WATCH: The First SF Bay Humpback Whale Video Of 2021 Has Arrived

Humpback whales are back in the San Francisco Bay earlier than ever this year, as a Tuesday, March 9 humpback whale sighting near Tiburon was the earliest a humpback whale has been seen in the SF Bay in modern history. (They typically arrive in late April). And the humpbacks coming back means whale videos can’t be far behind, and the first of these was posted Tuesday and is seen below.

The video from Tiburcio de la carcova is only 43 seconds long, but the whale catches some serious air while breaching not once, but twice. It’s unclear where in the Bay the video was shot, but it was posted to Youtube on Tuesday, and the backdrop shows it was clearly in the San Francisco Bay.

@maysdickey via Instagram

Meanwhile, SFGate has the story of this gray whale shooting rainbows from its blow hole spotted Sunday near the Golden Gate Bridge. “I was looking off on the bow and saw the cloud of water — Oop, there she blows!,” sailboat racer Mays Dickey told SFGate. Dickey also has a video of the rainbow whale on his Instagram page.

Spectacular! Watch as a rainbow forms in the spray from a whale's blowhole. This happened last weekend in the San Francisco Bay. https://t.co/xEiA0CQ67a

[Video: maysdickey via Instagram] pic.twitter.com/EmtNwT6StB

— NBC Bay Area (@nbcbayarea) March 24, 2021

Gray whales are a different species than humpback whales, and it’s not unusual to see gray whales in the SF Bay this time of year. Humpback whales have a dorsal fin, gray whales do not.

Researchers said that the krill may be the reason why a young #humpback #whale showed up early in San Francisco Bay. As more whales come to the bay, it’s important to give them space, slow down, or report.https://t.co/OGSGnJ4h5u

— Marine Mammal Commission (@MarineMammalCom) March 24, 2021

The humpbacks are back earlier than ever in their annual migration from Mexico to Alaska, and it may or may not be cause for alarm. Sausalito’s Marine Mammal Center tells NPR that climate change and warmer waters could be disrupting their food chain. Or it could just be that there are more of them now. In modern history, we did not ever see humpbacks in the SF Bay until about five or six years ago, but conservation efforts have helped boost their population. Marine Mammal Center CEO Dr. Jeff Boehm wrote in the Chronicle last year that “the humpback whale population in the North Pacific has grown from about 2,000 in the 1970s to more than 20,000 today.”

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