They drink about 50 gallons each day. A. Mating and calving both occur mainly in the lagoons of Baja California, Mexico. The shallow, warm, sheltered lagoons are ideal nurseries. However, calving and mating are sometimes seen during the migration, too. Gray whales aren't very friendly during courtship and mating.
Mothers are very protective of their calves.
The gray whale was removed from the endangered species list in 1994. A small number of gray whales are still legally hunted. Grays were hunted to the edge of extinction in the 1850s after the discovery of the calving lagoons, and again in the early 1900s with the introduction of floating whaling factories. Since that time, the eastern North Pacific gray whale population has made a remarkable recovery. In 1999 the National Marine Laboratory reported 26,600 gray whales.