Once in Iceland, Keiko grew even stronger and healthier and seemingly happier. The Free Willy/Keiko Foundation then partnered with Jean-Michael Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society, which would be in charge of overseeing Keiko’s care and rehabilitation. However, Ocean Futures then hired a crew mostly comprised of former SeaWorld staffers to run this program. According to Howard Garrett of the Orca Network, the two chief staffers considered “the entire Keiko Project a misbegotten movie-inspired project and an attempt by Craig McCaw to do the impossible,” and he warned Naomi Rose at the HSUS that “in effect, SeaWorld has taken over the Keiko Project.”
When Rose paid a subsequent visit to Keiko in Iceland, she was impressed by how well the whole operation was being run, and she was especially impressed by Keiko’s health, recalling the sickly thing she had first encountered in Mexico City. “It was a completely different whale,” she said. Notably, he was not only catching live fish, he was building real stamina, going out on “walks” with his trainers, following a boat out of his pen into the open ocean and then returning with them. On several occasions, they encountered wild killer whales, and Keiko took an interest in them, vocalizing and joining them for brief periods. These were exciting developments.
At this point, the Keiko Project by any fair measure was already a success: Keiko was far stronger and healthier than he ever would have been in tank captivity, including at Oregon. Whatever time he had left alive had already been extended by years, probably many of them, especially compared to what little future he faced back in 1993, when Free Willy was released. At the same time, the ultimate goal of reuniting him with his family and returning him to an ordinary life in the wild was in doubt. It was clear to Rose that her handlers were keeping him on an extremely short leash and ultimately were undermining the effort to disconnect Keiko from human contact. She became especially concerned when they told reporters that Keiko’s hopes for a return to the wild were “only 50/50 at best.”
There certainly was an important missing element in the plan: No one knew anything about any of the Icelandic wild orca societies, since no photo-ID census had ever been attempted. Balcomb says he proposed such a study in the late 1990s and was turned away; since then, there has been more scientific study of the Icelandic orcas, but no one has yet assembled a complete census.
Colin Baird, Keiko’s trainer in Iceland and the man who oversaw his release, says there was some data collected in Iceland in an effort to ascertain Keiko’s home pod, but the icy and rough-sea conditions around Iceland are such that collecting enough data on North Atlantic orcas to provide a full photo census of the population would have taken years if not decades (as opposed to the Salish Sea orcas, where dozens of scientists have had ample opportunities in a comparatively pleasant setting amid a large human population for the sightings needed to build a useful database). So, according to Baird, Keiko’s team decided to see if he could simply unite with any of the resident orca pods, which he eventually did.
However, Craig McCaw soon lost a huge chunk of his massive fortune when the tech bubble burst in 2001, and he had to drop out of the picture altogether. Ocean Futures’ money dried up, and the SeaWorld team left the project. Rose’s HSUS took over the project, keeping Baird and several local Icelandic staff members aboard.
Keiko had an especially close relationship with Baird, the former Sealand of the Pacific trainer who had handled Tilikum and had helped retrieve Keltie Byrne’s body. They frequently swam together, and Baird particularly worked to help Keiko form a bond with wild whales, since he knew that would be key to their ultimate success. The first of those meetings, about a year and a half after Keiko had arrived in Iceland, came about with Baird’s help, on a clear and sunny day when the seas were teeming with orcas, a gathering of three pods at one spot. Keiko was just hanging out next to his orange boat, watching them intently, shyly.
“We were sort of waiting and encouraging him to go out as best we could,” recalls Baird. “So finally I just put on a suit and jumped in the water with him, said, ‘Come on, let’s go,’ and basically the two of us swam out into the middle of 90-plus orcas. And I think that’s when his confidence really shot up. We had a pretty good afternoon.”
After a while, he started hanging out with these orcas and chowing down with them; they were all busy feeding on the schools of herring in the area, and Keiko joined in. Eventually, he did not return to his bay pen, but remained in the area with the orcas and would contact the boats sent out to monitor him. Finally, on August 4, 2002, one of the massive, howling storms common to this part of the world interrupted the team’s ability to monitor Keiko, and sometime during the storm, the whole wild superpod headed out for parts unknown, swimming northeasterly across the Atlantic. Keiko stayed with them.
A tag attached to his dorsal fin let the team catch up to him a week later, and they found he was still hanging out, albeit peripherally, with the wild orcas, but he eventually broke away from them on his own and headed almost due east. At that point, he swam almost directly to Norway, a 1,000-mile swim that took him another six weeks and which he undertook completely alone. Keiko found his way into a rural fjord called Taknes Bay and in little time made contact with the human residents there in their boats. His team of handlers arrived in Norway shortly afterward, and Keiko promptly recognized them and began staying with them and their boat. They were astonished by how healthy and strong he looked; when Baird measured his girth the next week, it was the same number as when Keiko was at his meatiest in Iceland.
So, it was clear that Keiko not only had reached a point where he could care for himself, but he could thrive doing it. Most of all, his handlers say, he was happy and frisky and seemed content. But orcas are social animals, and since he was unable to hook up with his orca family in the wild, he sought out the human family he had become accustomed to as a replacement, much as Luna had in Nootka Sound. The Norwegians embraced him. Tourists came from all over Europe to little Taknes Bay to see him by the thousands, and as many as fifty boats could be seen on the water at times from people going out to visit him. Little children were photographed frolicking with him in the shallows.
At that point, Rose said, the team reached the conclusion that Keiko would probably never be successfully reunited with wild whales and would have to remain under a form of human care for the remainder of his years. It was an experimental form of care; instead of the sea pen he had in Iceland, Keiko was free to come and go as he chose. The team rented a little house overlooking the bay and spent their days on the boat with him. They fed him fish as a treat and a form of reward for engaging them, but it was obvious that he was mostly feeding himself.
The experiment worked well for a year and a half. Keiko thrived and was happy, and the sometimes overbearing relationship with Norwegian tourists began to mellow. However, the marine-park industry remained determined to prove the Keiko experiment a failure, and soon spokesmen for the industry began claiming that the release experiment had now officially failed, and it was time to return Keiko to captivity. Indeed, Arthur Hertz of Miami Seaquarium tried in the fall of 2002 to have Keiko captured and placed under his care, claiming he wanted to find a companion for Lolita in her tank at his facility. (He never did explain how he expected two orcas to co-exist in a tiny, cramped, and shallow pool that is even smaller than the one from which Keiko escaped in Mexico City.) Hertz managed to convince the National Marine Fisheries Service to support his efforts.
The Norwegian government cut off this effort at the knees. “Keiko is doing well, and he is getting a lot of support. There is no immediate need for a rescue,” they replied, adding: “We are skeptical to keeping huge animals like whales in captivity. … We do not doubt that Keiko would get good support in Miami, but it would be a great step back to put him in an aquarium that will stress him.”
Then one day in early December of 2003, his many years in captivity caught up with Keiko. He came down with a lung infection that is common in captive killer whales and almost universally kills them
unless it can be diagnosed early. Keiko, however, displayed no symptoms until it was too late. And so on December 12, he quite suddenly passed away. Colin Baird was out of town and got the tragic word in an airport.
There was great mourning in Norway at Taknes Bay. The locals buried him under a large stone cairn there on the shore, and no necropsy was performed. The reaction from industry anti-release partisans was swift and predictable. One critic of the Keiko Project sneered that Keiko had been “probably the most expensive animal in human history” and that the entire effort had been folly. One of the former Ocean Futures trainers, a man named Mark Simmons, accused the HSUS team of “abandoning” Keiko, claiming he had been forced to rely on handouts from the Norwegian fishermen. He later described the project as “perhaps the most compelling case of animal exploitation in history.”
