A mother’s grief — Orca carrying calf a week after it died

An endangered orca that spends time in the waters of the Pacific Northwest was yesterday still carrying the corpse of her calf a week after it died.

Experts on San Juan Island, which sits near the western border of the United States and Canada, have been monitoring the 20-year-old whale, known as J35, since her calf died shortly after birth last Tuesday near Victoria, British Columbia.

It was a baby girl. In that moment, surrounded by family and swimming by her mother’s side, everything was perfect. Then, the calf stopped moving and J35 experienced a mother’s worst horror.

She watched her baby die — less than an hour after giving birth to her.

But J35 wasn’t ready to say goodbye. For hours, she grieved, carrying the dead calf on her head as she swam, Ken Balcomb, founder and principal scientist of the Centre for Whale Research on San Juan Island, told the Washington Post.

The hours turned into days, and yesterday she was still seen pushing her baby to the water’s surface.

“That’s not unprecedented, but it’s the longest one that I’ve personally witnessed,” Balcomb said on Friday.

Balcomb said the death had left researchers devastated.

Jenny Atkinson, executive director of San Juan Island’s Whale Museum, said yesterday that the orca and her pod were going through “a deep grieving process”.

The calf was the first in three years to be born to the dwindling population of endangered southern resident killer whales. There are only 75.