Whale Migration Map: Routes, Months and Species

No mammal on earth commutes further. Eastern North Pacific gray whales spend the summer sieving amphipods out of the mud in the Bering and Chukchi seas, then swim the length of a continent to calve in three shallow lagoons on the Pacific side of Baja California — Ojo de Liebre, San Ignacio and Bahía Magdalena. Then they turn around. NOAA puts the round trip at roughly 10,000 to 12,000 miles.

What makes the corridor unusual for travellers is that it runs along a coast lined with harbours. The same population passes eleven of our destinations twice a year, and the two passes look nothing alike: southbound whales in December and January are adults in a hurry, well offshore, while the northbound mothers of April and May travel slowly with calves close enough to the surf that you can watch them from a headland without a boat.

The honest caveat: this population went through a die-off between 2019 and 2023 that NOAA declared an Unusual Mortality Event, and counts have not returned to their previous peak. Sightings on the southbound leg are more variable than the old guidebook numbers suggest — the northbound cow-calf window in April remains the reliable one.

Every winter, most of the North Pacific humpback population leaves cold water and crosses open ocean to breed. The Alaskan animals swim about 2,800 miles to Hawaii, typically in four to eight weeks, and they do it on an empty stomach — there is almost nothing to eat where they are going. NOAA's sanctuary counts put roughly 10,000 whales in Hawaiian waters at the season's peak.

Three breeding ends of the same corridor sit on our map: Hawaii, the Mexican Pacific at Cabo San Lucas and Puerto Vallarta, and the Kerama Islands off Okinawa, where the western North Pacific population goes. The feeding ends are Southeast Alaska, Prince William Sound and, for a separate group, the California coast. Photo-ID projects such as Happywhale routinely match the same individual whale between an Alaskan feeding bay in July and a Maui channel in February — the clearest proof that these are one population, not two.

The North Atlantic version of the same errand has one detail the Pacific lacks: a legally fixed season. Humpbacks from Iceland, Norway, Greenland and the Gulf of Maine converge on Silver Bank and Samaná Bay in the Dominican Republic, and the Dominican authorities open that season on 15 January and close it on 30 March. Outside those dates you cannot see it, whatever a booking site tells you.

The Azores sit in the middle of the ocean and act as the corridor's crossroads. Blue, fin and sei whales pass the islands on their way north between April and June — the only place on this map where three of the largest animals alive move through in the same weeks. And several stops here are not migrants at all: the sperm whales of the Azores, Dominica and the Norwegian shelf hold station year-round, which is why those coasts have no closed season.

Australians named it, and the name is accurate: between May and November, tens of thousands of east-coast humpbacks travel from Antarctic feeding waters up the New South Wales and Queensland coast to breed in the warm shallows of the southern Great Barrier Reef, then come back down. The east Australian population has recovered so far from whaling that the northbound run is now visible from suburban headlands in Sydney.

The southbound leg is the better one to book. Whales heading north in June are in a hurry; the same animals returning in September travel slowly with new calves and stop to rest. Hervey Bay exists as a whale destination entirely because of that stopover — it was the world's first Whale Heritage Site, designated in 2019, and the whales that enter the bay are not passing through but pausing in it.

The same Antarctic feeding grounds send a second stream up the eastern Pacific to Costa Rica. That gives Uvita something no other stop on this map has: southern-hemisphere humpbacks from July to October, northern-hemisphere humpbacks from December to April, and the longest humpback season anywhere on earth.

Southern right whales feed in the open Southern Ocean and calve in shallow, sheltered bays on the southern edges of Argentina, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Because the whole population lives below the equator, the season runs on the southern winter: roughly June to November, in the months when the northern corridors are empty.

Two of those bays are on this map, and they are the closest thing to shore-based whale watching anywhere. At El Doradillo near Puerto Madryn, mothers and calves come within metres of a public beach at high tide. At Hermanus, the cliff path above Walker Bay does the same job — the town employs a whale crier and the September festival is built around animals visible without a boat.

A third of this site's destinations are not on a migration route at all. Sperm whales off the Azores, Dominica and Kaikōura hold station year-round; pilot whales off Tenerife and Madeira do the same. For travellers that is the most useful fact on this page — those coasts have no closed season and no wrong month.

The other half of this group only looks migratory. The orcas that fill the fjords around Tromsø between November and January are following overwintering herring, and when the herring shift their wintering grounds — as they have done more than once in recent decades — the whale-watching fleet has to travel further to find them. The orcas of the Strait of Gibraltar appear off Tarifa in July and August because that is when bluefin tuna funnel through. Blue whales feed in Monterey Bay from July to October on krill that the canyon's upwelling concentrates, and swap Sri Lanka's south coast for its east coast between seasons. Track the prey and you have the schedule.