On July 28, off the north coast of New South Wales, a drone camera recorded a humpback whale giving birth. ORRCA, the Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia, says it is the fourth complete humpback birth ever captured on film anywhere in the world, and the first recorded by drone [1].
The photographer was Alexander Forrest, working with ORRCA during the whales' northbound migration. What caught his attention first was not a birth. It was a mother behaving oddly, "displaying unusual behaviour" in his description, moving far more slowly than a migrating humpback normally does [1].
She surfaced, and it was not to breathe. The footage shows the water around her filling with blood before the calf emerges and takes its first breath [1].
"It's a privilege to have witnessed such a remarkable moment, and even more rewarding to know it may contribute to marine mammal science for years to come," Forrest said [1].
The contribution he is talking about is larger than a rare clip, and it has to do with where the whale was. Humpbacks have long been assumed to calve almost exclusively in tropical water. This calf was born in the temperate water off the New South Wales coast, which cuts against that assumption [1].
ORRCA's team stayed with the mother and calf for several hours afterward, recording maternal behavior and the calf's first hours of life [1]. Those are hours nobody has been able to watch from the beginning more than three times before.
There is a reason a single calf carries weight in this particular record. Commercial whaling has been under an international moratorium since 1985, and humpbacks are one of the recoveries usually cited for it. The recovery is uneven. Four of the fourteen recognized humpback population segments remain endangered, and one is listed as threatened [1]. Nine are not listed at all.
That is the shape of the species right now: most of it has come back, a substantial minority has not, and the basic question of how and where humpbacks reproduce is still being filled in one observation at a time.
Three things are not established here. The fetched account does not say which of the fourteen population segments the New South Wales whales belong to, so the birth cannot be tied to an endangered group or a recovered one. The count of four filmed births is ORRCA's own, and no independent tally was found. None of this has been through a journal or peer review, which means the temperate-water birth is a data point rather than a finding.
What the camera got is not in question. A humpback calf took its first breath off an Australian beach on July 28, and for the fourth time in the history of the species, somebody was recording when it happened.