The scientists who study whales, however, say Keiko’s story vividly demonstrates how not to return an orca to the wild. After all, wild orcas are highly social animals and hunters; their ability to remain with their familial pods is the key to their survival. Failing to do the primary research for Keiko—namely, identifying his home pod and giving him a chance to reunite with them—eventually ensured that it would not reach its final goal, although in terms of lengthening Keiko’s life and making his last years quality years where he was free to come and go as he chose, the project was a brilliant success.
“My belief is that Keiko would have needed direct contact with members of his immediate family and community in order to fully integrate back into a life in the wild,” says Paul Spong. “That did not happen in Iceland, and it is very unlikely that it would have happened in Norway. However, this does not mean that it could not happen, given the appropriate circumstances. Had more been known about Keiko’s social background, it would have been far easier to put him in contact with members of his family. I do not believe he met his mother or any siblings or close cousins while he was swimming freely in Icelandic waters. He did meet and interact with other orcas, but they were not his kin, so he did not join them permanently. That said, Keiko did get to experience the feel and sounds of the ocean once again, after being surrounded by barren concrete walls for most of his life, and that, I believe, must have come as a profound relief to him. For me, the simple fact that Keiko died as a free whale spells success for the grand project that brought him home. Deniers will deny, spinners will spin, but they cannot erase or alter this truth.”
• • •
Spong knew well whereof he spoke. Only a year before Keiko died, Spong and his OrcaLab colleagues had helped orchestrate an effort to return a (briefly) captive whale to the wild, which had been wildly successful.
Springer was first noticed by Mark Sears, an avid orca watcher who, in his daily life, is the caretaker for the Colman Pool, Seattle’s only salt-water public swimming pool, located right on the beach at Lincoln Park in West Seattle. Things are stone quiet there in the winters, when the pool is closed, and that happens to be the time of year that the Southern Residents (J pod particularly) have been known to come down to the southern part of Puget Sound and feed on the salmon runs there. En route, they often pass right by the pool and Sears’ residence there. So he is always on the lookout for them.
In January of 2002, a friend who worked for the Washington State Ferry system gave Sears a call. A little killer whale had been showing up for several weeks now at the northern end of Vashon Island, often around the ferry terminal there, and it was alone. This was very unusual. Sears motored out in his little runabout, since it was just a few miles crossing to Vashon from his home. As he pulled up to the bay near the terminal, he dropped his speed and got out his binoculars. Where was this little orca?
Kooosh! Right beside his boat was where. When he had sufficiently recovered from his near heart attack, Sears got out his camera and took some pictures. When he got back home, he gave Ken Balcomb a call and let him know there was now a confirmed sighting of a solo orca calf hanging out near Vashon. The word got out and onto the evening news, and now the little calf was all over it, featured on the front pages of the newspapers and in breathless media reports with footage of the calf frolicking near the ferry dock. It was a little female, about two years old, scientists eventually ascertained. At first, the ferry workers named her Boo (an acronym for Baby Orphan Orca), but eventually she was given the name Springer.
Like Luna, who was still roaming Nootka Sound at this time, she was a very playful orca who loved to approach humans in their boats to fulfill her social needs. This began causing a lot of concern, however, especially as it appeared she was becoming underweight. She was feeding herself but not well enough. The scientists pored over photographs of her, along with those of wild whales, to see if they could find any identifying marks that would locate her home pod. No one knew if she was a transient or resident or which pod she might have come from.
Then, Joe Olson of Seattle’s Cetacean Research Technology went out and dropped in a hydrophone and obtained a quality recording of Springer’s calls. The sounds were then relayed around the network of scientists who study the whales to see if anyone could identify her that way. Sure enough: Helena Symonds at OrcaLab, Paul Spong’s wife, promptly recognized Springer’s calls. They were the distinctive sound made by A45, a female matriarch of the Northern Residents who had gone missing, meaning the calf had to be her offspring, A73. Graeme Ellis ran a quick check to see who had been notably absent that fall from the A pod, and he confirmed that A73 was, in fact, missing.
