I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t seen the photograph. It is a picture of an adult from Puget Sound’s southern resident Orca pod swimming peacefully and proudly wearing a dead salmon draped across its forehead.

I know what you’re thinking. Do orcas even have a forehead? I’ve always understood the word “forehead” to mean that part of a face located above the eyebrows and below the hairline. To the best of my knowledge, orcas have neither, and so probably cannot be said to have a forehead. So let’s just say the orca was balancing the salmon on what would have been its forehead if it had eyebrows and hairlines.

That orca isn’t the only one that’s been spotted in the Sound sporting a dead salmon hat. This practice or trend or stunt is thought to have started with a single female orca in K-Pod in the 1980s. Within a few months of the first sighting the same phenomenon was spotted in the J-Pod and L-Pod orcas. But then, as quickly as it started, the salmon-hat craze seemed to die out…until October 25, 2024 when photographer Jim Pasola photographed an orca known as J27 Blackberry with a salmon across its forehead.

Blackberry is too young to have been around during the freewheeling, dead-salmon-on-the-head days of the 1980s, and so the obvious question is where did Blackberry learn that trick, and what prompted Blackberry and her predecessors to decide to carry their dinners on their heads in the first place?

Orcas are smart animals, and some experts think the craze may be related to some ingrained genetic fish-head pod memory, or perhaps an attempt at communication, or maybe a way to attract a mate. Other experts suspect it may just be a uniquely orcan way of goofing off. No one knows for sure, and the orcas aren’t realing their secret.

I favor the theory that it’s their way to attract a mate. Who among us hasn’t occasionally placed a food item on our heads as a way to impress a member of the opposite sex? Do you think Daniel Boone wore his famous coonskin cap to keep his ears warm? My 5- and 2 1/2-year-old grandsons both routinely put their food on their heads to attract a little attention around the dinner table and to get a little laugh, and both of them are far smarter than your average orca.

It turns out that wearing salmon hats isn’t the only playful activity orcas have been engaging in. There are cases of orcas breaching with a dead salmon draped over their pectoral fin, giving rise to the popular expression, “A live fish on the pectoral fin is better than a dead fish on the forehead.” In another case, orcas were observed pulling kelp plants underwater and then releasing them so the trapped air would propel the kelp upward to explode out of the water like an underwater volleyball released in a suburban swimming pool.

Whatever the motivation for the re-emergence of the salmon hat craze among local orcas, all killer whale experts agree that it’s probably a very good sign. No predator would be likely to play with its food if that food was scarce. The resurgence of forehead fish transportation suggests the existence of a healthy and well-fed population of local orcas, which is good news since the southern resident orcas are on the endangered species list along with grizzly bears, spotted owls and qualified Cabinet appointees.

In the interest of public safety, I should caution you that while this current orca craze continues, it might not be a good idea to go for a swim in the Sound with a dead salmon draped over your head while wearing a black wetsuit lest you be mistaken for an orca in search of a mate or a meal. I have a friend who learned that lesson the hard way when he went for a hike in the Hoh Rainforest wearing a hat he had fashioned from a pair of shed elk antlers during the elk rutting season. He lived to tell the tale, but it’s not a pretty story and my friend has been unable to eat venison ever since.

Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.