The Nature of Winter

by Jim Crumley

  A wise man, a grizzly bear guide on Kodiak Island, Alaska, called Scott Shelton, once told me: “The only way to get to know a creature is to live with it.” We were speaking in his cabin on a tiny island in the middle of a lake on Kodiak where I had found moulted bald eagle feathers yards from his doorstep, and the subject under discussion was living with bears, wolves and eagles. He was experienced and adept at sharing the landscape with all of these. He was the one who convinced me by his own example that we learn about and understand other creatures only by living with them, not by taking the word of the loud mouths and small minds of those vested interests which would shout us down and have us believe that Scotland cannot accommodate those creatures their predecessors cleared from the land. Scotland can. The land can and the people can. We learn by living with them. We make adjustments and so do they . . . In the same way, the two eagle tribes learned to live with each other many, many thousands of years ago.

  All of which brings me back to what might account for this new prospering of the golden eagle population down the spine of the country. It occurs to me that it has coincided with a marked increase in the appearance of wandering young sea eagles in the breeding territories of those heartland golden eagles. At first, this happened mostly in winter, because golden eagles relax their territorial disciplines outwith the long haul of their nesting season, and a degree of tolerance of other eagles is a symptom of that. My own experience has been that now it happens at any time of the year, and that can only be explained by one of two possibilities. The first is that, as yet, these wandering sea eagles are just that, and because they are too young to harbour territorial ambitions of their own, the resident golden eagles don’t see them as a threat. The other is that the sea eagles are providing something that the golden eagles can benefit from, and that is their sheer size and consequent power. They can kill larger prey, and like most top predators, they can kill beyond their needs and fill the mouths of others. The presence of a sea eagle on a golden eagle territory is also the presence of an extra hunter. It is also a comparatively cumbersome and conspicuous bird, so that when it does kill, the golden eagle, with its extraordinary speed and flight powers, is in a position to benefit from it immediately. A sea eagle can muscle a golden off a kill on the ground, but is no match for a pair of golden eagles.

  There is also the consideration that sea eagles tend to nest at lower altitudes than golden eagles, so when they do move into those heartland mountains to nest – as they will, and have done historically – the nesting golden eagles have little to worry about. Rather, there is every indication that the golden eagles will do very well out of the relationship. They learn from each other by living in each other’s company, you see, and they make adjustments.

  Chapter Ten

  Whale Watch (2): The Humpback’s Back

  A humpback whale turned up in the Firth of Forth in January 2017. The news of its arrival seared through me with a high-voltage shudder of dread.

  Now why would a humpback whale of all creatures induce such a drastic and irrational reaction in a nature writer of all creatures? Especially when you consider that the humpback in particular among the great whales has endeared itself to generation after generation of writers. Henry Melville, whose Moby Dick is the most celebrated of humpbacks, and arguably the most celebrated of whales, wrote of it thus:

  He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of all whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any other of them.

  Roger Payne, an American whale biologist who is also the author of my favourite whale book – Among Whales (Scribner, 1998) – wrote:

  . . . what captivates me most about them is their songs. During their breeding season, humpback whales produce long, complex sequences of sounds that can be heard by listening through a hydrophone . . . These songs are much longer than bird songs and can last up to thirty minutes, though fifteen is nearer the norm. They are divided into repeating phrases called themes. When the phrase is heard to change (usually after a few minutes), it heralds the start of a new theme. Songs contain from two to nine themes and are strung together without pauses so a long singing session is an exuberant river of sound that can flow on for twenty-four hours or longer.

  And I agree with both of those writers.

  And I have seen a humpback at its most gamesome and light-hearted, making enough gay foam and white water to last me a lifetime. And I have looked directly into the four-inch-wide eyeball of a humpback whale as I leaned over the gunwale of a small whale-watching boat in Glacier Bay, Alaska, and the whale slid past less than six feet below me and a yard out from the boat, and I felt as if everything I had done in my life and especially every moment of my nature-writing endeavours had been as a kind of preparation for that moment, that moment when a humpback whale looked me in the eye, and it felt as if I had been sought out, chosen, the subject of a predestined moment. I had never known anything remotely like it before. I have never known anything remotely like it since.

