Paul Spong seized that moment to make it into something worthwhile. In 1975, he convinced Greenpeace director Robert Hunter, fresh off the organization’s successful efforts to reduce nuclear-weapons testing in the open waters of the Pacific Ocean as well as on the tectonically unstable Aleutian island of Amchitka in Alaska, that saving the whales could and should be the environmental warriors’ next great cause, and they decided that direct action would be the path.
Using his credentials as a whale scientist studying sperm whales, Spong obtained the coordinates of Russian whaling fleets operating in the Pacific. Shortly afterward, a Greenpeace team, including Spong, Hunter, and a fiery activist named Paul Watson, sailed out to intercept them, and on June 27, 1975, off the coast of California, they found a fleet of Russian whalers about to harpoon a pod of migrating sperm whales. A small fleet of high-speed orange inflatable boats operated by the Greenpeace crew zoomed up and interposed itself between the whalers and their prey. At one point, one of the Russian whalers fired his harpoon toward Robert Hunter and Paul Watson, but it sailed harmlessly over their heads. Nonetheless, footage of the whole affair was broadcast around the world, and it reached the public consciousness that humans had, for the first time in history, placed their own lives in jeopardy to preserve an oceangoing cetacean.
An international outcry soon followed, and then began to crest in the coming years as more whales were slaughtered and more protests arose; in the meantime, Paul Watson splintered off from Greenpeace two years after the Russian confrontation and formed his own organization, the Sea Shepherd Society, which remains active in confronting whaling operations. The reality that whales were becoming endangered species, and the pressure from the public outcry forced the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to begin rethinking its mission and enforcing real conservation of the world’s vanishing whale populations. Eventually they won: In 1986, the IWC announced a global moratorium on all commercial whaling operations, and what whaling that exists today is conducted only by a handful of rogue nations that refuse to recognize the ban: Japan, Norway, and Iceland.
Even amid all the hippies and rainbows and unicorns, Paul Spong remained serious about the work of collecting data and coming to understand wild killer whales better, and when the flakes had fluttered away by the 1980s, and everyone’s “Save the Whales” stickers had aged and peeled off, he was still there doing the work. By then he was able to recruit volunteers to collect data from a number of watch stations he had situated around Johnstone Strait and some of the adjacent Broughton Archipelago islands. This involved, essentially, camping out at the shoreline shacks, watching and recording the whales, both their surface behavior and, with hydrophones, their underwater communications.
All along, of course, he was hardly doing this work alone. Spong was only the best known of a coterie of scientists from various walks of life who studied orca populations in Northwest waters and who opened our first real window on the lives of these most intelligent cetaceans. Collectively, all these people became the guardians of the Northwest’s killer whales.
• • •
In the summer of 1970, when Paul Spong had moved there with his family, Mike Bigg also showed up in Johnstone Strait to look for killer whales, but he was a little better equipped. He was there for the government, so he showed up with a 40-foot boat and plenty of gear, notably photography equipment. Bigg was a London-born transplant, who had moved to the Pacific coast as young boy and was raised with a fascination for the wildlife there. He obtained a biology degree from UBC by specializing in the study of harbor seals, and in 1970 he had just been appointed chief marine mammal biologist for the British Columbia unit of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO).
Increasingly, the captures of the region’s killer whales by marine-park teams were becoming controversial with the public, and Paul Spong’s widely reported remarks of the year before had added fuel to the fire. Worst of all, no one knew what the actual numbers of orcas in Northwest waters were, information that would have to form the basis of any management policy. The assumption was that there were many thousands of the killer whales out there, so losing a few to captivity wasn’t likely to hurt. The DFO decided it needed to be sure.
So Bigg was ordered out to see if he could gain any kind of count of killer whales in Canadian waters. And he did. He printed out and hung thousands of fliers at boat docks, in coffee shops, and in fishing shops asking people to send or call in any information they had about killer whale sightings. The calls started flooding in. It was the start of his database.
Within a few months, Bigg had hit on the idea of using photographs of the whales, focusing on their dorsal fins and saddle patches, to identify them. He realized that if he could sort out individual whales from each other, an accurate census of the population would be possible. Bigg’s methodology initially met with resistance and skepticism from scientists who were accustomed to more laboratory-intensive models of research that required captivity and who were doubtful that such nonintrusive research could yield much in the way of results. They were, of course, dead wrong.
Within a few years, Bigg was able to ascertain that there were in fact two distinct populations of killer whales in the Northwest, one that primarily resided in the inland waters of northern Vancouver Island in the summer and fall and another that spent the same months largely around the San Juan Islands as far north as Vancouver. More importantly, these whales numbered only in the hundreds, perhaps 300 at most. That one knocked everyone back, and it changed everything.
Eventually, after Bigg’s numbers convinced everyone that the captures had to stop or there would be no more killer whales remaining, the governments of both Canada and the United States put a halt to the predations of the “orca cowboys” and placed their waters off-limits to would-be captors. Then, having accomplished that with finality in 1976, the DFO informed Bigg that his work was no longer needed and that his orca research was being defunded.
