Journey of the Pink Dolphins

by Sy Montgomery

  I asked about her study technique: What times of day were best to see them at Marchantaria? How did she recognize individuals? How did she follow them?

  “At Marchantaria,” she said, “I arrived at six A.M. and left at six P.M. each day, trying to identify and recognize the individuals. To recognize individuals is very important, very important,” she said. “You cannot study them without.”

  So how, I asked, did she finally succeed?

  “I tried for a long time, but I couldn’t. It was too demanding. This will not work.”

  Oh.

  Most of her earlier work had been population surveys. Most of her behavioral work had not yet been published. And those data, she explained in lilting English stung with Brazilian Portuguese, had been collected at a different study site, a flooded forest reserve a thousand miles away called Mamirauá. There she had freeze-branded fifty-six dolphins, and later outfitted a dozen others with radio transmitters, allowing her to track them. At Marchantaria, though, not even Vera could identify a single individual.

  But we could at least learn from her what didn’t work and why. As we watched the dolphins together, she could explain to us what the dolphins were doing, to give meaning to what we saw. She could show us the techniques that perhaps did not work for her at Marchantaria but might work for us at another site. Or so I thought until she had phoned us at our hotel, as Dianne and I were dressing for the opera, to report that she had contracted viral conjunctivitis and couldn’t come.

  An epidemic of the contagious eye disease was sweeping INPA, she reported. In fact, when we’d visited Vera at work, several people were out sick. Now people couldn’t get to work because they couldn’t see to drive; and even if they could get there, it was impossible to work, because with conjunctivitis, you are constantly rubbing your eyes.

  My eyes began to itch.

  Vera would send her field assistant, Nildon Athaide, to be our guide. “He knows everything,” she assured us over the phone. Unfortunately, he speaks no English, I pointed out with dismay; and it was now too late to find a translator. “There will be no problem,” Vera said. “But you must be sure to do one thing: You must be sure to buy a frozen chicken. Nildon very much likes chicken. Don’t forget the frozen chicken! ”

  So that is how I came to be babbling incomprehensibly to a flustered clerk at the market that morning, desperate to purchase a food item that I, as a vegetarian, would not eat, and that Dianne, who eats anything, would cheerfully go without. It seemed to me a chicken was the last thing in the world to bring on a trip where the house would be literally surrounded by edible fish. But that was precisely why, I supposed, Nildon wanted it: he probably ate fish all the time.

  In fact, Nildon was so eager for his chicken that when I did not return to the truck with it, he came inside the supermercado to see what had detained me. “Sua frango! ” (“Your chicken!”) I exclaimed in distress. He proceeded to a freezer and carefully examined every chicken in turn before making his selection. Next the chicken had to be weighed. But the supermarket had only an electronic scale, and the power was out. We implored the clerk to estimate the bird’s weight, but she was adamant: If the chicken couldn’t be weighed, it couldn’t be priced. If it couldn’t be priced, it couldn’t be sold. And besides, the cash register was electronic, too.

  Leaving the priceless chicken behind, we trolled the streets in our INPA truck, searching for a supermercado with signs of electricity. At last we found a market with the lights on, secured the frozen fowl, and within five minutes arrived at Pôrto da Ceasa and the open sixteen-foot aluminum motorboat that would take us to the Meeting of the Waters and to the dolphins.

  The Amazon was full of trash. As we motored away from the dock, we viewed the muddy water around us with growing despair. We saw spray cans, cola bottles, oil cans every fifty yards or so. Plastic bags floated like jellyfish; stray barrels bobbed like bloated carcasses. We looked back toward Manaus and its industrial district where towering buildings proclaimed Samsung, Sony, Honda, Shell. An iron factory spewed black from one smokestack, while another glowed orange. Speedboats, reared up like anxious racehorses, whizzed by, so we had to pause to weather their wakes.

  Within five minutes, we came to the Meeting of the Waters. Tourists peered down from a party boat at the two wide, wet brushstrokes of coffee and cream. From the high deck of their big ship, the tourists would have had a dramatic view, farther away from the garbage. The separate waters looked like living creatures traveling together, two monstrous eels or fringed water snakes, flowing side by side for nearly four miles. Atavistically, I wanted to touch the waters, as a child reaches out to touch an animal; but I recoiled at the floating trash. It seemed impossible that dolphins could be living here.