  And I have heard a humpback sing.

  The boat engine was cut. The babble of our voices, edgy with adrenalin from an hour of watching the gamesomeness, the gay-foam-and-white-water-making, was suddenly hushed. Sea sounds rushed in to the lull – wave slap, kittiwake cry, a flag that flapped in an easy breeze. For we were suddenly in among the whales, and a hydrophone was lowered over the side and connected to the boat’s tannoy. We waited for the whales to sing. Breathe out, for heaven’s sake. I breathed out. I thought it might sound a little like jazz, something Ellingtonian with Harry Carney on baritone sax, Cootie Williams on trumpet. Or, Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax playing Solitude unaccompanied has always seemed to me as a voice of nature, the breath of a haunted creature in the depths of night, or now that I thought of it, perhaps in the depths of oceanic gloom.

  Or Sibelius: if anyone could write a score for humpback whale and symphony orchestra, he could.

  Then it began.

  Then my every preconceived reference point dissolved.

  It began like wolves, then slid from high to a mid-register note, but then it stopped abruptly, which is not like wolves. Then a higher note, like a squeak (a second voice?), also cut off abruptly, a percussive interjection. Then a bass sound so low it warbled uncertainly among the limits of discernible notes. Then it began to rise as a second and third voice overlaid it, and suddenly Harry Carney was a valid choice and I felt elated, vindicated. Then silence, water sounds.

  Then the repeats, a new version of what had gone before, the song, the singing. I am a part-time musician but I have a full-time musician’s ear, which I bent to what was going on. I heard rhythm, profoundly slow, but a constant pulse. Roger Payne said that whales give the ocean its voice.

  THE OCEAN’S VOICE

  Who taught you, Singer?

  Who first caught your eye

  and thought you fit to try out

  a world-travelling song,

  knowing your ways, bestowing

  the pacific demeanour to navigate

  between Alaska and Scotland?

  And if I give you my

  my most respectful silence,

  my musician’s ear and

  my writer’s best endeavour,

  can you reach me, teach me

  themes and variations,

  cadences and nuances,

  so that if I travel the earth

  as you travel the girth of the ocean – singing,

  I could be your tradition-bearer,

  marry my voice to your song

  and sing its worldly wisdom,

  rhymes and all, to landlocked tribes

  far from the ocean’s thrall?

  So why, when a humpback whale turned up and lingered for two months in the Forth estuary, and one of the best vantage points to watch it was but an hour’s drive from my house . . . why would I respond with anything less than a euphoric flourish? No sooner have I posed the question than it occurs to me that I may have trouble answering it, for if truth be told my first reaction
had rather surprised me too. In pursuit of an explanation then, let me first summon to my cause one William Topaz McGonagall, poet and tragedian, and the ghost of an old winter in my home town:

  ‘Twas in the month of December, and in the year 1883,

  That a monster whale came to Dundee,

  Resolved for a few days to sport and play,

  And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay.

  The events of that winter of 1883–84 in the Tay estuary off Dundee have long since been immortalised in McGonagall’s poem, The Famous Tay Whale, which immediately became (and which remains) one of his greatest hits. He was an eccentric, perambulating, Victorian historic monument of Dundee streets. The “monster whale” was there at all because that autumn and early winter the North Sea had seethed with vast shoals of herring, and it lingered in the Tay because they were easier to catch in the shallower waters of the estuary than out at sea. Why the whale was in the North Sea at all was a mystery (as in 1883, so in 2017). Humpbacks prefer the oceanic scope of the Atlantic and the Pacific for their restless and more or less endless migrations up and down and across the globe. Our species names and pluralises and divides up the world’s oceans to assist our own navigation and map-making, to give our land-masses geographical contexts. But humpbacks merely live in a single oceanic world. Visits to the comparative narrows of the North Sea are very rare events. The 1883 visit had consequences which, mercifully, did not – and could not – afflict the Forth’s visitor in 2017. But back then there were the direst of consequences for the whale, and some time later, there were consequences for me. There are still consequences for me.

