MY OBSESSION WITH WHALES began before I can really remember. Landlocked in Wisconsin, my only oceans were the inland seas of the Great Lakes. But obsessed I was—first with orcas, then sperm whales, and finally right whales. I learned they were named because they were the right whales to hunt: They live near shore, are slow, and float when killed. Unlike humpbacks or sperm whales, right whales have never recovered their pre-whaling numbers. Nature did not make right whales safe for the Anthropocene.

The home waters of North Atlantic right whales are urban; they range the shoreline from Canada to Florida, traversing some of the busiest shipping lanes in North America. Their slowness makes them vulnerable to vessel strikes. Modern ships are massive, and much faster than whales, making strikes almost always lethal. Likewise, their preference for shallow waters makes them more exposed to entanglements. Heavy ropes and plastic lines wrap around flukes and mouths, carving deep wounds, weighing whales down—slowly starving or drowning them.

When I was growing up, right whales’ slow extinction felt like something I could grasp in a world where climate catastrophe felt too vast to hold. Four hundred seventy-two individuals left? My high school graduating class had more students. Watching the whales’ numbers fall became a kind of megafauna clock marking the sins of the moment. What about the Endangered Species Act? The Marine Mammal Protection Act? We had the data—and none of the political will, not even to enforce laws already on the books, laws with loopholes wide enough for a cargo ship to sail through.

Historically, right whales calved every three to four years. Now, under the stress of warming waters and vessel traffic, mothers may give birth only every seven to ten years, making recovery ever more tenuous.

You can’t fault these whale mothers for responding to the moment, spacing their babies further apart. Like us.

We know there are an estimated 380 individuals this season, thanks to a group of dedicated researchers. Fellow obsessors. They keep tabs on this small population—where every loss is mourned and each birth celebrated, tremulous relief when individuals are noted as healthy and inevitable sorrow when they are not. It takes a unique kind of love to keep showing up, facing an uncertain outcome as a climate-changed Atlantic threatens the whales’ return.

We once recorded the deaths of these whales as capital. Now we record their precarious lives—the babies they have, the breaths they take, the excretions they make—an intimate tally marking the distance between extinct and not yet extinct. In an age defined by loss, the act of counting becomes resistance. As the Anthropocene tide barrels in, whispering give up, researchers dig in and say not yet. Steadfast as the right whales’ migration, hopeful as a Wisconsin kid yearning for the sea.

This is recordkeeping as sacrament.