The Breath of a Whale by Leigh Calvez

The Breath of a Whale by Leigh Calvez

Author:Leigh Calvez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2019-02-25T16:00:00+00:00


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It was midwinter in Puget Sound when a small black dorsal fin broke the surface. The event went unnoticed. Surrounded by unfamiliar waters, a young orca continued to swim. She headed steadily south, toward Kingston and Edmonds, where long trains rumble along the rocky coast. She passed the evergreen-lined shores of Bainbridge Island and the tall skyscrapers of Seattle, mimicking the jagged Cascade peaks, until she found the northeast tip of Vashon Island, across from West Seattle, with Mount Rainier looming in the southern sky. She had been traveling for weeks or for months, lost and alone. Here, in the waters near my home in Puget Sound, the young orca stopped, poked her head above the surface, and looked around.

From the wheelhouse of a Washington State ferry, the quartermaster scanned the calm waters between the Fauntleroy ferry dock and Vashon Island, as he had done thousands of times before. A puff of mist caught his attention, followed by a small dark body in the water. It was a little whale.

As the ferry moved closer, he could see the telltale black-and-white markings of the orca, but when he scanned the water for others, he found none. He had seen pods of orcas before, but never a baby alone. To report this unusual sighting, the quartermaster called his friend Mark Sears, a biologist who spends his free time looking for marine mammals in southern Puget Sound.

“I didn’t believe it at first. I thought it might be Foster, the lone false killer whale that sometimes hangs out down here,” Mark told me, referencing a whale of another species.

But he knew the quartermaster to be a reliable observer, so on January 14, 2002, he boarded his boat at the marina near the West Seattle ferry dock and set off to confirm this mysterious orca sighting. At 2:30 p.m., he called the NMFS and reported a lone orca calf between West Seattle and Vashon Island. Springer had been found.

Now that a lone orca had been found, the first mystery to solve was who was she and where was she from? How did she end up nuzzling up to a Washington State ferry off Vashon Island? Knowing the strength of the bonds between members of an orca family made the whale’s solitary predicament all the more puzzling.

The first task to help answer these questions was to take a photo ID. Every orca has a unique white swirling pattern, known as the “saddle patch,” on its back, just behind the dorsal fin. The dorsal fin itself is also different on every whale, showing an individual pattern of nicks and cuts along the trailing edge of each fin. By taking a picture of the left side of the whale, biologists studying whales can tell individuals apart.

These dorsal fin photos are kept in a catalog of family trees. Also kept in the catalog is a letter-and-number designation that each whale receives, like L62 or CA189, which immediately identifies the pod the whales belong to and its place in that pod.



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