Fin whales are open-ocean animals, the second-largest creatures on Earth, and Maryland is not fin whale country in any settled sense. The state’s ten records since 2000 are best read as a log of rare visitors and strandings, mostly inside Chesapeake Bay.
The shape of the record says as much. Eight of the ten fall in November, and seven sit in Queen Anne’s County on the Bay’s Eastern Shore. When a handful of dates and places account for nearly everything, the records describe a few events, some of which may have generated more than one report, rather than any regular seasonal use. Fin whales do pass along the mid-Atlantic coast, and every so often one strays up the Bay, where a 60-foot whale is impossible to miss and certain to be reported.
NatureServe ranks the species Critically Imperiled (S1) in Maryland waters, and the IUCN lists it globally as Vulnerable, a legacy of 20th-century whaling. For a whale this scarce in the state, each record genuinely matters, both as a point on the map of coastal movements and, in stranding cases, as a chance for scientists to learn from the animal directly.
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