Why Do Humpback Whales Breach?

March 3rd, 2026 by Carl D
A humpback whale breaching out of the Pacific Ocean Alaska
A sight to behold – breaching humpback whale.

The honest answer is: we don’t know. Not for certain.

I realize that’s not the tidy explanation you came here looking for. But it’s the truth, and I’d rather start with that than dress it up. Researchers have been working on this question for decades and the best they’ve managed is a list of plausible hypotheses. None of them fully explains the behavior. Several of them contradict each other.

What I can tell you, after five seasons watching humpbacks in Southeast Alaska, is what breaching looks like when it happens 200 yards off your bow. And a few patterns I’ve noticed that may or may not amount to anything.

What It Actually Looks Like

Most photos of breaching whales show a single frozen moment. The animal airborne, water streaming off its body. What the photos completely miss is the speed, the concussion of sound, and the sheer absurdity of the scale.

A humpback whale weighs roughly 40 tons. To breach, it has to accelerate vertically from depth fast enough to launch two-thirds or more of its body clear of the water. The splash when it comes back down can be heard half a mile away. The first time you see it happen for real, in person, your brain genuinely needs a second to catch up with your eyes. Something that large is not supposed to do that.

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Humpback Whales in Alaska

February 26th, 2026 by Carl D

Where They Go, When They Come, and Why Spring Changes Everything

A humpback whale feast. Spawning herring make a calorie-filled feast for the local humpbacks.
Watching humpbacks bubble-net feed is a treat.

Every year, thousands of humpback whales make one of the longest migrations in the animal kingdom. They leave the warm breeding waters of Hawaii, Mexico, and the western Pacific and swim north. Some travel over 3,000 miles, one way. They don’t eat during the trip. They arrive hungry, and Alaska feeds them.

Understanding why they come here, when they show up, and where they concentrate is foundational to everything we do on our Hungry Whales Photo Tour each spring. It’s also the key to understanding why early spring in Southeast Alaska offers something the summer whale-watching season doesn’t.

Why Alaska

Humpbacks spend winter in tropical waters where they mate, give birth, and nurse calves. But tropical oceans are nutritional deserts for a baleen whale. There just isn’t enough prey down there to sustain a 40-ton animal that needs to eat a ton or more per day. So they fast. They live off stored fat for months, and by the time they point north they’re running on fumes.

Alaska’s cold, nutrient-dense waters are the payoff. The coastal waters of Southeast Alaska, the Gulf of Alaska, the Bering Sea, these areas produce massive concentrations of the small schooling fish and krill that humpbacks need. The whales feed hard during the Alaska months, building fat reserves for the next winter’s migration and breeding.

The whole cycle is driven by food. Alaska isn’t a destination for humpback whales. It’s a grocery store. The biggest one in the Pacific.

The Herring Connection

In Southeast Alaska specifically, one species holds the whole thing together: Pacific herring.

Herring aggregate in enormous schools in the protected waterways around Sitka, Chatham Strait, and the surrounding channels to spawn each spring. Timing shifts a bit year to year, but the peak generally falls late March through April. When the herring show up, the whales are right behind them.

This isn’t a casual relationship. Researcher Joseph Liddle tracked humpback whale abundance in Sitka Sound alongside Pacific herring spawning biomass from 1981 through 2011. The correlation between the two populations was 0.87. For context, that’s about as tight a link as you’ll find between a predator and its prey in the wild.

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Wildlife Photography Tips and Techniques

February 25th, 2026 by Carl D
Alaska bear photo tour; brown bear with red salmon.
My favorite bear.

Intro

I’ve been photographing wildlife for thirty years. Grizzlies on salmon streams or high in the mountains. Wolves in the Alaska Range. Pumas in Patagonia. Eagles in winter storms on the Chilkat River. I’ve also been roaming around Alaska’s backcountry since 1998, and guiding here since 2001, which means I’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands, of days in the field with wild animals, in every kind of weather (well, most kinds of weather), in some of the most remote country in North America.

Most wildlife photography content on the internet focuses on camera settings and gear. Those things matter. But they’re only a part of what determines whether you come home with strong images. The other ninety percent is fieldcraft: knowing where to be, when to be there, how to read an animal’s body language, and what it’s about to do next. That’s the stuff that’s hard to learn from a YouTube video.

This wildlife photography guide covers all of it. Gear, settings, fieldcraft, behavior, composition, ethics, and the mistakes that cost you and me the shot. It’s not theoretical. Everything here comes from decades of doing this for a living, in wild places where often times the animals don’t know you’re there and the weather doesn’t care about your plans.

