And while she has not joined the group Tuesday, those monitoring her were pleased with her progress.

"She seems to be doing well. So far, so good," Deborah Phelan of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans said Tuesday.

The 2-year-old whale, dubbed A-73 for her birth order in her family group, spent much of Monday resting, Phelan said.

She visited a favorite killer whale "rubbing beach" on Monday evening with a group of about a half dozen members of A-clan, said Lance Barrett-Lennard, a Vancouver Aquarium whale expert who is monitoring her.

Killer whales swim close to shore here on the east side of Vancouver Island and massage their bellies on the smooth stones of the beach. It's the only place in the world where whales are known to exhibit this behavior.

Phelan said there are no major concerns about the whale's behavior. The orca has weeks of summer ahead here as orcas gather to feed along what Barrett-Lennard calls the "salmon highway."

While the hope is that she will join one of several groups of the A-clan whales who use her dialect, she could also live out her life as a solitary whale, or tag along behind one pod or another at a distance as a "satellite whale." There are 105 whales in the clan, one of three orca "language groups" in these waters.

A-73 did not appear to be bonding with any particular female, said Graeme Ellis of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Whale experts say that would be an ideal alliance for the little whale, who missed months of education when she wandered south last year after her mother's death.

She was captured near Seattle on June 13 when her health worsened and her increasingly chummy behavior around boats raised safety concerns. She was pronounced in perfect health after treatment by U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service scientists and a group of private caretakers. Last Saturday, she was transported about 350 miles by high-speed catamaran ferry to Hanson Island near here.

A group of A-clan whales answered her cries Sunday and entered the small bay where she'd been penned for less than 24 hours. She was released and swam out into the waters off Vancouver Island's northeast coast, not joining the other whales but staying within vocal range.

Barrett-Lennard and Ellis tracked her Monday in a motorboat, using the last of three transmitters attached with suction cups before her release.

Ellis and Barrett-Lennard eventually pulled their vessel back to chat with a reporter and others aboard a commercial whale-watching boat. They moved away because A-73 had fallen behind her group and seemed drawn to their engine noise - a habit she picked up in her solitary travels.

When all her transmitters have fallen off, Canada has a monitoring network of government staff, area residents and other volunteers along the hundreds of miles of coastline on both sides of Vancouver Island and all along the Inside Passage that separates the island from the mainland.

Killer whales, actually a kind of dolphin, are found in all the world's oceans. The inland resident populations of British Columbia and Washington state feed mostly on salmon, while transient coastal populations eat marine mammals.

The resident groups are struggling now with dwindling salmon runs, increasing human encroachment and pollution.

For More Information:

www.orca-live.net
www.vanaqua.org
www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca
www.nwr.noaa.gov