Return of the giants: 30 Orcas thrill Northumberland coast after 50-year absence
Orca sightings off England’s North Sea coast are going from rare to remarkable. For decades the “killer whales” were barely seen here. Researchers reported five verified sightings off Northumberland in 2025. This year the numbers jumped fast. Fishermen spotted a pod of up to 10 in April, and last Saturday tourists on a Farne Islands boat tour counted around 30 orcas swimming nearby.
The Saturday encounter is believed to be one of the largest pods ever recorded off this coast. It happened during a Billy Shiel boat tour around the Farne Islands. Crew member Jake Tiffin, 19, first mistook the group for dolphins. “As we got closer we realized they were orcas, which was insane,” he told SWNS. What started as two or three animals quickly turned into 20 to 30. “They just kept coming up, it was amazing.”
Tiffin climbed onto the wheelhouse to film as massive bulls weighing around six tons surfaced around the boat. Just as he was about to stop recording, he heard one orca surface to breathe. He captured it breaching — launching airborne before crashing back into the sea off Seahouses, about 60 miles south of Edinburgh.
The sightings are surprising locals who’ve never seen orcas here before. “We went out and spoke to boatmen in all the ports along the North East and nobody could actually remember seeing them in the past,” said Martin Kitching, coordinator of The North East Cetacean Project, in an interview with the BBC. “Now, all of a sudden, sightings—in Northumberland at least—are definitely up.”
“This is extremely rare,” Tiffin said. “Before last year they weren’t sighted for 40 to 50 years.” Scientists are still studying why the pods are returning now. For tourists and fishermen, it’s a chance to witness a species that’s been absent from these waters for generations.
