A record 228 humpback whales were sighted off the Kaikōura coast during this year’s Great Kaikōura Whale Count, the highest tally since the community survey began in 2020, with the results unveiled at the Kaikōura Whale Festival on Sunday.
The count is run each June by the Kaikōura Ocean Research Institute, a volunteer-driven marine research charity set up in 2012. Spotters sit on a hill above the peninsula and scan the water, logging every whale and dolphin that passes. This year they were there on 23 days, put in 116 observation hours and completed 476 scans.
KORI director Dr Jody Weir told RNZ the season had drawn spotters from far beyond the district. “This year we had spotters at the hill on 23 days in June for 116 observation hours and 476 scans (whale and dolphin sightings),” she said. “Because we usually had at least a few people spotting, we ended up with 432 volunteer hours. We had 88 volunteer spotters this year, all co-ordinated by Ashlin Donaldson, our incredible intern.”
The volunteers came from 14 countries and from 10 cities and towns around New Zealand. Alongside the humpbacks, spotters logged fin, minke and sperm whales, and thousands of dolphins. The busiest single day was 22 June, when 34 humpbacks went past.
The headline number is worth reading carefully, because the raw tally moves with how hard people look. Last year’s count produced 201 humpbacks, but it took 173 volunteers and 574 volunteer hours over 22 days to get there, as Weir explained to RNZ in August 2025. This year’s record came off roughly half as many volunteers and about a quarter fewer volunteer hours. On a per-day basis the two seasons are closer than the headline suggests, at around nine whales a day last year and just under ten this year, but the effort behind each sighting has fallen sharply. Fewer people watching, and more whales found.
That is not the same thing as a population estimate. A shore-based count records whales seen, not individual animals identified, and the survey window has changed length from year to year. The 2024 count, for instance, ran only 14 days and turned up 51 humpbacks, as reported in September that year, which looks like a collapse next to 2025 and 2026 until you notice the count was less than two-thirds as long. Comparing seasons honestly means comparing effort as well as totals, and on that measure the trend still points up.
What the spotters are watching is one of the longest commutes in the animal world. Humpbacks travel roughly 10,000km a year between feeding grounds in the Antarctic and breeding grounds in the tropical Pacific, and the Department of Conservation says they run mainly up the east coast of the South Island and through Cook Strait during winter, returning down the west coast in spring. Kaikōura sits directly on that highway, with deep water close to shore, which is why a hill and a pair of binoculars work at all.
The reason a count of a couple of hundred whales counts as good news takes some explaining. Commercial whaling killed more than 90 per cent of some humpback populations, and DOC records that New Zealand’s last whaling station closed in 1964 because the stocks had fallen so far that humpbacks were no longer migrating through Cook Strait in numbers worth hunting. The industry did not stop out of conscience. It stopped because there was almost nothing left to catch. The Oceania humpback population was still classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2008.
DOC has run its own Cook Strait survey annually since 2004 to track that recovery, using photographs of individual tail flukes and genetic samples to work out how New Zealand’s whales connect to the wider South Pacific. The Kaikōura count adds something the official survey cannot buy, which is a large number of eyes on the water for a whole month, paid for in volunteer hours rather than budget lines.
Which is where the good news gets complicated. The future of the count is in doubt because of a lack of funding. KORI launched a Givealittle page earlier this year and asked the community for help, and the Kaikōura District Council has since got in behind the survey along with DOC, Dolphin Encounter, Kaikōura Kayaks and the University of Canterbury. A count that produces a record result and an uncertain future at the same time is an odd position for a piece of long-run science to be in, and long-run is the whole point. A single season tells you very little. Twenty seasons tell you whether a species is coming back.
Sunday’s festival was itself a small saga. It was originally set for 7 June at Fyffe House to line up with World Oceans Day, then postponed twice by rough weather, and finally landed at the Kaikōura Memorial Hall, according to Scoop. Project Jonah brought its life-sized walk-through whale, DOC’s disentanglement team let people practise freeing inflatable whales from ropes, and 265 visitors worked their way through the whale-themed crafts and a papier-mâché humpback.
“It’s a celebration marking the end of the Great Kaikōura Whale Count, giving the community a chance to come together and have fun, learn and rejoice in the magic of whales,” Weir said.
Sixty-two years after New Zealand’s last whaling station closed for want of whales, 88 people stood on a hill above Kaikōura and counted 228 humpbacks going past. Have you spotted whales off the Kaikōura coast, or taken a turn on the hill as a volunteer spotter? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply