Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  • • •

  Graeme Ellis knew Bigg, too, but unlike his good friend Ford, he is open in his contempt for orca captivity. He had grown up in Campbell River, just a few miles north of Nanaimo and a little south of Johnstone Strait, but well within the range of the Northern Residents, and he would see them while growing up. He too got a job early on with the Vancouver Aquarium, caring for a group of wild orcas who had been captured and were penned up at Pender Harbour, adjoining Georgia Strait from the mainland.

  Ellis came to know several of the whales during the time they were in his care. Eventually, he tried getting into the water with them in his wet suit. One of them, a big male, came charging at him, teeth flashing, and Ellis leapt out of the water: “He scared the hell out of me. One moment I was in the water, the next moment I was standing on the logs.”

  But then he tried it again. This time, the big male charged again but stopped short of Ellis and then nuzzled him like a big dog. It had all been a big bluff. Ellis scratched the male under his chin and along his back with his fingers, and the orca nuzzled him some more. They became pals, at least until the day the big male also proved to be clever and escaped back to the wild.

  Ellis was eventually laid off by the Vancouver Aquarium, but the experience helped him land a job caring for orcas at Sealand of the Pacific, a large sea pen on the Haro Strait side of Victoria that was designed like a cattle yard for killer whales. The orcas were kept in increasingly appalling conditions as the years went on. Among Sealand’s more notorious facilities was the set of small enclosures in which the orcas were all stored overnight, allowing them no freedom of movement at all.

  As a trainer at the facility, Ellis swam with its whales often, particularly a big male named Haida. Ellis says Haida once gave him a kind of warning dunk after Ellis had failed to take the hint that playtime was over, reminding him, once again, who was really in control. It made clear to Ellis that orca facilities are only possible because of the patience and forbearance of the orcas themselves. Ellis was also among the Sealand crew who captured the albino whale Chimo in 1970, along with the rest of its T2 family, some of which later returned successfully to the wild, the same crew who misfed these transients a fish diet for the duration of their captivity. By then, however, Ellis had undergone a change of heart.

  “I got really disillusioned,” he said. “The whole thing was money-oriented. You sell the whales, you sell the show, and if the whales don’t perform, people don’t want to see them. As a trainer, I had people demand their money back because a whale wouldn’t jump if it was off its show. I got quite cynical about the reasons the public was there.” What really appalled him, he said, were Sealand’s goofy entertainment shows featuring orcas wearing hats and sunglasses and being ridden like horses, ending with the requisite soaking of the audience. “Those shows just made me want to puke,” Ellis said. “It was degrading to the animal…. I thought it was just sick.”

  Ellis took time off and then went to work for Mike Bigg. It was Ellis who became Bigg’s ace photographer, forming much of the foundation of his photo-identification database (which included some 7,000 photos). Over the years, Ellis worked with the DFO as a technician gathering data on marine mammals of all kinds, as well as tracking salmon movements and assessing shellfish populations. Eventually he took a position as a researcher at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, where he remains to this day, working with John Ford specializing in work with whales and large marine mammals. In recent years, he has conducted a wealth of research on transient orcas, Bigg’s killer whales, and analysis of the world’s populations of killer whales.

  • • •

  Alexandra Morton, like most of the Northwest whale scientists, knew Mike Bigg well, too, but her pedigree working with killer whales began farther down the coast, in California; Morton at one time was a protégé of John Lilly, the renowned dolphin scientist whose reputation later fell into disrepute after he tread into dubious experimental methods (such as giving LSD to dolphins) and held strange speculative views. It was Lilly who, in 1977, employed a young Alexandra as a researcher at the Human/Dolphin Society, where she catalogued some 2,000 recordings of dolphin vocalizations.

  The next year, she went to work at Marineland of the Pacific in Los Angeles, first working as a dolphin trainer and conducting research on their communications. She then befriended the park’s two orcas, a pair of Northern Residents named Orky (a male) and Corky (female). The two whales kept mating, and Corky kept getting pregnant, raising hopes at Marineland that they might someday be able to produce a viable captive-born killer whale. However, it never happened; Corky either miscarried, or her young calves would die shortly after birth because, having been captured in 1969 at only about three years of age, she lacked the knowledge or skills to nurse the youngster.

  The first of these lost calves was particularly heart-wrenching for everyone involved. Morton described it in her anthem to orcas, Listening to Whales:

  I had learned a few orca calls while recording Corky’s false labor, but the sound that Corky repeated the night she lost her baby was new to me. This wasn’t a sweet rising and falling riff. This was strident, guttural, and urgent, like a dog yelping at the end of a chain. After each breath, Corky returned to the bottom of the tank. As her delicately curved face grazed the cement bottom, she resumed her lament. Every fiber of her being begged for the nuzzling of her newborn baby.

  Alexandra went to work with the two orcas, believing she could make a difference in helping improve their lives. However, she realized it was futile, especially after observing Corky sink into depression. “It ignited the awareness in me that captivity had a certain wrongness about it, and that my race had violated this mother whale in the most basic sense,” Morton later said. After a year at Marineland, she gave up in anger and frustration. Moved by concern for the orcas she was leaving behind, she contacted Mike Bigg to inquire about the families of Orky and Corky. “Mike just blew me away,” she recalled. “He was extremely cooperative, offered all the help he could.”

