Thanks to a call from Jon Scordino, marine mammal biologist for the Makah Tribe, we were able to record J pod vocalizations for the first time using a hydrophone deployed just inside the entrance to Neah Bay. Jon got some photos which should confirm or deny the acoustic inference of the pod identity.

Here are example clips made using the recording software in Neah Bay, as well as the raw recordings from the orcasound.net audio streams:

100 second clip with S1, S2, and S10 calls (and percussives?) –
http://www.orcasound.net/wholistener/nb/detections/raw/2011/05/09/AveDb_93_05_09_2011_17_22_09.mp3

Longer continuous recordings —
http://orcasound.net/mp3s/nb/110509_1715_nb-kw-sighting.mp3
http://orcasound.net/mp3s/nb/110509_1728_nb-kw-sighting.mp3

The only other time killer whales have been observed using this hydrophone was on 9/28/2008 at 23:00:00 — the approximate time when a human listener reported hearing calls. In both of these cases, however, the automatic detector was not triggered — although it may have done so during the loudest calls recorded today if I hadn’t over-ridden the system by manually recording through the WhoListener software.