Two Days for a Few Frames

I once spent two days in the Alaska Range following a band of Dall sheep rams. From watching the ewes’ behavior on day one, I guessed where the rams were headed, hiked to that spot the next morning, and approached slowly and quietly enough that one ram eventually grazed to within inches of where I lay on the tundra. Two days of fieldcraft for a few frames with a wide-angle lens. That’s wildlife photography.

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Packrafting the Arctic: Float Trips in Gates of the Arctic and the Brooks Range

February 24th, 2026 by Carl D
Packrafting trip on the Noatak river, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.
Packrafting trip on the Noatak river, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.

Why lightweight boats unlock Alaska’s most remote wilderness

Gates of the Arctic National Park has no roads, no trails, and no services. At 8.4 million acres, it’s one of the largest wilderness areas in the United States, and getting there requires either a very long walk or a small plane.

This is where packrafts shine.

A packraft is a lightweight inflatable boat, typically weighing 4-8 pounds, that can be rolled up and carried in a backpack. When you reach water, you inflate it and paddle. When you reach land, you deflate it and walk. The combination of backpacking and paddling opens terrain that neither activity alone can access.

In the Arctic, where floatplanes have strict weight limits and portages are unavoidable, packrafts make trips possible that would be impractical with traditional boats. You can fly into a remote lake, hike to a river, paddle for days, then hike out to a different pickup point. The boat goes where you go.

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Whale Photography in Alaska

February 19th, 2026 by Carl D

Tips From Five Seasons Shooting Humpback Whales

Humpback whale bubblenet feeding.
The feast for all!

Whale photography is humbling. You can have 30 years behind a lens, a camera body that costs more than your truck, and the fastest autofocus system money can buy, and a humpback whale will still make you look like an amateur.

They’re fast. They’re unpredictable. They surface where you’re not looking, breach when you’ve just put your camera down, and vanish when you’ve finally got your settings right. The ocean is moving, the boat is moving, you’re moving, and the whale is doing whatever it wants.

I’ve been running our Hungry Whales Photo Tour in Southeast Alaska for five seasons now. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far. Emphasis on “so far” because the whales keep teaching me things.

Why Southeast Alaska Is Different

A humpback whale fluke looks about the same whether you photograph it in Alaska, Cape Cod, or Antarctica. What sets Southeast Alaska apart is the context around the whale.

The backdrop matters. Moss-draped old-growth Sitka spruce, dark water, cloud layers sitting on the ridgelines. When a whale flukes against that shoreline, there’s no ambiguity about where the photo was made. Place changes everything in a wildlife photograph.

Then there’s the behavior. Spring here coincides with the Pacific herring spawn, which draws hundreds of humpbacks into concentrated feeding. The bubble-net feeding that results is among the most visually dramatic wildlife events on the planet. Groups of whales lunging through the surface together, mouths wide, herring flying. That’s a fundamentally different subject than a lone whale fluking on the horizon somewhere.

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Pumas, Penguins, and the Rewilding Paradox

February 17th, 2026 by Carl D
Patagonia puma roaming the tundra near Torres del Paine, Chile.
She walked and walked looking for some Guanacos. Hungry cubs.

In the mid-2000s I spent four months living in Futaleufu, Chile, working with a rafting and kayaking company, guiding, and doing photography; eating a LOT of carne asada.

I spent a lot of time in the Andes backcountry around there. Never saw any pumas then. Not a track, not a kill, not a flash of tawny fur disappearing into the trees. That’s normal. Pumas are ghosts. You can live in their backyard for months and never know they’re there.

So when I started reading about what’s happening at Monte Leon National Park on Argentina’s Atlantic coast, it stopped me cold. Pumas aren’t just present there. They’re walking through a colony of 80,000 penguins in broad daylight, tolerating each other at close range, and hunting at the highest density ever recorded for the species anywhere on earth. These are not ghost cats. They’re something else entirely.

Three studies published between 2023 and February 2026 have documented a predator-prey interaction that didn’t exist a generation ago.

Three studies published between 2023 and February 2026 have documented a predator-prey interaction that didn’t exist a generation ago. Pumas at Monte Leon National Park on Argentina’s Atlantic coast are systematically hunting Magellanic penguins. Not scavenging. Not opportunistic snacking. Organized, sustained predation, with individual cats restructuring their entire lives around the penguin breeding season.

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Bubble-Net Feeding: How Humpback Whales Hunt Together in Alaska

February 13th, 2026 by Carl D
Humpback whales bubble-net feeding out of Sitka, Alaska
The feeding frenzy; spawning herring are a mouthful for this post of humnpbacks.

You hear it before you see it. A hiss of air breaking the surface, then a ring of bubbles appears, 25 yards across, expanding outward in a near-perfect circle. The water inside the ring goes dark. Shadows rise.