  Dundee is where I was born and where I grew up, a city to which I still make many migrations every year. I love it dearly and it is still the only place I ever learned to think of as home. But it has a stain on its character, one which troubles a nature writer perhaps more than most of its natives. For around 170 years, beginning in 1752, Dundee was a whaling port. Eventually, in the late 19th century, it became the biggest in Britain. By that time, the whaling industry was diminishing all across Britain, but Dundee was also the global epicentre of the jute industry, and whale oil was in great demand there because it was perfect for softening the jute fibres. In the winter of 1883 then, the biggest whaling fleet in Britain was in its home port because the whaling grounds were out of reach in the winter. So when a humpback whale turned up, there were 800 whalers in Dundee with nothing to do.

  The whale attracted huge crowds, made headlines. Local newspapers devoured its every move. The Edinburgh and Glasgow papers were hooked. The Times sent a man up from London. Whenever it appeared, whenever it put on a show, you could hear the cheers of the crowd at Broughty Ferry on the Dundee side of the river from two miles away, where a much smaller crowd would gather at Tayport on the Fife side. But the whalers wanted nothing to do with it. Then, after two weeks, during which the crowds – and the papers – had more or less relentlessly goaded the whalers to do something, the whale vanished. The crowds dwindled over the next few days, then they stopped coming altogether, and instead they set about polishing the whale’s legend. For ten days, the firth was a blank page. If only it had stayed away, retraced its journey back up the North Sea into Norwegian waters then the great oceanic liberation of the Atlantic, it might have lived for another 150 years, swum a million miles, sired a new dynasty of humpbacks, added eight or nine tons to its weight, reaching around thirty-five tons. McGonagall would have been short of a poem and I would have been spared an uneasy inheritance. But after ten days, the whale came back.

  The crowds redoubled, of course. They bayed for the thrill of the chase, and for two more weeks the whale swam and danced and sang. Still the whalers wanted none of it. They were enjoying not being at sea, a season of rest from the colossal labours of their trade. The shipowners were less than enthusiastic about rounding up crews to pursue a single whale in front of a crowd of thousands, a circumstance that reduced their dangerous deep sea trade to a game in the domestic shallow waters of the Tay. Almost certainly, they judged the humpback not worth the effort commercially. Its layer of fat is thin and yields very little of the precious oil, and it was well-known to whalers that the carcase of a harpooned humpback usually sinks. By comparison, the Greenland right whale’s fat layer is thick and valuable, and it floats in death, hence right whale – the “right” whale to catch. So there was no commercial gain for the whalers. Even by the scant ethical standards of the day, there was no reason for that whale to die. The only people who wanted it were the crowds. And when the whalers did eventually give in, it was to indulge in nothing more than a blood sport, as blatant as a bullfight.

  The hunt was farcical. It was hampered by all kinds of clowns in their boats who wanted a ringside seat. The whalers were probably a little ring-rusty, and their initial efforts were worse than useless. What followed was long, slow, inept, and no whale ever took longer to die than that one. Having been harpooned several times, it towed four boats far out towards the Bell Rock Lighthouse. The lines eventually snapped, the whale escaped, only to be found days later floating dead on the sea by fishing boats from Gourdon up near Stonehaven. They got ropes on it and towed it ashore, where the carcase was auctioned and eventually bought by a Dundee oil merchant. At which point, the humiliation of its life after death began.

  To cut a very long story short, the whale was towed back to Dundee and its innards, including its skeleton, were removed. A kind of wooden skeleton and a great deal of stuffing restored it to something like a whale shape, and it was put on display with its mouth propped open (and in that open mouth were set a table and chair at which you could pose for a photograph, at a price). It then went on a tour of Britain by train, attracting massive audiences. Finally, the skeleton was donated to Dundee museum, where it is still on display to this day.