  Just then, two triangular fins split the waters. They sliced precisely between the two halves of the river, at the intersection of the two colors, as if being born.

  “Tucuxis,” Nildon announced over the roar of the fifteen-horsepower motor. In Brazil, these small gray dolphins are still called by the name the Mayanas Indians gave them in the Tupi language. We recognized them as the species scientists call Sotalia fluviatilis —the other Amazon dolphin that shares these waters with the boto. But unlike botos, tucuxis look and act the way we expect of dolphins: with their neat, compact bodies, short, well-defined snouts, and triangular dorsal fins, they launch out of the water, leaping and spinning, leaving arcs of spray as they spurt along the water’s surface. Perhaps fifty yards from our boat, first one leapt, then the other, revealing soft, pinkish bellies; then the two leapt together, almost touching. Dianne and I grabbed each other’s hands. “First the symphony,” she yelled at me over the motor, “then the opera—and now the ballet.”

  Everyone likes the tucuxis, Vera had told us back at INPA. River people tend to be suspicious of the big botos, who approach boats so close and so suddenly. But the tucuxis are not as bold. They perform their joyous leaps at a distance, and they are small and pretty. Only four to five feet long, tucuxis look like miniature marine dolphins, elegant and streamlined, their bottle-snouts split with cheerful smiles.

  Within the whale order, which includes the dolphins, Sotalia is classed in Delphinidae, the same family as the marine dolphins who swim in the seas and perform in oceanaria. In fact, until relatively recently, tucuxis almost certainly were exclusively marine dolphins, for even today they can be found in both fresh and salt water, ranging from southern Brazil to Honduras. Although they share the Amazon with botos, like the black water of the Rio Negro and the white water of the Solimões, the pink dolphins and the gray tucuxis arose from separate origins.

  The Delphinidae, comprising some twenty-six species, are a modern group. The most abundant and varied of the whales, they are compact and athletic, designed for speed-swimming in open waters. Although there are no fossil records of Sotalia, most scientists agree that these dolphins entered the Amazon from the Atlantic, probably no earlier than 5 million years ago.

  But the botos are representatives of a very different whale lineage. Until recently, botos were classed with the other five species of river dolphins in the Platanistidae, the family to which the dolphins we had seen in Bangladesh and India belong; but now many scientists believe that boto and one related species, the La Plata dolphin of southeastern South America, should make up their own family, the Iniidae. Dianne and I had only seen botos in photographs and television documentaries, but even these images conveyed something eerie and ancient, a feeling you don’t get from marine dolphins.

  The boto’s big body, which may stretch to eight feet long and weigh four hundred pounds, is quite different from most dolphins’. It lacks a prominent dorsal fin, possessing only a low ridge along the back. The flippers are huge, almost like wings. But it is the face that is most arresting: compared with the tucuxi’s neat, smooth head, the boto’s bulbous forehead seems misshapen, like a troll’s or a dwarf’s. The eyes are tiny. The face ends in a tube-shaped beak, which often curves to one side as if it has gott
en bent. American scientists David and Melba Caldwell, who studied captive botos in Florida for many years, described them as “beady-eyed, humpbacked, long-snouted, loose-skinned holdovers from the past.” But there is a strange beauty to the boto, a beauty that takes longer to see: it is like the beauty of the very old and the beauty of the fetus. Theirs is the beauty of becoming, of a creature poised on the brink of becoming something else.

  Their lineage probably arose in western seas. Some scientists believe that the ancestors of today’s botos may have entered the Amazon from the Pacific as long as 15 million years ago, when the Amazon still flowed westward into that ocean, before the Andes Mountains were born. The Amazon and the boto grew up together, at the beginning of the world. Back then, the South American plate was still drifting westward on the earth’s mantle, on a collision course with the Nazca plate (which now underlies much of the eastern Pacific). The two plates’ collision pushed up the Andes, and the mountains’ rise cut off the great river from its only outlet to an ocean, creating the splendid isolation that allowed the Amazon to evolve its astounding diversity. The Mississippi, for instance, hosts only 250 species of fish; the Congo, fewer than 1,000; but the Amazon harbors more than 2,500 species, more than any other river in the world, and most of these species are found nowhere else on earth. For no other place on earth was like this: Until its waters finally managed to excavate the present, eastern course to the Atlantic, the Amazon, for 5 million years, was no longer a river at all, but one giant, flooded forest, the largest lake that has ever existed on the face of the planet. And each year, with the rains, that ancient, brimming lake re-creates itself. Now, just past the Meeting of the Waters, we would see the lake-world remade.