Boom.

The surface explodes. Mouths the size of pickup trucks burst upward through the center of the ring, wide open, pleated throats ballooning with seawater and herring. Five, six, seven whales at once. Tiny fish leap in every direction. The sound is part freight train, part waterfall.

The gulls go crazy.

And then it’s over. The whales slide back under. They blow a few times, the stench of half-digested herring drifting across the boat, and one by one they arch their backs and dive. The whole thing lasted maybe eight seconds.

Now we wait.

Again.

I’ve watched this happen hundreds of times across five seasons running our Hungry Whales Photo Tour in Southeast Alaska, and it still stops me cold. Bubble-net feeding is, without exaggeration, one of the most sophisticated cooperative hunting strategies in the animal kingdom. And it happens right here, in the cold green water off Sitka, every spring.

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Expeditions Beyond Alaska

February 10th, 2026 by Carl D

Patagonia Pumas

Wild female puma in Patagonia, Chile.
Wild puma near Torres del Paine, Patagonia, Chile.

Last April I sat on the ground in open tundra somewhere on a private ranch bordering Torres del Paine, and a female puma named Escarcha walked past me at five yards. Not past the vehicle. Past me. I was sitting in the grass with a 400mm pointed at her and she couldn’t have cared less.

That was Day 5 of what was supposed to be a scouting trip. By Day 3, I already knew we’d be coming back.

Back to Patagonia

I first went to Patagonia in 2006. Spent four months on the Futaleufu River in central Chile, working with an international crew of guides. Rafting, kayaking, and photographing some of the most dramatic river landscape on the planet. It was one of those stretches that stays with you. Patagonia gets into your head. The scale of it, the light, the wind. It doesn’t feel like anywhere else.

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The River From Deep Within: History and Ecology of the Noatak

February 3rd, 2026 by Carl D
Floating the Noatak River, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.
Floating the Noatak River, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.

Understanding one of the last great wild rivers in North America

The Noatak River begins on the north flank of Mt. Igikpak, the highest peak in the Brooks Range, and flows 425 miles to the Chukchi Sea. Its entire course lies above the Arctic Circle. Its entire watershed lies within protected wilderness. No other major river in North America can make both claims.

In Inupiaq, the river’s name is Nuataam Kuuŋa. Early translations rendered it as “passage to the interior” or “the river from deep within“. Both fit. For at least 10,000 years, the Noatak River has been a corridor for human movement through the western Brooks Range, connecting coastal communities with the interior. The people who named it understood what the river was: a path into a vast and wild country.

Largest Undisturbed Watershed in North America

The statistics are staggering. The Noatak drains 12,600 square miles. The Noatak National Preserve alone encompasses 6.5 million acres. Combined with Gates of the Arctic National Park, the protected area exceeds 13 million acres of contiguous, roadless wilderness.

More importantly, the watershed remains essentially unaltered by human activity. No dams. No roads. No significant development. The only permanent settlement along the river’s 400-mile length is the Inupiaq village of Noatak, population 400, located near the coast. Upstream, the country looks the same as it did when the glaciers retreated.

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Backpacking the Brooks Range; Arctic Camping Trips

February 3rd, 2026 by Carl D
Backpacking the Brooks Range, in Alaska's Gates of the Arctic National Park.
Backpacking the Brooks Range in Fall can be gorgeous. Gates of the Arctic National Park.

The Philosophy of Trailless Travel in Gates and ANWR

Backpacking in the Brooks Range is not about following a line on a map. It is about learning to read the language of the landscape.

In the Brooks Range, there are no cairns, no signs, and no footprints that last more than a season. You are engaged in a constant, 24-hour-a-day exercise in micro-navigation. As John McPhee observed, the scale of this place is so vast that it can be disorienting. You’re operating in a world where the nearest road is hundreds of miles away and self-reliance and judgement is the only currency that matters.

Where is the Brooks Range?

The Brooks Range stretches 700 miles across northern Alaska, from the Chukchi Sea near the Canadian border to the western coast above the Arctic Circle. It is the northernmost extension of the Rocky Mountains. The Brooks Range forms the continental divide between rivers flowing south to the Yukon and north to the Arctic Ocean. The range rises abruptly from the boreal forest, crests at elevations between 4,000 and 9,000 feet, and drops onto the treeless coastal plain that runs to the Beaufort Sea.

Two of America’s largest and wildest protected areas occupy the Brooks Range. Gates of the Arctic National Park covers 8.4 million acres of the central range, including the granite spires of the Arrigetch Peaks and the headwaters of six designated Wild Rivers.

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Expeditions Alaska
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