Note: This article contains photos of a whale carcass which some may find graphic.

At the Point Reyes Lighthouse, you’ll spot a gray whale’s stately skull overlooking the sweeping Pacific Ocean. Hundreds of thousands of visitors marvel at her massive cranium and beak-like jawbones—which measure 9-feet long and weigh several hundred pounds—as her marine relatives migrate nearby. This skull holds stories of this Pacific giant and her journey, of a multi-divisional effort to obtain and prepare the bones for display, of gray whales’ struggles to survive in a changing climate, and of the many visitors inspired to care for these ocean titans after interacting with the specimen. 

Teamwork Makes the Whale Work

In Spring 2022, an adult female gray whale became stranded at Limantour Beach during her long migratory route towards nutrient-rich Arctic feeding waters in the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Her body came to rest along the Seashore’s foggy coastline, beach crustaceans skittering around the carcass and the ocean lapping a song of remembrance.

Biologists suspect that the whale may have died due to starvation and malnutrition, possibly part of a larger Unusual Mortality Event which took place from 2019-2023 along the West Coast. Many whales suffer from malnutrition during their long migratory journeys due to abnormal environmental conditions at their feeding grounds. Photo (of a live, healthy gray whale) by Andrea Carpio via iNaturalist.

Within this saddening circumstance, Point Reyes staff saw a glimmer of opportunity for the whale’s story to live on. The 40-year old whale skull on display at the Lighthouse—an adult female which had been stranded at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in 1985—was very weathered and degraded. Together, Park Ranger Sierra Frisbie and Marine Ecologist Sarah Codde envisioned replacing the old skull with a fresh one—a massive undertaking which they’d been considering for a while. Though a few whales wash up at Point Reyes each year, this whale was in an ideal location for access and was fully intact:

“Many times when whales die out at sea, they float up to the surface and then are scavenged upon by sharks—or any number of things—so it’s in really rough shape by the time they get to shore,” says Frisbie. “This one washed up very soon after it died, so it was fully complete and in really good body condition.”

This new whale skull, Frisbie and Codde hoped, would offer the opportunity to enhance public education about gray whale populations’ natural history, ecology, and future challenges due to climate change. Providing visitors with the chance to interact with a skull which was found locally at Point Reyes, rather than elsewhere along the Pacific Coast, was another incentive. Frisbie and Codde promptly began devising plans for bringing this vision to fruition—which first involved excavating the skull from the beach. After securing appropriate permits to collect the skull and coordinating compliance to use heavy equipment off the roadway, the pair collaborated with staff across multiple park divisions and beyond—including Park Tractor Operator Ryan Hickey, Roads and Excavator Operator Ryan Semorile, Ranger Carlo Arreglo, Wildlife Technician Dane Horowski, and California Academy of Sciences’ Marine Mammal Stranding Technician Marjorie Cox—to plan out an operation to move the skull from Limantour Beach to the Bear Valley Headquarters.

Formulating a plan to circumvent the marshy Estero de Limantour and navigating heavy tractors along the weight-limited tidal channel bridge and narrow trails proved to be complicated. After finally receiving compliance to go through with the project, the carcass disappeared from the beach during a huge storm and heavy surf:

“When it washed out, we thought the project was over for about a week!” remarks Frisbie. “Then a park volunteer found it on the other side of the Estero at Drakes Beach.”

Four miles west of its original stranding location, Drakes Beach was a more ideal location for beach access with the heavy machinery—a miracle of sorts. “The Ryans” expertly drove the excavator down the shoreline and maneuvered it to separate the skull from the vertebra, as well as to hold tension on the flesh while biologists cut excess blubber and tissue from the whale’s mandibles.

Top: Staff operate an excavator to remove the whales’ skull from its body. Bottom left: Codde, Cox, and Arreglo cut excess blubber and tissue from the whale’s mandible. Bottom right: After the whale’s head was removed from its body, the excavator pulled it off the beach and into a trailer waiting in the Drakes Beach parking lot. Photos by NPS / Sierra Frisbie.

“I had never worked on a project that required such different, diverse skillsets that all came together for this really efficient day of teamwork,” says Frisbie. “You have people from our road crew…doing delicate, finite work with an excavator, and you have this team of ecologists and biologists who know that anatomy and where to cut the blubber…the communication between these skillsets that don’t often collide was really cool. The morale was very high when we did succeed [at removing the skull], because we had had a solid plan, but no idea how it would actually go,” she laughs.