  In less than thirty minutes of travel, all traces of Manaus and its garbage were left behind. Even the feeling of flow, that feeling of a river journey, was now behind us as we turned from the main channel toward a place called Catalão, where we would spend the next few nights. Catalão, it seemed to us, was not a town or even a village; just a stretch of reddish water punctuated by fruit-laden trees standing halfway to their crowns in the water.

  Swollen by rains that had fallen almost daily since December, rivers throughout the Amazon may rise six to ten feet a month until the rains stop in May. Now, in April, in some places the water penetrated up to thirty miles inland from either bank, flooding thousands of miles of forest and village. Beneath our boat, we knew, saplings still grew green leaves under the water; and that night, while we slept, dolphins would swim beneath the floor of our floating house.

  Besides our three-room house, painted gaily with red and green, and INPA’s deserted double-decker laboratory boat, the Harold Sioli, we could see only one other floating house, a few hundred yards upriver, with a television antenna perched atop its aluminum roof. The television must have run off a generator, for there were no power lines. Like ours, this house floated on log pontoons and was tethered to a tree. The house belonged to a family of woodcutters, Nildon explained. We could see little gardens of potted plants growing on the porch of the house, where the people’s chickens pecked at bugs.

  Once Nildon cut the motor, the silence and the noon heat were stupefying. On the kitchen ceiling, an inch-and-a-half-long wasp was building a tubular nest. Tiny ants streamed over the kitchen table, undeterred by the water-filled cutoff Pepsi-Cola bottles in which the table legs stood as if in shoes. Outside, big green dragonflies perched on the purple blooms of water hyacinth beside the dead body of an eighteen-inch baby caiman. Other than insects, little moved. The three resident dogs and their four puppies, having greeted us, now lay on the floor as if in a swoon. Not even time could move in heat like this. So, as Nildon tucked his precious chicken into the little gas-powered refrigerator, we hung up our hammocks and waited for the noontime heat to pass. The water around us did not seem to flow. Instead, it sprawled all around, timeless, dark, shining and warm, full of promise and mystery.

  ———

  Though we were eager to look for botos, the reasons to wait were sensible. Vera had found that, like most animals, botos are more active at dawn and dusk. Baking in the open aluminum boat at noon would be futile. Our limited petrol would better be used in the late afternoon.

  We went out at 2:45. By then, the heat had softened; it had grown no cooler, but more moist. Fat white clouds had gathered overhead, piled so high that the ones on top appeared to be squashing the ones beneath. We wondered when it would rain.

  Shortly after three, the first tucuxis erupted from the water. First one, then another, then two together, about seventy-five yards to our starboard. I had read that they like to travel in groups of two or more; the pink dolphins were said to be more often sighted singly. Nildon cut the motor so we could watch their water ballet: Again and again, their sickle-shaped fins sliced through the water, side by side. Another pair came to join them. Perhaps they were hunting cooperatively for fish, one group herding the prey toward another. Or perhaps they were simply enjoying the rush of water against their skins. A single tucuxi leapt into the air, spinning, then crashed into the water with a splash. Large whales do this to dislodge parasites, I had read; but the tucuxis appeared to be doing it for pure pleasure.

  But where were the pink dolphins?

  “Inia gosta lago ,” said Nildon. (“The Inia like lakes.”) This was why Vera, who had initially begun counting Inia at the Meeting of the Waters, had moved her study to the floodplain lake at Marchantaria, which we would visit tomorrow. Although both species are often found together, the Sotalia prefer deeper waters, Vera had explained, while the Inia prefer the shallower lakes and flooded forests. That is why their backs bear only a low, subtle ridge: “You would be constantly bumping your dorsal fin on sunken branches,” she had explained.