No one had any idea how she had become separated from her pod (A pod whales never travel south of the strait of Georgia) or how she had found her way to southern Puget Sound, but now they knew who she was and where she belonged. There was one hitch: Her mother, A45, was also missing and presumed dead, a fact that probably played a role in her separation. So, if Springer was going to return to her home pod, it would have to be with relatives and not her natural mother. A45 had been part of a large clan with numerous relatives still alive and well, so this was probably not a serious issue.
However, concern was growing about Springer’s behavior. She began displaying Luna-like behavior: approaching boats, rubbing on them (dangerously close to propellers, in some cases), interacting and playing with the humans in them, and showing dependence on humans for her social needs. Monitors tried to keep the crowds away, but there was only so much they could do. In addition, her health seemed to be deteriorating. The scientists knew that this couldn’t go on indefinitely and began forming a plan to reunite her with her Northern Resident family.
Soon, they had a plan in place: Springer would be held briefly in a sea pen and returned to health. Then she would be transported to Vancouver Island and cared for until she had a chance to reunite with her home pod. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) balked at these plans at first, opting not to intervene because it had no funds to undertake such a plan, and besides, it had never been tried before. There had never been a successful re-introduction of a whale back to the wild after the intervention of humans, although there had been several escapes of penned killer whales in the 1960s, whales who successfully returned to the wild on their own.
Finally, a coalition of private groups—notably the Orca Conservancy, a Seattle-based orca-advocacy organization led by Fred Felleman and Michael Harris; the Whale Museum; People for Puget Sound; and Project SeaWolf, whose monitors had spent the most time on the water with Springer—convinced NMFS that they could obtain funding for the plan through a series of grants, and with building public pressure, the government finally announced it would proceed with the proposal. The Vancouver Aquarium was designated the chief Canadian partner for the operation and, after some back and forth, eventually played a critical role in its success. Paul Spong and the OrcaLab crew went to work coordinating the whale’s arrival at the northern end.
In June 2002, they were ready. Springer was gently roped and pulled up in a sling and onto a boat, then transported to a little bay not far away, near Manchester, where t
hey held her for four weeks, feeding her live salmon and keeping the human contact to a minimum. On July 13, they loaded her into a catamaran that had been specially adapted to hold the little orca in a sling between the two pontoons. With TV helicopters and boats following, the procession headed out of Puget Sound and up Haro Strait into Canada. At Campbell River, midway up Vancouver Island, the boat pulled over and took on board the hundreds of bags of ice that had been donated by locals as a “welcome home” for the calf, helping to cool her off at a critical juncture in the journey.
Finally, just as evening was approaching, the boat reached its destination: Springer’s sea pen on Hanson Island, not far from OrcaLab, which had been stocked the previous day with live salmon caught by members of the local Namgis tribe. It faced out onto Johnstone Strait, and A pod whales had been coming by frequently. Springer began vocalizing loudly. That night, a small pod of wild whales came by, and one of them had a vocal exchange with Springer. When they went away, Springer frolicked and vocalized excitedly.
The next day, the A pod whales, some from the pod led by Springer’s grandmother, were there, displaying extreme curiosity about the little orca inside the sea pen, and some of them entered the bay where the pen was and came close. Springer’s human team decided to open up the net on her pen to let her out if she so desired. She immediately swam out and toward the wild orcas, who appeared to be waiting for her. There was a brief interaction, and then the A pod whales swam off on their own to the east. Springer went west on her own.
However, the next day, as her monitors followed her in a boat, it became clear that Springer was tagging along behind her grandmother’s pod, and over the next several days, she began interacting with them more and more, particularly with an A5 subpod whale, A51, who began acting as a surrogate mother, pushing Springer away from boats when she was tempted to approach them. By late August, it was clear that Springer had fully reestablished herself with the wild whale community.
Of Orcas and Men Page 24