The Salish Sea has never had more orca sightings. The twist is that most of them are not the famous endangered residents. The mammal hunters have quietly taken over.

Two completely different kinds of orca share the water on this map. They look nearly identical from a boat, they have not interbred in tens of thousands of years, they do not speak the same dialect, and when they cross paths they mostly just avoid each other.

The famous ones are the Southern Residents, J, K and L pods, the most studied whales on Earth. They are fish eaters, Chinook salmon specialists above all, and they live in big loud extended families run by their grandmothers. They are also endangered, hovering around 73 or 74 individuals, because their entire way of life is chained to Chinook runs that keep shrinking. When people talk about saving the orcas here, these are the orcas they mean.

The other kind is Bigg’s killer whales, named for Michael Bigg, the Canadian biologist who first figured out you could identify individual orcas by their fins and saddle patches. Bigg’s eat mammals: harbor seals, sea lions, porpoises. They hunt in small quiet groups, because unlike salmon, a seal can hear you coming.

Here is what has flipped in a generation. The Marine Mammal Protection Act rebuilt the seal and sea lion populations of this coast from a few thousand back to the tens of thousands, and for a mammal-hunting orca that is an endless buffet. Bigg’s sightings in the Salish Sea have been setting records year after year, and on most days now, the orcas people actually see from a ferry or a beach are Bigg’s. The residents, tied to their declining salmon, spend less and less time in their old summer waters. Same black and white whale, opposite trajectories, and the difference comes down to what each one eats.

The split runs deep enough that scientists formally proposed them as two separate species in 2024. You can even see it in the public data behind this map: recent observations increasingly get logged with the new subspecies names, rectipinnus for Bigg’s and ater for the residents.

August is the best month of the year to see either from shore, and shore is genuinely the best seat. Lime Kiln Point on San Juan Island is arguably the finest land-based whale watching spot in the world. If you are on a boat, know the rules: Washington law now requires recreational boaters to stay 1,000 yards from Southern Residents. From a bluff with binoculars, nobody has to keep any distance at all.

Pulled from public sightings across the region, close to three thousand confirmed records, so read it as the big picture rather than a place to go looking. Although if the big picture tells you anything, it is that a ferry ride is never a bad bet.