How many gray whales pass below the bluffs at Point Vicente in a given season? Ask that question at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center and you'll get an answer chalked onto a whiteboard, updated by hand, every single day the patio is staffed. It has been updated that way since 1984.
The number on that board this year told a strange story. Read one line of it and gray whales look like they're vanishing off the Palos Verdes coast. Read another line, from the same season, and there's real reason for cautious relief. Both readings are accurate. Neither one alone tells you what's actually happening offshore, and that gap between the headline number and the fuller picture is worth understanding if you spend any time on that bluff.
Two Records, One Season
The American Cetacean Society's Los Angeles chapter runs a full-season shore-based census from the back patio of the Point Vicente Interpretive Center, a cliffside post roughly 125 to 138 feet above the water where the seafloor drops off close to shore. The project just wrapped its 42nd consecutive season, running from December 1, 2025 through late May 2026, staffed seven days a week by trained volunteers with binoculars and spotting scopes.
Here's what three consecutive seasons of that count actually look like, side by side:
| Season | Southbound Whales | Southbound Calves | Northbound Whales | Northbound Calves |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-24 | 225 | 22 (9.8%) | 579 | 34 (5.9%) |
| 2024-25 | 130 (record low) | 0 (first time ever) | 485 | 8 (1.6%) |
| 2025-26 (42nd season) | 214 | 17 (7.9%) | 445 (new record low) | 16 (3.6%) |
Look at that last row closely. The southbound count climbed back from the prior season's all-time low, and the calf percentage jumped from zero to nearly 8 percent, better than the previous year by a wide margin. But the northbound count didn't follow the same script. It fell to a new record low, the worst count in 42 years of watching, even though northbound calves also improved from 8 to 16.
Census director Alisa Schulman-Janiger, who has run the project since 1984, called the calf numbers "the highlight of this season" and cautious optimism in her own season-end summary. She was careful about how far that optimism should extend. In an April interview about the same data, she put it plainly: you can't say there's a big comeback.
Why It Isn't A Straight Line
The backdrop here is a population that has been through a documented crash. NOAA Fisheries reported the Eastern North Pacific gray whale population at somewhere between 11,700 and 14,450 animals for the 2024-25 season, the third-lowest estimate in the agency's time series, following an Unusual Mortality Event that ran from late 2018 through November 2023. That's down from an estimated 27,000 whales in 2016, according to Schulman-Janiger's own account of the decline.
The mechanism researchers point to is food, not weather. Gray whales feed on amphipods in the Arctic before making a roughly 6,000-mile migration south to breed in Baja California lagoons. When ice coverage shrinks, that prey becomes harder to find, and whales arrive at the start of migration already underweight. A skinny whale can't sustain a pregnancy or nurse a calf across that distance the way a well-fed one can, which is the direct link between Arctic ice conditions one year and a coastal Peninsula's calf count the following spring.
"The last few years have been very bad. Bad in that, very low counts and skinny whales," Schulman-Janiger said in a July 2026 interview, describing what her team has watched from the same patio for four decades.
What The Cliff Can't See
Here's the part that matters most if you actually watch from the bluff yourself, and it's the part most casual coverage of the whale decline leaves out entirely. The Point Vicente census does not measure the total gray whale population, and its own operators say so directly. Most gray whales on their southbound migration take an offshore route through the Channel Islands, well outside the range visible from the Peninsula's cliffs. The nearshore count from Point Vicente captures only a slice of the total migration, and that slice can shrink or grow based on where whales choose to swim that year, independent of how many whales exist.
That distinction has taken on new weight recently. Some researchers, including Gray Whale Foundation education director Todd Mansur, have raised the possibility that whales are shifting further from shore near busy shipping lanes, potentially swinging wide around Catalina Island to avoid vessel noise around the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. If that's happening even partially, a falling count at Point Vicente could reflect a route change as much as a population decline, which means the whiteboard on the patio is measuring two different things at once: how many whales exist, and how many of them are choosing to pass close enough to be seen. Untangling those two questions is exactly what four decades of consistent, same-spot counting is built to eventually answer.
The People Who Never Stopped Counting
None of this data exists without the volunteers who show up on that patio in December rain and May glare alike. Over the 2024-25 season, roughly 100 volunteers logged more than 8,700 hours of observation, with a core group of a dozen people each contributing more than 200 hours. Joyce Daniels joined the project in 1994 after retiring and has been a near-daily presence since. Watching the recent seasons unfold, she didn't soften the assessment: "We're now seeing the lowest gray whale numbers I've ever seen."
That kind of continuity is the whole point of the project. Schulman-Janiger has described it simply: "We've been looking at the same water since 1984." Forty-two years of consistent methodology from one fixed spot is what makes a single strange season readable as data rather than anecdote, and it's what will eventually tell researchers whether this year's calf rebound was a real turn or a blip inside a longer decline.
Watching For Yourself
The census patio at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center is open to the public during daylight hours whenever the project is running, and the museum itself keeps regular hours from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily year round. The next season, the 43rd, begins December 1, 2026, just over three months from now. Los Serenos de Point Vicente, the city's docent organization, also leads guided hikes and museum tours through the Palos Verdes Nature Preserve for anyone who wants context alongside the view. Each spring, the city and the docents co-host Whale of a Day, a free festival built around the migration, with marine life exhibits and family activities at the Interpretive Center grounds.
If you already have a spot on that bluff where you like to stand with a coffee and see what passes by, this year's board gave you something more complicated than a simple story of loss. It gave you a real question worth watching for next season: whether the calves keep coming back, and whether the whales keep choosing this stretch of water to swim close enough to be counted at all.
Living on the Peninsula means noticing details like this, the kind that don't show up in a listing photo but shape what it actually feels like to be here through the seasons. Patrice Meepos and her team spend as much time paying attention to those details as they do to market data, because for the people who call Palos Verdes home, that's usually the part that matters most.