  It convinced Morton to come north to Vancouver Island and OrcaLab, where she went to work as a volunteer researcher. It was while there that she encountered a man named Robin Morton, a Canadian filmmaker who led a crew shooting underwater footage of killer whales. That summer they were trying to obtain footage of orcas rubbing themselves on the smooth pebbles of Robson Bight. Alexandra and Robin fell in love and were married in 1980, then moved to the Broughton Archipelago and set up shop in the outback village of Echo Bay, which is mostly a collection of homes with docks. In 1986, Robin Morton died in a diving accident; his rebreather stopped functioning while he was deep underwater at Robson Bight. Alexandra Morton, however, picked up the pieces and continued their work as advocates for the killer whales. She remains in Echo Bay to this day, having remarried and raised two sons in the quiet wilderness. In recent years, she has become a persistent critic of the salmon-farming industry in British Columbia, primarily because their operations pollute British Columbia waterways where native salmon runs are affected in a variety of negative ways. That in turn, she says, is harming resident orca populations.

  • • •

  You can learn a lot from whales, just trying to see them in the wild—not about the whales, but about yourself—because in trying to enter their world, you have to leave some of yours behind. My wife Lisa and I, both having been raised inland, first attempted to see killer whales on our honeymoon in 1989, when we traveled north to Alert Bay in British Columbia and signed on with local guides to spend a day sailing with the orcas. It was early July, and the whales had been plentiful. As it happened, the day we went out with them was the first day on which these guides encountered no whales. We were mildly disappointed, but we knew that killer whales could also be seen in the San Juan Islands, and having moved that year to Seattle, we figured it would be a simple matter to remedy. The next summer, we began making trips to the islands, always with the idea in mind of seeing orcas, but somehow, we kept miss
ing them.

  Seeing them was always more or less an agenda item, something we wanted to do while out visiting, but on our own schedule, and the orcas never managed to mesh with it. We would drop out to Lime Kiln Park or San Juan County Park and expect to see them from the island’s western side. When we’d get there, inevitably, our fellow whale watchers would inform us we had just missed them. Or they just wouldn’t show up that day. After a while, Lisa began joking that we were jinxed, that the whales were actively avoiding us and would flee if they knew we were coming. I wasn’t so sure it was a joke.

  Finally, after about three years of almost frantically driving about the island in the vain hope of catching a glimpse of the killer whales, we gave up, sort of. We began to realize that the places where we were looking for them were unusually beautiful in their own right and that there was more to see there than just whales. So we settled down and began enjoying the places themselves, bringing our picnic basket and blanket and books out to the west side, settling down, and just enjoying the day. At first, this meant simply that we were enjoying the waves and the wildlife and the gurgling quiet of the landscape.

  Then we began seeing orcas. Lots of them. Our first spectacular view of them came from an area on the west side of the island known as the “Land Bank,” an open space south of Lime Kiln where the orcas often come past, available for simply sitting-and-watching by the public. They breached that day, and there were calves romping next to shore, and the whole experience was breathtakingly memorable.

  After that, we began taking more time and care, ensuring that we simply gave ourselves time to just be where the whales were, letting them come to us on their own terms in their own good time. We began camping out on the island and then kayaking. Most of all, we learned to just be where we were, in the whales’ space and on their schedule, which was bound up in the flow of the tides and the salmon. If we did that, they would always come and bless us. Almost always, anyway. No matter how well you master this, the orcas will always keep you guessing, but even when they did not, we had long since learned to soak in the beauty and stillness of where we were.

  Wild orcas inevitably reward the patience of would-be admirers.

  Monika Wieland went through the same sort of initiation. Nowadays, the thirty-something blonde is something of a San Juan Island wildlife icon, having published a masterful collection of photographs of killer whales that is popular in the bookstores, as well as a useful guidebook on bird life on the islands. However, back when she arrived here in the 1990s, she was much like Lisa and me: running hither and yon, clutching binoculars and cameras, hoping for some fleeting glimpse of the elusive orcas.

  “I was definitely a whale chaser, going along the west side and trying to catch them,” she says with a wise smile now. “More often than not, it doesn’t work out.”

  She went to work on the tour boat Western Prince as an onboard naturalist, explaining orcas and the other wildlife to passengers, and in that way got her fill of whale sightings (not to mention a refined eye for wildlife photography). Then she left to take up other work on the island and found herself jonesing for orcas again.

  “As I stopped working as a naturalist, it was really tough to transition, to go back to being an exclusively shore-based whale watcher, and not going to the whales, but sort of readopting that mindset,” she says. “And when I finally got there and let it go, sort of, like: ‘No, I’m just going to go to the west side and have a free afternoon and whatever happens, happens.’ And just sit at Lime Kiln. And some of the best experiences happen when you do that. It’s amazing how true that is.”

