PORT STEPHENS, Australia (AP) — Sydney’s harbor becomes a humpback highway in winter as the whales migrate from feeding grounds in Antarctica to breeding areas off Australia’s coast. Whale watchers are spoiled for sightings during peak traffic weeks in June and July, when 40,000 creatures the size of buses will navigate the waters of New South Wales. A pod of the giant, graceful mammals even created traffic delays for humans this month when a passenger ferry had to halt its passage across the harbor because they were swimming by. The humpback population boom is a sharp reversal from the 1960s, when numbers dwindled to a few hundred.
Reporting by Charlotte Graham-McLay and Mark Baker, Associated Press
Banner image of a humpback whale breaching in Iceland, by Giles Laurent via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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