The team left the rest of the whale’s body on the beach to return to nature, and loaded the 5,000 pound skull onto a trailer to be transported towards park headquarters—along with a particularly imposing smell.

“The skull itself smelled horrendous. We moved it off the beach and then had to trailer it back to Bear Valley, and the smell was just lingering,” recalls Codde. “People in their cars were pulling over and so they didn’t have to follow behind us.”

The Art of Decomposing a Whale

Once at Bear Valley, the team faced a new challenge: decomposing the skull to strip away its thousands of pounds of tissue. 

Neither Codde or Frisbie had ever undertaken a project such as this, and viewed the process as an experiment of trial and error. Codde had previously participated in retrieving an orca carcass—a rare ecotype found on the beach at Tomales Point— in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences, but wasn’t involved in the latter process of cleaning the skeleton. Together, Codde and Frisbie gathered as much information as they could about how to best decompose the skull—the composting materials, the temperature, and the duration of time that the skull should remain buried—but ultimately, were on their own in figuring out the best methods. 

“We were so focused on it being perfect—thinking about how to get the right ratio of manure to nitrogen-rich leaf litter or hay.,” says Frisbie. “In the end we just had to do our best and trust the process.”

Photo Right: Staff covered the skull with manure and straw from the Point Reyes Morgan Horse Ranch and the nearby Five Brooks Ranch, where microbial activity worked to decompose the remaining flesh. →

The team buried the skull in a large compost pile and covered it with manure and straw from the Point Reyes Morgan Horse Ranch and the nearby Five Brooks Ranch, where microbial activity worked to decompose the remaining flesh. Whale bones are notoriously oily, an adaptation which allows them to maintain buoyancy in water, and many museums who obtain specimens cleaned through other methods—such as flesh-eating dermestid beetles and heated water—struggle with oil leaks in their collections. Composting, however, breaks down and removes these heavy oils. And as an added bonus, the skull lost its pungent scent after it was buried in the compost pile…except to Bear Valley critters such as foxes, badgers and deer, who were intrigued by the unusual ocean scent wafting through their inland habitat.

Many Bear Valley animals—such as this badger and fox—were intrigued by the whale’s unusual ocean scent wafting through their inland habitat.

The osteologists in-training periodically used a long thermometer to monitor the temperature of the compost pile and ensure that it was heating up, and after five months, decided to unbury the skull for a check up, expecting to see it still plastered with blubber and flesh. Instead, they discovered the opposite: 

“I was really surprised when we unburied it,” remarks Codde. We dug it up sooner than we needed to, and any pieces of remaining blubber pulled cleanly off.” 

After using a pressure washer to remove remaining tissue from the many nooks and crannies of the skull, it was left to dry and bleach in the sun for over a year  while Scott Worley—the park’s former Historic Preservationist—carefully built the wooden base on which the skull is currently displayed. Finally put on display in April 2024, almost two years after the whale was retrieved from the beach, the skull was the final puzzle piece in the 2018 to 2019 restoration of the Point Reyes Lighthouse which occurred in the years prior. For Worley, taking part in the whale skull project was a highlight of his career, on par with building the welcome sign at Alcatraz:

“I knew my career would be coming to an end soon. It was very satisfying knowing that so many people are going to [enjoy] this,” says Scott Worley. “[Building the base for the skull] was something that was like the icing on top of the cake that everyone else built. I got to help them put the cherry on top,” says Worley.

← Photo Left: Staff unburying the skull, which had been decomposing in a large compost pile for five months.

So…Why did the Whale Die?

Now on display at the Point Reyes Lighthouse, the whale serves as an ambassador for the beauty and immensity of its species—as well as the numerous challenges that gray whales face. While not confirmed, biologists suspect that the whale may have died due to starvation and malnutrition, possibly part of a larger Unusual Mortality Event which took place from 2019-2023 along the West Coast. During this time, gray whale populations plummeted from 27,000 whales to 13,000, the lowest since the effects of commercial whaling came to a peak in the early 1970s. This decline is attributed to localized ecosystem changes in the gray whales’ Subarctic and Arctic feeding grounds. Sea ice algae, for example, feeds sea floor crustaceans, one of gray whales’ favorite nutrient-rich foods. As ice melts due to global warming, there’s less surface area for the algae to grow—which leads to fewer crustaceans, and in turn, less food for the whales. The whale stranded at Point Reyes in 2022 may have not found enough food during her trip to the Arctic the year prior. After fasting during her 6,000 mile southward journey to Baja California breeding grounds and possibly giving birth, it would make sense that she became emaciated and exhausted to death during her long trip back north.

