Sand, Stamps, and Spirit: The 2024 Right Whale Festival

It’s around 10 a.m. on Sunday morning, and a little girl runs up to our table in a mermaid outfit. She sparkles in the morning sun, unmoved by an increasingly high wind whipping up tablecloths and unmooring displays at vendors’ tables throughout the bustling beach park festival. This kid is here for the whales, and she’s ready to let you know it.

Defenders of Wildlife was a sponsor and an onsite presence at the 2024 Right Whale Festival, hosted the weekend of Nov. 2-3 in Fernandina Beach, Florida. Our table was full of information about our work on the North Atlantic right whale, as well as the story of the entangled right whale Snow Cone and her calf, with custom stamps to match.

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Ashley Holmes / DOW

Supporters spoke with us throughout the festival in (mostly) sunny Florida weather — and quite often, it was young ones like the girl in the mermaid suit leading the charge. Some kids knew all about the festival’s namesake and had opinions far outstretching their years about why the roughly 370 remaining right whales deserve protection. Others were there for our coloring sheets, showing whales and marine life in a vibrant ocean; or to collect stamps for a scavenger hunt, answering a trivia question at each booth to get a clearer picture of the vast world of wildlife out past the shore of the beach and beyond.

With those eager children came adult visitors with a wide range of understandings of how dangerous life is for the North Atlantic right whale. Here at Defenders, we know and discuss the core facts all the time: Around 370 whales are alive today. Fewer than 70 of those are reproductive females. Mortal danger is posed by vessel strikes and fishing gear entanglement. Plenty of people at the festival were unfamiliar with these realities and may never have learned differently had they not made the trip. It’s one thing to write those numbers out, but quite another to see the shock and horror on someone’s face as they begin to understand, for the first time, just how many knives are out for the species.

Tortoise Time

The Right Whale Festival was about more than just its namesake species. Some booths were onsite with live turtles or information about Florida ecology.  

Near the Defenders’ tent, around a mass of foot traffic, one roped-off spot drew plenty of attention to something other than a whale. It wasn’t a booth, though, but a nest, belonging to a gopher tortoise that had chosen the festival grounds as a perfect place to make a burrow.

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Ashley Holmes / DOW

Gopher tortoises can dig deep, creating nests up to 40 feet long and 15 feet deep to take care of their eggs. This one was down a hole, but still visible, sometimes poking its head out. Thousands of visitors walking around its roped-off hole in the ground meant the tortoise stayed inside for most of the weekend, but one short and intense blast of rainfall on Sunday drew it out to cool off. Defenders’ own Katherine Sayler, one of our Florida-based staff, started her career with gopher tortoise work, so she was eager to share the importance of gopher tortoises and the threats they face to curious passersby. Sometimes things come full circle when you least suspect it.

A Day to Remember

Late on Saturday afternoon, Fernandina Beach Mayor Bradley Bean stepped onto the festival’s performance stage, which had hosted a full day of live music. He grinned as he proclaimed November 2024 “Right Whale Month” — an annual festival tradition.

The energy across the beach was that the right whale is a species everyone should care about. That’s the right attitude, and one that must endure if the species is to survive. Calving season for the right whale begins in November, and coastal Florida is prime mother-calf spotting territory. Many people will try hard to catch a glimpse of a calf in its first weeks in the water.

What they won’t see is the dangerous path that comes after. Right whales travel north up the eastern seaboard as far as Canada. Along the way, they face human-caused dangers that threaten the species’ low numbers at all turns. Events like the Right Whale Festival instill a real care for the species. That care, however, must extend past one month, one festival, and be something that stays with us through the rest of the year.