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Luna has been sticking very close to his familiar territory in Nootka Sound these days. I've been marking the locations where I've seen him lately on a chart, and it's getting full of red pins in a relatively small zone.

The weather has been a lot calmer some of the time, too, so I've been hearing him more often on the hydrophone. I have also found places next to the shore to anchor that are closer to the area in which he's been spending time, so the calls I do hear are a bit clearer. His calls are pretty much all the same short call we've been hearing for most of the past year.

I have been spending nights on the water, and early one morning over the weekend I woke late after writing and listening at anchor very late in the night. (I have a small desk under the canvas on the boat and a car battery to run the computer.) I heard a plane that sounded as if it was circling. By the time I got outside to take a look at what was going on the plane had left. But when I asked the pilot about it later, he told me that he had circled once because he saw Luna breaching. In all, the pilot said, Luna breached three times in swift succession.

I didn't see any more airborne displays by Luna, but I did watch him spend time with some of his old boat friends. One was a small dozer boat – the kind that pushes logs around in a booming ground. These boats are small but built like tanks, and this one was being ferried from one booming ground to another, so it came chugging across the open water where Luna was. Luna immediately swam over to it, tucked in behind it, gave his tail a hearty slap, and followed for a while. However, when he came to the edge of his territory he dropped off and went back to foraging.

A little later the same day, Luna was back on the east side of the area when a tug that he has known and played with for years came by, pushing a big white bow wave. Luna hooked up with the tug quickly, too, and went about the same distance before dropping off. This time I followed about 200 meters behind the tug, because I expected Luna to go a long way with this friend. He didn't, though. He dropped off at about the same place he had left the dozer boat. In fact, after he dropped off the tug he came right back to my boat, so I had to scoot over to the shoreline (only a hundred metres or so) to get away from him.

Then he did something I thought was interesting. The water was flat calm at the time, so he was easy to follow through the binoculars. He headed out in a very purposeful straight line, as if he were on rails, and went perhaps as far as two kilometres across the bay. On the way he stayed close to the surface, swimming and blowing. Because of that, he sent a long wake rolling like a taut silver thread across the water. He went almost exactly back to the place where he had first joined the tug, and went on fishing.

There was something wonderfully coherent about this little event, a sort of confident assertiveness to it. It gave me a sense of his precise geographical knowledge of the area, which he certainly ought to know by now as well as he knows the front of his pec fins. He was completely at home, and intent on the task at hand, like a kid who knows where the cookie jar is.

I had the hydrophone in the water while he was making this little purposeful journey, and didn't hear any calls or echolocation while he was doing it. I heard plenty of echolocation once he went back to fishing.

He doesn't stay at that spot all the time, though. My observations on his locations, which are a bit rough since I don't have distance measuring equipment, indicate that he spends time in many different parts of the bay. But the general region in which he's been spending the time seems very consistent, with clear boundaries. He seems willing to go a short distance across these boundaries if the company is compelling, but not too far.

That, of course, is just the latest phase. No doubt he'll change the pattern again, soon.

Over the past few days there have been a lot of sea lions in the area, too. They don't seem to bother him, and he doesn't seem to bother them. They have been doing a lot of splashing around in groups of at least six or so, and all that turbulence didn't seem to either interest Luna or chase him away, at least as far as I could tell. A couple of times I saw both Luna and a group of sea lions in the same binocular view, and he just kept on fishing.

A couple of times, though, I picked up some very odd underwater sounds. They sounded, because of a bit of buzziness to them, as if they were attempts by Luna to copy sea lions' barks. Impossible to tell, but strange to hear.

Listening to the sounds from the sea is like putting your ear up to a closed door behind which people are dining or watching TV; in all the clatter and talk it's sure hard to know what's going on in there.

I am sending a small mp3 audio file with this report in case it can get up on the website for you to listen to. It is of a few calls Luna made in mid-afternoon on January 22, followed by a short burst of echolocation made about the same time. I pasted the echolocation on the end of the calls file, so it didn't happen exactly in the timing in which you would hear it.