The gender is not clear, but we do know the baby was born about 1pm somewhere off the coast of northern NSW, weighing a healthy 1.5 tonnes or so.

In what is thought to be a world first, a wildlife photographer has captured the birth of a humpback whale using a drone.

Alexander Forrest, a drone operator who works with ORRCA – the Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia – was watching the whale migration from above on Monday when he noticed a plume of blood rise in the water next to a whale that was alone there.

Moments later the calf appeared, and was soon hoisted to the ocean’s surface to aid it as it takes its first breaths.

“It’s a behaviour called logging, it’s like resting at the surface,” ORRCA’s head of research, Annie Post, said. “Whales don’t breathe unconsciously the way we do; they have to think about it, that is what the mother was helping the calf do.”

ORRCA drone operators were able to stay with the pair until sunset, observing other whales swim in to inspect the pair, and also recording sharks in their vicinity. Whales, even calves, are unlikely to suffer from predation by sharks, though they may have been drawn to the afterbirth, Post said.

Young humpbacks from the population that travels up and down Australia’s east coast each year have a survival rate of 67 to 87 per cent. Typically, the mother will take the newborn to calm, shallow waters to feed before completing their annual migration.

It is estimated that this year about 50,000 humpbacks will make the long swim from their southern feeding grounds to breeding grounds in the north, up from about 7000 in 2004, and near extinction in the 1960s.

“This is just evidence of that fantastic increase from the whaling days,” Post said.

“The more whales that are now passing along our coastline, and the more people that are out enjoying them, the more likely we are to see more of what happens in their day-to-day lives.”

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Nick O'Malley is National Environment and Climate Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is also a senior writer and a former US correspondent.Connect via email.