This is me touching a baby gray whale. You can tell
it's a baby by the hair folicles--those dents on its head. This was taken two years ago in San Ignacio lagoon, one of the warm water lagoons of Baja where the grays give birth every spring. These birthing lagoons were discovered by whalers in the late 1800s, and hundreds of thousands of gray whales were killed, driving them to the brink of extinction. Now, unbelievably, mother whales seek out this encounter with humans. Once you have touched a whale, you will never be the same.