A drone hovering off the New South Wales coast recorded a humpback whale giving birth on July 28, footage that scientists believe is only the fourth complete humpback birth ever captured on film and the first recorded from the air. Wildlife photographer Alexander Forrest, 20, noticed a female behaving strangely during the northbound migration, sent his drone over the water, and came back with a moment whale researchers have chased for decades.
A 20-Year-Old Photographer Filmed What Research Vessels Never Could
Forrest was photographing whales from a coastal point in northern New South Wales when he spotted an adult female traveling at unusually slow speed, then rising suddenly toward the surface. He launched his drone, hit record, and captured a vivid red plume spreading through the water before a pale gray calf emerged with a flick of its tail.
The footage shows the calf surfacing for its first breath, then swimming alongside its mother. The Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans, the Australian volunteer group better known as ORRCA, verified the recording and kept members watching the pair for several hours afterward, logging observations through the first hours of the calf’s life.
“It’s a privilege to have witnessed such a remarkable moment, and even more rewarding to know it may contribute to marine mammal science for years to come,” Forrest said.
The timing puts the birth in the middle of one of the planet’s great animal commutes. Roughly 50,000 humpbacks travel close to 10,000 miles (16,000 km) along Australia’s east coast each southern winter, a corridor so busy locals call it the humpback highway.
Four Recorded Births Across a Century of Whale Science
The scarcity is the story. Humans have watched, hunted, and studied humpback whales for well over a century, and in all that time only four complete births have made it onto film anywhere in the world. This one is the first seen from above.
“This is a secret moment of a whale that’s never been seen like this from the drone,” said Vanessa Pirotta, a whale scientist at Macquarie University.
The reason the moment stayed secret for so long is structural. Births happen mid-migration, on the whale’s schedule, in open water. A boat close enough to film the event changes the event, because engine noise and hull pressure alter how whales behave long before a camera finds its frame.
A drone flips that equation. It watches from above, at distance, without announcing itself. The whale that gave birth on July 28 behaved as if nobody was there, and that is precisely why the footage exists.
Drones Keep Opening Doors That Boats Cannot
The New South Wales birth extends a pattern that drone-based marine science has been building for years, one first-ever observation at a time. The tools change, but the mechanism is always the same: the aircraft removes the human presence that used to contaminate the data.
In March, DroneXL covered the first sperm whale birth ever documented on film, recorded off Dominica by two DJI Mavic 3 drones flown by Project CETI researchers. That delivery lasted 34 minutes, and the surrounding whales lifted the newborn onto their backs so it could breathe, behavior no textbook had confirmed before the cameras caught it.
The research side has moved just as fast as the filming side. DroneXL reported on tap-and-go drone tagging back in 2025, and this week researchers at the University of Hawaii announced they deployed 22 suction-cup tags on humpbacks off Maui directly from drones, including on nursing mothers and a calf, without a single boat approach.
The First Hours of a Calf’s Life Are Now a Data Set
What happens right after a birth may matter to science even more than the birth itself. ORRCA’s volunteers tracked the mother and calf for hours, and the group says every observation like this can expand what researchers know about humpback reproduction, maternal behavior, and the earliest stage of a calf’s life.
That stage has almost no scientific record, because nobody could watch it happen without disturbing it. Four filmed births means four data points for a species that numbers in the tens of thousands on this migration route alone.
Each new aerial observation compounds the last one. The Dominica sperm whale footage produced two peer-reviewed studies. The Maui tagging program is generating movement and energy data from whales that never noticed the researchers. The New South Wales birth now joins that record.
DroneXL’s Take
I’ll be direct, this is the kind of story that reminds me why I cover this industry. Whales have been swimming in our oceans for millions of years, and in all of human history we have managed to film four of their births. Four. The first one seen from the air did not come from a research vessel or a film crew. It came from a drone.
We spend most of our time reporting what drones do for us: inspections, deliveries, search and rescue. This is the other side of the ledger. Drones are starting to show us things no human has ever seen, and you cannot protect what you have never understood. Study leads to conservation, and conservation is the whole point.
Eating whales is bad. Taking care of whales is good. Some editorials write themselves.
Sources: CBS News, The New York Times (via DNYUZ)
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Rafael Suárez.
