Whale season — the humpback highway

Of all the wildlife the Sunshine Coast offers, the humpbacks are the one you can most reliably promise a visitor. From about June, stand on one of the headlands for ten patient minutes and give the horizon your full attention, and you will see them: the blow first, a puff of vapour hanging over the swell, then the long black back and, if you are lucky, the great flukes lifting as an animal sounds. Through the cold months they are heading north — streaming up the coast to the warm, sheltered water off the tropics where they breed and calve — and the run past Point Cartwright and the Noosa headlands is close and dependable, cresting around July. Then, from about October, the traffic reverses: the whales come back south, this time with calves tucked in beside them, and the southbound animals often pass closer inshore, so the spring show can be the more intimate of the two. (See the species unit on the humpback-whale, and the winter-whales season for the cold-season picture on land.)

It is worth knowing what you are looking at, because it is not the constant it appears to be. This eastern-Australian population was very nearly destroyed within living memory — hunted down to a few hundred animals by the middle of the twentieth century, the whaling station at Tangalooma on Moreton Island taking thousands before it closed in 1962. The crowded highway you now watch pass the headlands each year is the long climb back from that, a population recovered into the tens of thousands. Every whale you count from the clifftop is a small piece of one of the better conservation stories the coast has to tell.

The whales are not the only large thing out there. Off Double Island Point, at Wolf Rock, grey nurse sharks gather year-round — a critically endangered species holding at one of its reliable aggregation sites, a reminder that the winter sea is anything but empty. And, as with everything on this coast, the show runs on the weather, not the date. The migration keeps its own broad calendar, but any single day depends on wind, swell and light, and the whales run a little early some years and a little late in others. Pick a clear, calm morning, take binoculars, give it time — and let the sea tell you whether today is the day.