Bigg, of course, understood full well that the work was just beginning. So he continued to catalog the Northern Residents and their pods in the ensuing years, even without official funding. He managed to persuade the government in 1982 to set aside Robson Bight, the special spot in Johnstone Strait with the smooth-pebble beach where the Northern Residents love to gather to rub themselves, as an Ecological Preserve, which meant that logging and development would be permanently precluded from the little cove, as would hordes of whale-watching boats.
In 1983, he was first diagnosed with cancer and, after enduring treatments, appeared to return to good health. However, in 1990, Bigg was told he had advanced-stage leukemia, just as he was wrapping up work on his final report on the Canadian killer whales. He read the finalized version in his hospital bed and died the next day, on October 18.
Bigg’s legacy lives on in many ways: The Robson Bight preserve now bears his name, as do the “transient” orcas he first identified (not to mention the J pod whale named Mike, born in 1990). The fact that his photo-ID technique revolutionized not just cetacean research but the whole field of wildlife research—techniques that gave researchers non-obtrusive data-gathering tools for a broad range of management concerns—makes him something of an object of awe among his fellow scientists. And his bigger-than-life, gregarious, and generous personality remain deep in the memories of everyone who knew him.
“Mike’s last name was right,” says his old friend Ken Balcomb. “He was big—big in every way. Big heart, big mind. I still miss him.”
Bigg’s chief legacy, however, is the status now enjoyed by the killer whales he loved and studied: They are alive and surviving if not thriving, and they are widely loved by millions more people. They have become regional icons of the Pacific Northwest, talismans of its identity, and helping the Southern Residents survive is something of a fetish there. The local papers report assiduously on the births of new calves and the losses of old veterans, and orca fans keep careful track of the members of J, K, and L pods and their health. People know them
by the names and numbers that Bigg first helped supply. That kind of heavy-duty public support for a conservation program made it easier for government officials on both sides of the border to take the steps needed to declare those pods protected under the Endangered Species Act in 2005.
The scientists who were Bigg’s colleagues and companions are continuing to carry on his work, along with even newer generations of whale scientists and advocates.
• • •
Ken Balcomb is one such advocate. A native of California, Balcomb arrived in the San Juan Islands in the 1970s with a contract from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to collect information on killer whales. Soon he and Bigg were working together to compile a complete census of the Southern Residents, which they completed in 1976.
“Our mandate was just, count ’em up,” recalls Balcomb. “But within three or four encounters, I saw that it was worthwhile continuing our study, looking at whales growing up, to see how fast they grew up. Basically, it’s like having all the fish in the fish bowl that you can look at.
“I wanted to ask more lasting questions that were of interest to other biologists—how long do they live, how many babies do they have, what is their behavior. And as it turns out, they are a society, with a culture and intelligence.”
Ken Balcomb
Balcomb became enmeshed in the fight to protect the Southern Residents from captures. It was that ’76 census, showing that only about 70 whales remained in the entire community, combined with Bigg’s similar work with Northern Residents, that led to the shutdown of Washington and Canadian waters to orca captures.
Balcomb stayed on San Juan Island. In 1985, he bought a piece of waterfront property on its western side, a place where whales are frequently seen, back when such homes were affordable, and converted it into his Center for Whale Research (CWR). In addition to his own work conducting a variety of research projects, the CWR, from a two-story house overlooking Haro Strait, with a work lab up the hill, hosted summer-long gatherings of Earthwatch (an environmental organization) volunteers, who would go out on Balcomb’s boats (usually a big trimaran that had been donated to the center years before) to observe whale behaviors, take photographs, and record sounds. In between, Balcomb became involved in a broad range of whale-research and rescue efforts, including dealing with beached beaked and minke whales in the Bahamas and humpbacks in the Atlantic. He’s also played a key role in building orca census records in other parts of the world, notably in southeastern Alaska.
Nowadays, a little grayer in the beard, he is more retiring, content to maintain the annual census of Southern Residents and monitor their well-being with the help of his core team, but there are always projects popping up that need his attention. Over the winter of 2012-13, he spent much of his time pursuing the K pod down to Monterey after National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists successfully satellite-tagged one of its members.
• • •
Like his old friend Mike Bigg, John Ford had grown up in British Columbia and was entranced with its wildlife. As a grad student, working under the tutelage of Bigg, he had studied the vocalizations of Northern Residents for his master’s thesis. In addition to his early work establishing the existence of dialects in killer whales’ communications, Ford did much of the leg work amassing the data on the Vancouver Island orcas who formed the basis of Bigg’s completed survey. In the process, they spent many weeks and months huddling under tarped tents in the gully-washing Johnstone Strait rains, but when they were done, the science was impeccable.
Ford had early exposure to killer whales beyond even his first frightened encounter in his family’s sport-fishing boat. Because his mother volunteered at the Vancouver Aquarium, he was afforded a front-row seat when Moby Doll was captured, and his imagination was fired. He got a job sweeping up after shows at the Aquarium, watching their captured whales, Hyak and Skana, who were initially kept in a small dolphin tank until a larger facility was made for them.
