes — a design she even patented. “It is beautiful to see people touched by this,” Seitz said of Tahlequah. “Maybe it helps us all expand our appreciation for grief, maybe the animals are teaching us.”

She wonders daily what is happening with Tahlequah and the calf. “Do the predators come? Do the other orcas feed her? We don’t know the answers.”

For some, a least a few answers are clear. “This is a call to action,” said Alyssa Macy, CEO of Washington Conservation Action and a citizen of the Confederates Tribes of Warm Springs. “In losing another calf she is showing us two-leggeds, we humans, that we have more work to do. That is what I took from that. She is not the first of her people to lose a calf, but she is the one consistently showing us and telling us … we have work to do.”

Many Coast Salish peoples regard the orcas as family relatives. “Think of them as the highly intelligent relatives that they are,” Macy said. “I don’t know how the calf died, but my guess is it just didn’t have enough food. How awful it would be to not have enough food for your child, and then to grieve that grief.”

When she heard of Tahlequah’s second tour of grief, Lummi elder Raynell Morris floated a wreath of cedar and flowers on the waters of Puget Sound, offshore of an ancient Lummi Village at what today is called Cherry Point.

“I’ve been crying a lot, praying a lot,” Morris said. “As hurtful as it is, we can’t quit advocating. We are still doing the good work. Because that is what is given to us.”

For Rob Williams, chief scientist at Oceans Initiative, Tahlequah’s grief was up close and personal. On New Year’s Eve, he and his wife bundled their 10-year-old daughter into their research boat so she could come along as they took breath samples from the new baby for research. “We were taking our calf to see her calf,” he said. But as they approached, the parents quickly figured out, “that calf is dead,” Williams said. “It was: Get her to look the other way.”

Williams is lead author on a recent paper about the accelerating extinction risk for the southern residents looming in plain sight. How much more plain could that sight be? “This is hard as a scientist,” Williams said. “It is even harder as a dad. As a parent.” Especially a second time.

He puts it this way: If a Hollywood producer asked him to consult on a script in which a whale whose family was shattered and food taken away carried her dead calf for everyone to see, not once but twice, he would reject it as unbelievable, Williams said. “And yet, here we are.

“At some point you gotta admit, she is trying to tell you something.”