After fasting during her 6,000 mile southward journey to Baja California breeding grounds and possibly giving birth, it would make sense that the whale became emaciated and exhausted to death during her long trip back north. At the Point Reyes Lighthouse, hundreds of thousands of visitors now marvel at her massive cranium and beak-like jawbones—which measure 6-feet long and weigh several thousand pounds—as her marine relatives migrate nearby. Photo by NPS / Anela Ramos Kopshever.

Though the Unusual Mortality Event ended in 2023, gray whale populations are still declining. In addition to continually abnormal environmental conditions at their feeding grounds, whales often die due to entanglement and vessel strikes—the two most common causes of whale strandings along the Point Reyes Peninsula, which sees about 1-4 carcasses per year. When whales’ flippers, bodies, and tails become entangled in fishing gear and marine debris, their ability to swim, feed, breathe, and other essential functions becomes impaired. While some whales are able to free themselves of debris, severe entanglements can lead to death from infection, starvation, amputation, blood loss, strangulation or drowning. Researchers estimate that 300,000 whales, dolphins, and porpoises around the world die every year from entanglement with ocean debris and fishing gear.

Vessel strikes are another common cause of death for gray whales, as well as blue, fin, and humpback whales. Each of these species migrate and feed in areas which overlap with the routes of cargo ships, military vessels, and other large boats. As whales’ Arctic food supplies are dwindling due to climate change, they are stopping at new areas along their migration routes—such as the bustling San Francisco Bay—to forage, putting them at higher risk of being hit by a commercial ship.

Full Circle Moments

When he was a child, Hickey—who assisted with the beach excavation—visited the Lighthouse on a school field trip, and remembers learning about the old whale skull alongside his classmates: “When we were tasked with replacing the old skull, it felt like a full circle moment, and I am proud to have been a part of that project.  Knowing that generations of children will similarly go on educational field trips to the Point Reyes Lighthouse, and will learn about the Point Reyes ecosystem in the same way I did when I was a youth, makes me smile,” says Ryan.

The multi-divisional team of staff who came together to make this project a success hope that the new skull display lasts for another 50 years—as the previous skull did—and provides the public with a way to engage with whales and learn about the challenges that they face.

The entire process of gathering the skull from the beach to constructing the base on which the skull is displayed was a highly collaborative, multi-divisional effort. Left: April 20th, 2022 – Park Tractor Operator Ryan Hickey, Roads and Excavator Operator Ryan Semorile, Ranger Carlo Arreglo, Wildlife Technician Dane Horowski, and California Academy of Sciences’ Marine Mammal Stranding Technician Marjorie Cox. Right: April 9th, 2024 – Marine Ecologist Sarah Codde, Maintenance Mechanic Aaron Cherniss, Historic Preservationist Scott Worley, and Park Ranger Sierra Frisbie.

“The Point Reyes Lighthouse is where I saw my first whale and then my next 100 whales,” says Frisbie. “It completes the story for the folks who are looking from the Lighthouse Observation Deck and seeing the whales swimming by. From hundreds of feet up, the whales are smaller than the palm of your hand.  Then, turning around and getting to and see the skull and the sheer magnitude of those animals is pretty incredible. Her story gets to live on through hundreds of thousands of visitors who are going to come see and interact with the exhibit.”

How Can You Help Whales?

 • Share your whale sightings through the Whale Alert app, which alerts mariners about whale presence and helps them avoid deadly collisions. In the long term, this data will help scientists learn about whale migratory patterns to establish more permanent protective measures in heavy traffic areas.

 • Reducing plastic waste is an important part of supporting whale and marine ecosystem health. In addition to the risk of entanglement in plastic waste, whales ingest an estimated 200,000 pieces of microplastic each day, which can cause internal blockages and lead to malnutrition and death.

 • Share your love for whales with others. By spreading the word about the challenges which whales are currently facing within our communities, more people can work together to protect them.