Still Saving the Whales
The humpback whales that visit Maui each year are doing well, but threats remain.
Sky Barnhart
Photography by Flip Nicklin | Jason Moore
A forty-five-ton whale breaches straight into the air, broad back glistening, before crashing back into the ocean with a tremendous splash. Glancing out of his car window on his way to work, Daniel Bergan enjoys the show. Every year from November to May, the whales are part of his morning drive from Napili to Kahului.
“It’s one of the things I love most about living on Maui,” Bergan says. “Especially in the early morning, driving along the ocean and seeing the whales on my way to work makes the whole day beautiful.”
Bergan is one of thousands of Maui residents and visitors who feel a special connection with the humpback whales that visit here every winter. Like Bergan, the whales are commuters too, but of an incredible distance, traveling as much as 5,000 miles from their feeding grounds in Alaska to breed and give birth in the warm waters of the ‘Au‘au Channel between Maui and Lana‘i.
This year, there promise to be more humpback whales than ever moving through Hawaiian waters: an estimated 8,000. According to Meagan Jones, executive director of Whale Trust, a nonprofit research organization, the population of humpbacks is increasing at an estimated 7 percent per year. That’s good news for an endangered species whose population was 95 percent destroyed by commercial whaling before gaining protection in the North Pacific in 1966.
But it’s not time to take humpback whales off the endangered list just yet. For one thing, population estimates are just that: estimates. Researchers are still struggling to find an accurate way of counting the creatures that roam a vast aquatic world largely inaccessible to human eyes.
“In the old days, they’d go out whaling and watch over time how the number they caught decreased,” says David Mattila of the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary in Kïhei.