  But this feature also makes the botos far more difficult to spot. They seldom leap like the tucuxis. If they were like the dolphins we had seen in Sundarbans, they would appear to us first as only a motion—distant, subtle, sudden. So we cast our vision wide, like a net, and hoped to catch, in it, the signal of movement.

  Then, at 3:15 I saw it: a low gray fin, a bright pink back, the color of sunset against storm clouds. It belonged in the sky, but was in the water. That pink creature coming out of a river was impossible, my brain said, and although the sighting lasted over a second, it was several long moments before I understood what I had seen. By then, the boto was long gone. I did not even have time to call out, “Look!”

  But Dianne had seen it, too, and of course, so had Nildon, who was smiling broadly in the back of the boat, by the stilled motor.

  We continued to watch the spot where it had appeared, as if the location had produced the dolphin and might offer up another. And indeed, two tucuxis rose out of the spot in tandem just minutes later; they rolled and jumped at the same spot again and again. Perhaps here was some sort of upwelling, I imagined, which attracted fish. Perhaps the tucuxis had been watching the boto, and learned from him where the fish were; perhaps the two of them chased the boto away. I longed to ask Nildon, but did not have the language skill; I longed to ask Vera; but most of all I longed for another glimpse of the boto—his tail, his flippers, his face.

  We counted each sighting: in those afternoon hours, we saw tucuxis fifty-four times. There were perhaps ten of them, Nildon said. “Onde fica boto? ” I asked plaintively. (“Where is the boto?”) “ Nada,” Nildon answered.

  At 4:25, thunder rumbled in the distance. We had forgotten to watch the sky, and now we looked up into an aerial landscape of white light over black clouds over cerulean air. Black and white swallows swirled like breeze, and we could hear the voices of other birds beginning their evening songs. But the sky itself was still, hushed, waiting.

  We watched the sky in the water, as the sunset spilled itself over the wide river. Three tucuxis leapt out of the sunset. And then another low, pink form, a ripple made flesh, rose one hundred yards or so off the bow. We thought we could see the hump of the forehead, and before it dove, we heard
the whoosh of breath. Another boto rose nearby—possibly the same dolphin, possibly a companion. And behind us, another breath, long and slow. We turned to see a wake. Next, to starboard, very close, mistlike spray. “Sometimes you see the breath, but not the boto,” Vera had told us. It had sounded impossible, but now we saw it was true. Another gasp, from farther away. There were at least two of them. They had come to us.

  The thunder came closer, too. A bolt of lightning cracked in the western sky, a stepladder of energy from sky to water, water to air. The lightning reflected the sunset. We had never seen anything like this: lightning a searing, impossible pink.

  By six, the water had turned a molten silver, and the world looked like a photographic negative. Pink lightning throbbed on all sides. Later, I would recall with amazement that we were on a river in an open boat made of aluminum in a lightning storm and were completely unafraid. For we could have imagined no omen more obvious, more miraculous than this. The skies flashed pink, back and forth, like a message, a summons, an agreement, while invisible dolphins surrounded us with the moist promise of their breath.

  Unfathomable Fragments

  Mornings and evenings, we found, were the best times for seeing botos, just as Vera had said. This is true of many animals, who take advantage of the cool of the day, and the transition from dark to light, to forage, to play, or to hunt while their prey is active. But to us, it seemed as if dawn and sunset called them. Like a beautiful woman is drawn to her own reflection, the pink forms rose from the water as if to greet the clouds that glowed pink with the rising and setting of the sun.

  They surfaced all around us. We would hear a breath, a splash, and we would spin around to see patches of rose and dusk skimming the water’s surface. Sometimes it seemed they would pop up through the water like corks; other times it was as if they slowly gathered themselves from the water itself. And then, after just a second at the surface, they would sink from sight. We would stare at the wake, transfixed, as if it were an opening through which we might see the vanished animal, as if somehow the ripples, like one of those Magic Eye images, would suddenly fly into focus and make sense—but of course this never happened. And because we were staring at the wake, we would nearly miss the next sighting, which might be one hundred yards away, or right at the side of our boat—always, it seemed, in the direction opposite from where we had last seen one. The only thing we could tell for sure was the difference between a boto and a tucuxi: if we could tell what it was, it wasn’t a boto.