Dr. Ken Balcomb, founder of the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island, will receive the Warren G. Magnuson Puget Sound Legacy Award for his advocacy and research work on behalf of the region’s killer whales.

The award will be presented by People For Puget Sound at its annual New Day for Puget Sound breakfast fundraiser May 8 at the Women’s University Club in Seattle.

The keynote speaker is former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

Balcomb could not be reached for comment Monday.

The Warren G. Magnuson Puget Sound Legacy Award is given in recognition to those working on behalf of the marine life of Puget Sound. Last year’s honorees were activist Eloise Kailin and Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporters Robert McClure and Lisa Stiffler.

Also honored this year: dive community activist Bruce Higgins and fisheries biologist Sam Wright.

Balcomb has devoted his career to the health of orcas and other marine mammals and is a pioneer in orca identification and tracking.

Balcomb started the Orca Survey in 1976, identifying and documenting the populations of J, K and L pods, which frequent the San Juans and Puget Sound. He has been an invited specialist on the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission.

He is an accomplished wildlife photographer and authored or co-authored several books related to whales, including “The Whales of Hawaii,” “Killer Whales: The Natural History and Genealogy of Orcinus Orca in British Columbia and Washington State,” “The World’s Whales: The Complete Illustrated Guide,” “Marine Birds and Mammals of Puget Sound,” and “Killer Whales in Greater Puget Sound.”

Balcomb has long suspected that pollution in Puget Sound, declines in salmon population and competing interests — such as sonar from Navy vessels — have posed the biggest threats to the region’s killer whales. The whales’ population has seesawed in recent years in the mid- to high 80s, after a loss of 20 whales between 1995 and 2001.

“An oil spill is something this population could not recover from,” he said.

On its Web site, the center says the whales’ population decline “is coincident with the deployment of (Destroyer Squadron) 9 to Everett in 1995. The destroyer squadron’s exercise area is nominally off the Olympic Peninsula but has included Strait of Juan de Fuca and Haro Strait.”