Almost 300 harbor porpoises are living in San Francisco Bay year-round, and Tiburon residents can spot them from the waterfront and the Angel Island ferry route.
The small cetaceans vanished from the Bay in the early 1940s, driven out by submarine nets strung during World War II and a rise in industrial pollution, according to a Marin Magazine report published Monday, July 27. Their return marks one of the region's clearest signs that decades of water-quality work under the Clean Air and Water Acts of the 1960s and '70s paid off.
They're back.
Maggie McDonogh, a fourth-generation ferry captain and co-owner of the Angel Island Tiburon Ferry, told Marin Magazine the comeback is personal. "Growing up, my father would tell me about all the porpoise he would see. He was born on Main Street in Tiburon and spent his life navigating the bay and delta," McDonogh said. She added that she didn't see them herself until approximately 20 years ago.
Bill Keener, a porpoise researcher at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, has been studying the Bay's harbor porpoises since 2008. Keener told the magazine the animals keep to a loose schedule based on tides, with their presence also depending on the mix of currents and prey fish. Photographs credited to Keener show mother-and-calf pairs near the Golden Gate Bridge and Cavallo Point, waters along the approach to the Tiburon waterfront.
Harbor porpoises are dark gray with a white belly, five to six feet long, and have a short, round face rather than a bottlenose. Their dorsal fin, seen from a distance, looks like a Hershey's Kiss, according to the magazine's description.
How to spot them
The Angel Island Tiburon Ferry departs from downtown Tiburon. Through August 2026, weekday departures leave at 10 a.m., 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.; weekends run the same schedule plus 2 p.m., 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. departures. The crossing takes about 15 minutes. The ferry company also offers bookable wildlife tours at angelislandferry.com.
No specific Tiburon-area hotspots have been publicly confirmed by researchers, but the porpoises can be seen "all over the Bay," according to the Marin Magazine report.