  Nothing in nature, including being twenty paces from an adult grizzly bear in Alaska and being introduced to a captive wolf pack inside their enclosure in Devon, or even being temporarily trapped in a Cairngorms pinewood while rutting stags pounded and roared all around me . . . none of that has induced any semblance of fear in me. I am at my most tranquil in nature’s company, and always have been. Except for my childhood encounters with the skeleton of the Tay Whale in the local museum. It was displayed by suspending it from the roof, and it is, of course, colossal. It was forty feet long when it was caught, and its tail measured seventeen feet and four inches across. When I wrote the whole story in a book called The Winter Whale (Birlinn, 2008), I remember that I lingered over that last statistic and considered the room in which I was writing at the time. I measured it, and it was a little over sixteen feet by thirteen. So the tail would not have fitted in the room.

  The effect on my childhood self was that it haunted my dreams for a long time. I can’t remember how long now, but it recurred again and again, one more grim consequence that the crowds and the whalers of my old home town never took into consideration in that winter of 1883–84 when the boats finally sailed and sealed the fate of the famous Tay Whale.

  So . . . a humpback whale turned up in the shallow waters of the Firth of Forth in January 2017, and when the newspaper photographers and the TV crews turned up, not to mention squads of people with boats and cameras and phones and the internet at their disposal, I recoiled a bit and stayed away. There are no whaling fleets nearer the Firth of Forth than Norway, and in any case, the Norwegians only hunt minke whales. Times have changed. There were no crowds lining the shores; there were a few people with cameras and big lenses, binoculars and telescopes. I suppose the indifference is television’s fault – what you might call Blue Planet Syndrome, where the perfection of the filmed sequences exceeds a thousandfold the expectations of what you or I might see walking the Fife Coast Path between Burntisland and Kinghorn on a squally, sleety day of an east coast winter.

  But as it happens, I now have a unique souvenir of that particular humpback, thanks to my friend Leo Du Feu, a wildlife and landscape painter with wh
om I have shared the occasional book festival platform. Leo lives at Burntisland, so he did spend quite a few squally, sleety days walking and sitting still along that coast, making fast sketches (a talent of which I am more than a little envious) when the whale showed, and subsequently working them up into two oil paintings, one of which is facing me now on the wall of the room where I write. The image is a tranquil one, the whale breaking the surface in a dark curve that just reveals the “hump” and the small, pointed curve of the dorsal fin. The water is calm and bright (the viewpoint is south-facing), the whale at ease, which to my mind reflects the fact it was untormented by humanity throughout its stay. It left when it was ready to go, it suffered no wounds, it left no slick of blood in its wake, it towed no whaling boats out to sea; and given a fair wind it will live for another 150 years, and it will swim another million miles. I asked Leo if I could buy the painting because to me it represents a kind of reassurance. It is okay now to be a whale in the east coast waters of Scotland. Welcome. Thanks for coming and cheering our winter. We shoot only photographs. We have come a long way.

  As for the Tay Whale skeleton, it has become the centrepiece of a new exhibition in The McManus (as Dundee’s museum and art gallery is now known, named for the former Lord Provost Maurice McManus), although somehow the more sophisticated museum techniques of the 21st century have achieved a less threatening exhibit. In the autumn of 2017, the museum celebrated its 150th anniversary, an event it previewed with a specially commissioned wrap-round representation of the whale skeleton on the side of a double-decker bus. A newspaper photograph of the launch showed the bus and a group of boisterous, cheering and generally happy-looking Dundee schoolchildren, just about the age I was when the whale was giving me nightmares. That too is a kind of reassurance. If any of these children suffers in the way that I did at their age, and if one day they read this, my message to them is to hang in there, it will pass, and one day you may look a humpback in the eye and hear it sing.