A Good Year for Whale Mothers

What's happening

The 2025-2026 calving season for the North Atlantic right whale is the strongest in seventeen years, according to NOAA Fisheries. At least twenty-two mother-and-calf pairs have been documented off the southeastern United States coast. The researchers who track them know each mother by name, identified by the unique callosity patterns on her head. On January 20, a member of the public reported "Giza," at least twenty-six years old, swimming with her fourth calf near Charleston. Her first daughter, Hopscotch, became a mother herself in 2024, making Giza a grandmother. On January 22, a beachgoer in Daytona Beach spotted "Slalom," forty-four years old, with her seventh calf. She has survived seven entanglements. On January 30, campers in Flagler Beach reported "Ghost," about fifty years old, with her ninth. Fewer than 370 North Atlantic right whales remain alive in the world.

What the text says

Job 39:1-41"Do you know the time when the mountain goats give birth? Do you watch when the doe bears fawns?2Can you number the months that they fulfill? Or do you know the time when they give birth?3They bow themselves, they bring forth their young, they end their labor pains.4Their young ones become strong. They grow up in the open field. They go forth, and don't return again.

God's speech from the whirlwind, which runs from Job 38 to 41, is the longest sustained passage in the Bible about non-human life. It is often read as a rebuke to Job for daring to question God. It reads more naturally as a tour. Chapter by chapter, God walks Job through the ostrich, the warhorse, the hawk, the wild donkey, the behemoth, the leviathan. In chapter 39 the tour arrives at the births of wild animals: the mountain goat, the deer, the doe. The question God asks is specific. Do you know when they give birth? Have you watched them count their months? Have you ever sat still long enough to see one crouch down in the grass and become a mother? The implied answer in Job's time was no. The assumption of the speech, though, is that someone does know. Every wild birth has an attentive witness in it. The deeper move of the passage is to show Job that none of these creatures are alone, even when no human has ever seen them.

The reflection

For the first time in human history, someone does know. A woman with a clipboard knows when a fifty-year-old mother named Ghost is about to give birth off Flagler Beach. A researcher knows that Slalom has survived seven entanglements and is the eldest daughter of Wart. God's question to Job is starting, very slowly, to have answers. That is a quiet kind of wonder. There are creatures in this world too rare to be anonymous, and the human attention they have been given looks, from a certain angle, a lot like the attention Scripture says creation was always under.