“The bigger pool was built in 1972,” recalls Ford. “That was around the time I went to work at the Aquarium. I was initially a popcorn sweeper. My beat was the stands around the pool, and so I spent a lot of time leaning on my broom and watching the whales. I was, of course, totally intrigued with them, and the next year I got a position in the marine mammal department—first, feeding seals and then belugas and worked my way up to working with the killer whales: Hyak first, and then Skana eventually. She was a real handful, so the experienced trainers knew she was a little ornery.”
Ford kept the job through college. “It was kind of a summer job as I got my undergraduate degree at UBC. I left there in 1976 to work on my thesis, which I did on narwhals. Then I worked on gray whales in 1977. I switched theses back to my first love, I guess, after a particular dull and challenging encounter with gray whales, which was interrupted by some transient orcas—that convinced me I was going down the wrong path.
“So I went back to my initial desire to study killer whales, which I had approached Mike Bigg to do a couple of years earlier, when some of the first results from Mike, Graham, and Ian McCaskey’s work coming out showing that these pods were really stable and could be predictably found. And I thought, perfect! This is an opportunity that I don’t know that exists for any other species where you can repeatedly go out and actually find the same group over and over again over a period of weeks and months, and observe different behaviors and record their sounds, which could match up sounds with behaviors, and maybe get some insight into how those sounds function.
“Now, I’d been listening to recordings that Dean Fisher, my advisor at UBC, had of killer whales and he had some recordings of Moby Doll, and Skana and Hyak. I approached Mike on that, and I think he was a little skeptical—I even proposed to him that, you know, maybe they have dialects between different groups. And I think at that point he probably wrote me off as a wild-eyed guy. And it was true that I was naïve in even proposing that, because I didn’t have sufficient background in animal communications at that stage to realize that that was a little outlandish to even suggest, because land mammals don’t have dialects at that kind of level. Humans do, but no other species does.”
Eventually, Ford would not only go on to prove that killer whales have dialects in their communications, but that these dialects adhere closely to the animals’ social organizations. Bigg himself would ruefully recount the tale of his skepticism to his fellow scientists: “Mike always used to like telling that story about how important it is to remain open-minded because this young kid came over and proposed that he wanted to record whales because they maybe have dialects, and sure enough they did,” Ford says with a smile.
After obtaining his PhD in biology from UBC, Ford taught there for a number of years while conducting orca surveys with Mike Bigg and others in Johnstone Strait. Ford eventually went to work for the Vancouver Aquarium, where he was in charge of caring for its captive orcas, initially, the same Hyak who had been under Paul Spong’s care, and then later, two Icelandic captives named Finna and Bjossa. (Skana had died in 1980, after 10 years in captivity; Hyak died in 1991, having survived 23 years.)
Ford’s most important work, however, involved wild whales. He initially specialized in analyzing the communications used by killer whales. During those years at the Aquarium, Ford conducted pioneering studies of Northern Residents analyzing orca dialects and echolocation, as well as research about their diet and social organization (the latter was especially an outgrowth of his important work demonstrating that calls from specific pods were signature calls that could identify them and that these calls could be taught to and mimicked by other orcas).
Operating in the Northwest, however, the Vancouver Aquarium was faced with increasing hostility from the local public about its captive whales, especially after Finna died in 1997, and a dilemma arose in deciding whether to obtain another orca to keep Bjossa company. They decided to punt, getting out of the captive-orca business altogether. They sold Bjossa,
their last remaining killer whale, to Sea World in San Diego in April 2001. She died there six months later.
By then, John Ford had already found other work; the Department of Fisheries and Oceans hired him in 2001 as head of cetacean research for its Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, an hour’s drive north of Victoria on Vancouver Island. From there, he continues to conduct study after study. Unlike most of the scientists who study orcas in the wild, Ford’s background inclines him to mixed feelings about keeping whales in captivity.
“My feeling about captivity has evolved over the years,” he says. “I was never wholly accepting of it—I could accept it in certain institutions that had a strong research or at least an education focus that treated them with a degree of respect. I’ve never been a fan of the highly theatrical shows involving water work—I just don’t think it’s portraying the animal appropriately, and I’m not sure that the audience is getting a message that really contributes to the betterment of killer whales, toward their conservation or anything like that.
“So most of the institutions that now house killer whales are more of the corporate kind involving the more theatrical shows, and I don’t think that really is an appropriate kind of environment for these animals. I think compared to other species, they don’t do as well in captivity. It’s really difficult to provide for their physical needs and social needs.
“That said, if they’re not available in the future for research opportunities to learn about things that we just can’t get a grip on in the wild, that’s going to be really unfortunate. Especially when it comes to physiology and some of the acoustical stuff. But the kinds of facilities that house killer whales today and the way that their show schedule dominates their time, it doesn’t really provide opportunities for that kind of research.”
Of Orcas and Men Page 15