The history of the relationship between the California gray whale and humans is long and sometimes bitter.
Some coastal native American groups hunted gray whale for subsistence, using all parts of the animal and respecting their greatness. The hunts carried out by other cultures, including our own, were quite another matter. These slaughters took place in the birthing lagoons of Baja, where grays were concentrated and trapped, and in favorite feeding areas of the Bering Sea. As the sea turned crimson, whaling crews learned that the gray whale under attack shed its placid nature, sometimes smashing pursuit boats with their gigantic tails and sending hunters to a watery grave.
It was not without reason that gray whales, among all whale species hunted, were named “devilfish” by the Japanese.
The California gray whale population was decimated by the 1870s, with hunting on the remnants continuing sporadically past the middle of the next century.
Whales are long-lived, so the grays’ memories of the hunt must have persisted into recent decades. Elders with wounds or memories of narrow escapes could be expected to teach avoidance of men in ships. But as the passage of time dims generational gray whale memories, there is a change afoot in human-gray whale interactions.
In The Eye of the Whale, Dick Russell describes a scene that is increasingly common in the lagoons of Baja: gray whale mothers and calves purposefully approaching small boats containing guides, scientists, writers, and tourists, to be touched, even petted, and to look, eye to eye, at a more benign human than ancestor whales could imagine. For Russell, “The look exchanged penetrates to my very depths. It feels as though I am being read by the whale, as though my entire life, for one endless moment, is an open book.”


Read more about Alaska whale watching and Home Shore's whale encounters with the gray whale >>>