Between the 29th of December and the 8th of January one recent winter, seventeen separate humpback whale sightings were reported around the Isles of Scilly. One whale, recognisable by a distinctive marking on her tail fluke, has been named Pi by locals, and has now returned to the same waters every year since 2019.
A humpback whale keeping a regular winter appointment off the Cornish coast is not something that would have seemed plausible within living memory. Commercial whaling reduced humpback populations globally to a fraction of their historical numbers, and for most of the twentieth century, seeing one anywhere near Britain was vanishingly rare. Whether Pi’s reliable return, and the wider run of sightings around her, means something has genuinely turned a corner, or simply reflects a more complicated set of changes in the water itself, is a question I don’t think has a single tidy answer.
What the Numbers Actually Show
Britain’s waters host a genuinely wide range of species. At least twenty eight different kinds of whale, dolphin and porpoise have been recorded around the UK coastline, and seven of those, including minke whales, harbour porpoises, bottlenose dolphins and killer whales, can be seen regularly throughout the year. Scotland’s volunteer led Shorewatch programme logged over a million minutes of coastal observation in a single recent year, recording at least eighteen different species, everything from familiar bottlenose dolphins to an entirely unexpected beluga whale, an Arctic species that has no obvious business being anywhere near Scotland at all.
Some of the more striking recent stories fit a pattern that reads, on the surface, as straightforwardly encouraging. Risso’s dolphin sightings around Cornwall and Devon more than doubled in a recent year, and marine wildlife guides working the coast there have linked it directly to warmer sea temperatures boosting octopus and cuttlefish populations, the prey Risso’s dolphins particularly favour. Humpback whale sightings along England’s south coast, from Kent through to Sussex, have climbed well beyond what researchers there are used to seeing, with at least thirty recorded in a single recent winter along a stretch of coastline where one or two sightings a year used to be the norm.
The Part That Complicates the Good News Story
Here is where I found myself genuinely uncertain how to feel about what I was reading. The same warming waters that appear to be drawing more dolphins and whales closer to British shores are warming for reasons that are not, in any other context, something to celebrate. Researchers at the Ocean Conservation Trust have pointed out that rising sea temperatures around Britain are likely boosting plankton and krill populations during summer months, the base of the food chain that baleen whales and filter feeders like basking sharks depend on. More food, in warmer water, drawing more animals further from their usual range. That is a genuinely different story from a population simply recovering in numbers. It looks, at least in part, like an ecosystem responding to a changing climate, with some species temporarily benefiting from a shift whose longer term consequences nobody can yet fully predict.
Alongside that, some of the recovery is unambiguously real and unambiguously good. Humpback whales are returning to something closer to healthy population levels globally following the end of commercial whaling, and their reappearance around British coasts reflects that recovery directly, independent of any warming related shift in food availability. Separating how much of what people are currently seeing is genuine long term recovery from historical persecution, and how much is animals following food into places they would not otherwise have gone, is not something I can do with any confidence, and I am not sure the marine biologists working on it can fully separate it out yet either.
What Doesn’t Get Resolved by Any of This
There is a harder fact sitting alongside all of the encouraging sightings. More than a thousand whales, dolphins and porpoises die around the UK coastline in an average year, largely through entanglement in fishing gear, collisions with shipping, and the effects of ocean noise and pollution that are much harder to see or measure than a beautiful sighting from a headland. A rising number of sightings does not, on its own, tell you whether overall populations are actually growing, shrinking, or simply moving to where people happen to be looking. Both things, more whales being seen and more whales dying, are true at the same time, and neither one cancels the other out.
Why I Keep Coming Back to Pi
I find myself drawn to the story of one identifiable whale returning to the same waters year after year precisely because it resists the neat conclusion I initially wanted to reach. Pi’s return is not proof that everything is fine, and it is not proof that everything is dire either. It is one animal, tracked carefully enough by people paying genuine attention, choosing to come back to a particular stretch of sea near Scilly each winter, for reasons that are probably some combination of food availability, established habit, and a global whale population still slowly recovering from a century of hunting most of us never witnessed directly.
I don’t know what the sightings data will show in another five years, whether Pi keeps returning, whether Risso’s dolphins stay closer to Cornwall permanently or drift back offshore once conditions shift again, whether the encouraging humpback numbers settle into something durable or turn out to have been a temporary consequence of warming seas that eventually causes other problems entirely. What I do know is that people are watching closely enough, from clifftops and boats and dedicated observation posts up and down the coast, to notice Pi at all, and that noticing, patient and unresolved as it currently is, seems like exactly the right way to be paying attention to something this genuinely uncertain.
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