HOW FAR WILL YOU WALK FOR WHALES?
Whales migrate thousands of miles each year – a huge distance for us as individuals but, together, we can walk the equivalent of a whale migration and raise vital funds to protect whales. Walking is good for our mental and physical well-being too!
Walk for an hour or a day; complete your walk over a week, month or several weeks. Could you cover the equivalent of the Cotswold Way (102 miles) or the South West Coastal Path (630 miles). How about Lands End to John O'Groats - an impressive 837 miles? If you're dreaming of going further afield, a virtual Santiago de Compostela trail would see you clocking up 585 miles.
Kids can walk with their parents, friends, dogs or even record their walk to school each day.
Want to keep your sports team fit and motivated? Or work off extra calories consumed whilst working at home? Walking the equivalent of Route 66 is a whale-sized challenge at an incredible 2,448 miles!
It's easy to create routes, keep track of distances and create teams or clubs by linking your JustGiving page to Strava. If you don't want to set up your own JustGiving page, ask sponsors to donate to our WDC page and leave a message for you there instead.
We’ll add the distance you walk to our Great Migration total and, collectively, we will walk hundreds, if not thousands, of miles!
We’ll help you every step of the way with suggested walking routes and simple ways to raise funds through your sponsored walk. Our top fundraiser will win a fantastic walking-related prize and everyone else will be entered into a draw for the chance to win a prize too!
Walk anytime between now and the end of October.
It doesn't matter where you walk, who you walk with or how far you go.
If you're still at home, you can walk in your garden or on your balcony.
Home-schooling? Get children using geography skills to map read, plan a route and research features or landmarks to photograph en route. Challenge them to put together a catchy playlist or to come up with a theme for your walk.
To register and request your free WDC Great Migration fundraising pack, contact [email protected]
Downloads:
Ideas for walking trails and music playlist
Don't forget to tag us in @whalesorg and send us photos afterwards.
Did you know...
Which whales make the longest migration?
Gray whales and humpback whales regularly make incredible annual journeys of between 4000 and 5095 miles (6400 to 8200km) each way, between their favoured cold water feeding grounds and their warm water breeding grounds. Some humpback whale populations have been found to journey even further than this, swimming between Antarctic waters where they feed, across the Equator to reach their coastal breeding sites in Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica. This is a round-trip of up to 7000 miles (11,300km).
For the time being though, the award for the longest whale migration and the longest migration recorded for any mammal, goes to a grey whale named ‘Vavara’. Scientists tracked Vavara, a female gray whale, as she swam a round-trip of 13,988 miles (22,511km) in 172 days. She migrated between the east coast of Russia to the gray whale breeding grounds in Mexico and back again.
