Though they may be seen close to shore where deep water approaches the coast, Baird's Beaked Whales' primary habitat is on or near the continental slope and near oceanic seamounts (Kasuya 2002) in temperate oceanic waters 1,000 to 3,000 m deep. Off the Pacific coast of Japan, these whales have been recorded in water temperatures ranging between 23°C and 29°C, with a southern limit at the 15°C isotherm at a depth of 100 m.

Baird's Beaked Whales feed mainly on deepwater and bottom-dwelling gadiform fishes and cephalopods  (Balcomb 1989, Kasuya 2002), as well as some pelagic fishes, such as mackerel, sardines, and saury. The diet off the Pacific coast of Japan consists of 82% fish and 18% cephalopods, while in the southern Sea of Okhotsk the proportions are 13% and 87%, respectively (Walker et al. 2002).

Baird's Beaked Whales are found in deep oceanic cold-temperate waters of the North Pacific Ocean and the adjacent Okhotsk and Bering Seas. Their range extends to the southern Gulf of California, Mexico, in the east and central Honshu, Japan, in the west. They also occur in the vicinity of drift ice in the northern Sea of Okhotsk. Off the Pacific coast of Japan, they migrate into waters over the continental slope from May to October, but where they go in winter is not known. They also occur in the northern Sea of Japan south to the Korean Peninsula. Their distributional limits in oceanic waters of the mid-Pacific are also not well known (Balcomb 1989, Kasuya 2002).

To date, the question of whether the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has the competence to classify or set catch limits for this species has not been formally resolved, even though Baird’s Beaked Whale is included in the IWC definition of "bottlenose whale". Japan’s withdrawal from the IWC in 2019 made this matter, in effect, moot. It is listed on CITES Appendix I.