Gray Whale Mother and Calf or Grey Whale Mother and Calf

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Today's new printable coloring page that I drew is of

a mother gray whale.  

Gray Whale Mother and Calf

Gray Whales are a medium-sized whale.  Females can get up to 49 feet long. That is about 15 meters long.  Females are a bit larger than males.  A large female can weigh up to 60,000 lbs.  That is a mass of 27,215.5 kg.  That is pretty dang big!  Gray Whales (that's the spelling in the USA) are unique in that they tend to feed on the bottom of the ocean.  This primary food off the ocean floor is amphipods.  But they also eat some other ocean seafood such as mollusks, tube worms, and some fish like herring.  

When feeding the Grey Whale will roll onto its side and scrape its open mouth across the bottom of the ocean.  They can find an incredible amount of amphipods in the Bering Sea and in the Antarctic.  Gray Whales feed only in the summer and then live off their fat stores in the mating and breeding season.  So a mother Gray Whale is making rich milk for her nursing calf by accessing her fat stores.  

Mother whales nurse by basically squirting milk into the ocean.  The calf can gulp up the floating globules of milk because the milk does not dissolve in the seawater because the milk is very high in fat.  So again, the milk floats in tasty globules for the whale calf to gulp down. 

The closer birds in the drawing are Frigate Birds.  They have a wingspan of up to 9 feet or just under 3 meters wide.  I have seen these birds in the wild.  They look a lot like Pterosaurs.  But of course, they are not related to Pterosaurs.  

NOTE:  This drawing, in printable form, is found by clicking on the "Animals" button.  Then, if you are accessing this site in February or March of 2025 then you will find this title at the bottom of the list of animal drawings.  Have fun coloring!  Oh, I forgot... since there are Frigate Birds in the drawing I will also post it under the "Birds" button.