It’s not often that a humpback whale is filmed giving birth, let alone filmed via drone as it happens.
According to the New York Times, a humpback whale has only been filmed giving birth three times total…until recently, when a 20-year-old wildlife photographer named Alexander Forrest filmed what he thought at first was a whale being viciously attacked by a predator that actually turned out to be a humpback whale giving birth to a calf.
He captured it all via drone, making it the first time a humpback birth has ever been recorded using a drone, giving researchers one of the clearest views of the process yet.
This all happened while Forrest was whale watching as humpbacks migrated off the coast of New South Wales, Australia. He saw a female behaving strangely along the so-called “humpback highway.” It was slow, lollygagging compared to the rest of them. He sent his drone over to take a look and caught the site of an enormous plume of blood erupting from the whale.
Expecting to soon see the emergence of whatever predator was shredding it apart, he instead saw a tiny pale gray calf emerged from the cloud of blood. It breached the surface and took what can be presumed to be its first-ever breath.
Rare Drone Footage Captured the Moment a Humpback Whale Gave Birth
He and other members of the Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans Australia followed the mother and calf for hours, documenting their behavior all along the way. The calf was too new at life to swim in a straight line, so it stayed close to his mom as it figured out the basics of being a whale.
The footage gives us all the chance to stare in awe at the majesty of life, and it gives researchers the chance to study something extraordinarily difficult to observe in nature. As previously stated, only three other births have ever been documented in scientific record, and not a single one of them has been captured via drone.
Forrest had his drone out there at just the right time, as about 50,000 whales migrate along Australia’s east coast, as they do every year, traveling thousands of miles to warmer breeding waters. Some of them take pit stops to give birth somewhere along the way. Pretty cool for a species that was once almost hunted to extinction.
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