Dotted across a map of coastal B.C., a handful of place names tell a cryptic and almost forgotten story. Whaletown, on bucolic Cortes Island. Whaling Station Bay, a semicircular sweep of white sand on the northeast corner of Hornby Island. The Ballenas Islands, a pair of uninhabited islets readily visible from the ferries that plow daily between Nanaimo and Horseshoe Bay. All point to a glorious past, a time when the Strait of Georgia was a paradise for many species of whale, along with harbour seals, sea lions, and fish beyond number.

They also hint at a different, bloodier time, when B.C. was briefly home to a thriving trade in whale oil, meat, and baleen.

“At the turn of the last century, it was quite common for people to row out in English Bay and watch the humpbacks breaching,” says Andrew Trites, on the line from his office at UBC, where he’s director of the Fisheries Centre’s marine-mammal research unit. “And then there was a whaling station set up over near Nanaimo, and within only a few years they managed to kill all the humpbacks that used to come to the Strait of Georgia.”

This wasn’t the brutal but easily romanticized whaling of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Instead, it was a modern, industrialized fishery, with motorboats and rocket-propelled harpoons, and by 1910 it had extirpated the Strait’s humpbacks and grey whales. Some thought they’d never return.

Recent months have shown otherwise, however, with several high-profile cetacean sightings giving hope to amateur whale watchers and veteran marine biologists alike.

“We’ve always had grey whales and humpbacks and even Pacific white-sided dolphins kind of poke their heads into Georgia Strait,” says Paul Cottrell, regional marine mammal coordinator for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (FOC). He’s checking in from Bedwell Harbour on South Pender Island, where he’s overseeing a project designed to identify noise-pollution threats to southern resident orcas, an endangered subspecies now thought to number just 88. “But what’s unique about the last year is that animals from these different species were staying.”

Cottrell cites the pod of approximately 100 Pacific white-sided dolphins that spent several days feeding in Howe Sound this past May, a grey whale many urban residents saw feeding in False Creek at about the same time, and two more greys that have become long-term occupants of the waters off Victoria and Sechelt.

“We do have resident grey whales along the west coast of Vancouver Island and the central coast up north,” he notes, “but we’re seeing grey whales maybe becoming residents of these other areas, which is really interesting. Of course, they’re just occupying areas they used to occupy. But they’re staying because there’s a food source there, which indicates a healthy aquatic ecosystem.”

If this sounds like a positive development for our embattled marine environment, it probably is. And it’s not just greys, humpbacks, and dolphins that are making a comeback. Although chinook-salmon–eating southern resident orcas are just barely holding their own, their carnivorous transient kin in the Strait of Georgia have experienced a resurgence that is surprising even whale specialists.

“When we started studying killer whales in the mid-’70s in Georgia Strait, these transients were extremely rare,” says FOC biologist John Ford, speaking by cellphone from Klemtu, where he’s researching fin whale populations in B.C.’s northern waters. “Over the years, the numbers [of transient orcas] have increased substantially. The population has done really well: their numbers have gone from about 25 animals in the early ’70s to about 10 times that in our study area. There’s a combination of really good survival in the population and immigration into the area, to the point that transient killer whales are a very common feature in the ecosystem of Georgia Strait. They’re present pretty much on a daily basis.”

The inference is that populations of harbour seals and Steller sea lions—preferred prey for transient orcas—are also healthy, as indeed they are. The larger of the two pinniped species has suffered a calamitous population crash in the western portion of its range, from Prince William Sound across to northern Japan. Here, though, Steller populations are on the rise, and although harbour seals in the strait have topped out at about 40,000 individuals from a low of 3,800 in the 1970s, that’s on a par with the numbers that would have been present prior to European colonization.