  In spite of all the time she’s spent being around and observing wild killer whales, she says they remain mysterious to her. “I’ve been lucky to be here for as many years as I have, but I also feel like I’m just beginning to come to an understanding of the whales, in a lot of ways. They certainly are continually surprising me. I think I am starting to understand what they might do next, and they don’t. They do something completely different.”

  Wieland says she has learned a lot more about herself, being in the orcas’ world, than she ever thought she would. “I guess one thing that the whales have taught me is the benefits of just sitting in one spot and waiting for something. So much of our lives has gotten so fast-paced, and scheduling every moment and going from this to the next thing, and all the electronics and everything. But when I come to the west side, I sit outside, and I stop everything else, and go on whale time.

  “I see amazing encounters out of that. There’s a lot of other amazing things, other wildlife—the seals, and sea lions and the bird life. And also the people that I’ve met while waiting for whales has been amazing, too. I mean, I’ve formed some lifelong friendships doing this, sitting on the rocks, waiting for whales.

  “In modern-day society, people don’t wait for much of anything. But there is nothing instant-gratification about the whales, unless you’re really, really lucky. Being on whale time means slowing down and looking around, looking at the people that are around you—what are they experiencing, and why are they here? And what are these birds? And the tidal life. There’s so much to see.”

  Bob Otis has been joining Wieland on the west side of San Juan Island for many of those watches. A quiet-spoken, semi-retired college professor from Wisconsin, Otis mans the whale-watching operations inside the Lime Kiln State Park lighthouse, where a number of students and volunteers each summer monitor the comings and goings of Southern Residents and other whales who happen past. The monitoring work includes listening in on the hydrophones that are plugged in off the rocky shore at the lighthouse. Otis began this work in the 1990s as part of his work as an animal psychologist. But after a while, he says, it just became an old-fashioned passion: “Certainly when I started, I came with all the baggage that a scientist brings in terms of quantification and objectivity. That has changed somewhat,” he says. “Today, when I teach a course on the killer whale, back in Wisconsin, I bring the students here,” he says. “I want them to be able and willing to look at the killer whale through the eyes of a poet, a musician, an artist, as well as a scientist. I encourage my students to dabble in the arts, because it makes them much better scientists.”

  More than anything, Otis says, the orcas themselves have inspired him to think beyond just the raw science. “I think Paul Spong has said over the years that he started out being an objective scientist, and always stressed that kind of information, but at the same time he was willing to talk about personality differences in the whales and so on. And I think the same thing has happened with Ken Balcomb,” Otis says.

  “So is it the whale that does it to us? We hear from hundreds of people here every day who come in, and they perceive the killer whale as the icon of a perfect world. Anyway, it’s very satisfying and rewarding. And I think if you hear that a few thousand times as a scientist, you start to feel that somehow our objective measures are not tapping into that, and they should.”

  Otis says that whales have rearranged his views about scientific certainty. “Certainly, the more we learn about these whales, the less we understand,” he says. Moreover, his experiences have taught him to learn from unexpected sources. “I tell a story when I’m giving my little slide show about the whales breaching, about a little boy who was in the group and who raised his hand,” Otis says. “He said he knew why whales breached. At the time, I thought he was setting me up. So I said, ‘OK, why do they breach?’

  “He turned to the group in the room and spoke clearly and, in all sincerity, he said: ‘They breach so they can dry off.’ And you know, he just might be right. It may well be something that simple. I have learned not to argue with the wisdom of children.”

  Indeed, Ken Balcomb has experienced much the same sort of epiphany in his dealings with the whales themselves: “They always seem to find ways to surprise me,” he says. Mostly, he says he is endlessly impressed by the orcas’ own flexibility and willingness to learn, as well as the depth of their empathy.


  “The most amazing stuff was when A73 (Springer) was down in Puget Sound, and Luna up in Nootka Sound. I had gone to see Luna with Graham and John in December, after the marine mammal conference, and he was definitely seeking human contact. Not more than ten days later, Mark Sears called me and said we’ve got this little lone orca down in Puget Sound. I went down there and went out with Mark; the day before when he had seen her, she was playing with a stick, so we boated out there and found that stick. And there was Springer playing with it. After a while Mark would take the stick, and she would respond. I gave her a signal, and she responded in kind by rolling over. When it came time to capture her, she just let us do it. She didn’t fight at all. She was ready for anything that we did.”

  He still is trying to grasp the role that killer whales play in their environment: “Maybe they do like the First Nations people thought they did at first—they go out and find the fish and herd them in. And they know enough not to eat all of them. In fact, they only eat about 10 percent of them. They know that it just doesn’t work, if you eat them all. And whether or not they experimented with that eons ago, I don’t know, but certainly in their management of things, they are very, very conservative. They are also conservative in their behavior in that they don’t risk their lives.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some kind of stewardship involved. They’ve been very, very successful for a very long time.”

  At times, he says, it has seemed as though the orcas knew that he and his researchers were trying to gather information on them to help them and were eager to help them learn: “In the case of mothers and calves, we had mothers and calves rolling up and showing us their undersides. I think they were aware that we were curious about what was going on, and they were aware that knowing what sex a new baby was would be part of what would be interesting to our little monkey minds.”