A calf gray whale was found dead after swimming 20 miles up a creek, shocking Washington state residents and leading an official with the Marine Mammal Research Group to suspect that starvation may be forcing the whales to travel to new hunting grounds as their numbers dwindle.
The whale was discovered Saturday in the Willapa River near Redmond, Washington, which empties into the ocean in Willapa Bay. Currently, many gray whales are on their 5,000-mile (8,000-kilometer) spring migration in the Gulf, from their birthplace in Baja California, Mexico, north to their feeding grounds in Alaska.
John Calambokidis, a research biologist with the Cascadia Research Collective, told The Associated Press on Sunday that a bigger problem facing the eastern Pacific gray whale population since 2019 is reduced food availability in the northern Bering and Chukchi Seas off the coast of Alaska.
“Gray whales are facing a major crisis, and the core of the crisis does appear to be hunting their prey in the Arctic,” he said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries agency announced an unusual mortality event of eastern gray whales, or gray whales in the eastern Pacific, from late 2018 to late 2023. During this period, a total of 690 gray whales were stranded from Alaska to Mexico.
NOAA Fisheries investigators concluded that the preliminary cause was “localized ecosystem changes in the whales’ subarctic and arctic foraging areas leading to changes in food, malnutrition, reduced birth rates, and increased mortality.”
Officials believe the population is rebounding, but the latest statistics from 2025 show a continued decline. Federal agencies estimate the gray whale population at about 13,000, the lowest number since the 1970s.
“A lot of gray whales look very thin, very emaciated,” Kalambokidis said.
The northward migration is often the most challenging period for gray whales, who go the longest without eating, forcing the animals to deplete their nutritional reserves.
“When this happens, you often see gray whales become more desperate to find new feeding areas,” Kalambokidis said. “That’s the most likely background for this whale.”
Researchers may try to examine the whale as soon as Monday.
On Wednesday, it entered the north branch of the Willapa River through the bay, about 185 miles (298 kilometers) southwest of Seattle. Residents gathered on riverside bridges just to catch a glimpse of the giant mammal, and social media was flooded with photos and videos of it blasting air through its blowholes.
The nonprofit Cascadia Research Group posted on Facebook that although the gray whale looked thin, it was behaving normally and did not appear to be injured in any way.
Kalambokidis said the organization was giving the whale time and space to leave the river on its own, but when researchers tried to find it Friday, the animal had swam further upstream into waters that were unnavigable by boats.
