by Philip Hoare
They owe their common name to Charles B. Cory, the nineteenth-century ornithologist and golfer who first described them in 1881, and whose house in Boston was stuffed with nineteen thousand avian specimens; their Latin title is rather more prolix, Calonectris diomedea borealis. Shearwaters – which do precisely that – hail from the family of procellariids, after procella or storm, the kind of weather they are supposed to favour. It was one reason why sailors were wary of their appearance; another being that they were believed to bear the souls of their drowned comrades.
Their order includes some of the most romantic birds of the sea: the albatrosses, fulmars, puffins and storm petrels. Like whales, they have evolved mechanisms to cope with an oceanic life: olfactory bulbs in their brains that allow them to smell their food from far away; tubes in their beaks that discharge salt water; and a diet of fish, squid and krill which produces a noisome stomach oil potent enough to dissolve the plumage of any interloper who is on the receiving end of a projectile vomit, although its greatest benefit is as a highly calorific fuel. Procellarids require such energy, since they are the greatest riders of oceanic winds, which echo the currents below. From wandering albatrosses with twelve-foot wingspans to tiny storm petrels barely bigger than a sparrow, they undertake journeys so ambitious that they occasionally get lost and end up in strange locations, such as the back of a whale. Or perhaps not so strange, since their kind have long been called ‘whale birds’ after the way they appear to herald leviathans. Storm petrels will fly downwind of hunting orcas, savouring the fishy grease in their blows. Off Cape Cod, I’ve watched clouds of greater shearwaters over feeding humpbacks, even dipping into the whales’ mouths to pluck out sand eels.
In the waters off the Azores, whales and dolphins drive to the surface the deep-water prey that the birds cannot ordinarily reach; as the cetaceans round up their bait, the shearwaters dive down to feed on the same source. Sadly, these seabirds suffer from our own hunting habits. Tens of thousands of procellariids die each year snared on longlines, strung out along them like a gamekeeper’s line; some escape only to return to their nests, beaks loaded and pierced with hooks.
Cory’s shearwaters mate for life, returning to the same site each year to lay a single egg. They regurgitate their day’s catch, supplemented with rich stomach oil, into the mouths of their begging chicks, all under the cover of a dark moon to avoid predatory gulls. With their legs at the back of their bodies, setting their centre of gravity awry like wonky clockwork toys, they are at their most vulnerable on the ground. Yet these islands must suit such precarious lives, since they are home to seventy thousand breeding pairs of shearwaters that gather here from all over the North Atlantic, very noisily. They echo in my ears as I lose consciousness, and rouse me a few hours later when the birds start to leave before dawn. Too late to sleep, too soon to rise, I give in, lie awake, and listen.
I realise that each cry is individual (odd how we assume all animals of a species sound the same, as if everyone we knew spoke in an identical intonation). I start to hear how the intervals between each screech change; how they elide the two central notes of their four-note phrase, and how the final squawk goes up in tone. I practise Cory calls in my head, wondering if they’re different from the sounds they make as they come in – ‘Don’t worry, I’m here, I’m home,’ as opposed to ‘See you later, don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.’ Like other nesting seabirds such as the gannet, their mates can recognise each other’s cries over the hubbub, a phenomenon known as ‘the cocktail-party effect’. There is also sexual dimorphism at work, a behavioural difference between the genders: the male’s call is distinctly more ringing in tone, presumably to attract its mate.
Mulling over these sounds in my head and what they may or may not mean, I drift back to sleep till the sun rises over the volcano and it’s time to go back to sea myself.
I’d forgotten how uncomfortable it was – the back-breaking, ball-numbing ride as the hull hits the waves with a mighty thwack. I wonder if our skipper enjoys inflicting such pain, but João, who is also a footballer, complains of the effect of his day job on his spine. Every rucking wave means another bone-jarring bump – pow-pow-pow – every fall harder for each rise. It’s the price we must pay for our presumption, for daring to enter their domain. I decide that it’s better to stand up, legs astride the padded seat like a cowboy at a rodeo. It works, after a fashion, but I keep checking my teeth to see that they’re still intact.
As suddenly as it kicked into life, the boat judders to a halt as João cuts off the engines. Over the Tannoy, we hear a quiet voice speaking in Azorean Portuguese. Up on the cliff top, perched on his wooden stool in the Vigia da Queimada, Marcelo André da Silva Soares is calmly directing our movements.
Marcelo is twenty-four years old, and has lived with whales all his life; his father watched them from the same concrete tower on the headland, directing his fellow hunters. In the transition from hunting to watching, which happened barely a generation ago, Marcelo’s father passed on his knowledge to his son. Now, for ten or twelve hours a day, Marcelo sits quietly in the vigia, peering through powerful binoculars. Behind him is a chart of different species and shapes of cetaceans, resembling the outlines of aeroplanes provided to wartime spotters. From this elevated position, Marcelo’s field of vision can range over two dozen miles across an ocean tilted up to the land like a board on which every movement may be plotted. He is a grandmaster, strategically moving his pieces – the boats – to their targets – the whales.
Marcelo’s father still works a neighbouring vigia, too. Where his voice is urgent, with the excited stridency of a market trader, his son’s words are whispered, in the hushed tones of a late-night radio DJ. He may be half my age, but Marcelo has already lived another life as a soldier in Kosovo, where other hunters – snipers with deadly rifles – also took their time, and their aim.
Marcelo directs João towards a whale which has just surfaced. Both men know their part. They know this is a narrow window of opportunity. The whale will stay up for less than ten minutes, as long as it needs to charge its body with oxygen before diving again. And in the time it takes us to get there, the animal promptly does so, leaving only the distant glimpse of its descending flukes and misty blow.
From behind his plexiglass screen, João unwinds a wire and tosses a hydrophone into the sea. Immediately, we hear clicks over the loudspeaker: the steady, insistent sound of whales in search mode, scanning the water column for squid: a sharp stutter, a pure, clean sound compared to the messy squawk of the shearwaters. It reminds me of the hundreds of bats that skittered over our heads last night, roused from their roosts and employing the same technology.
A sperm whale’s clicks are the product of a process even more complex than Southampton’s double tides. They’re created by the opening and shutting of a valve set at the front of the animal’s head, the same device found on porpoises and dolphins. Known as the museau de singe or phonic lips, they operate rather like a human voice-box, sending the rapid sounds back through the whale’s internal, right nasal passage and through its ‘upper case’, a reservoir of oil with bio-acoustical properties.
Having travelled all the way to the back of the whale’s concave cranium, the sound then bounces from an air sac, then returns through the ‘lower case’, filled with convex compartments of spermaceti oil which act as acoustic lenses. Only then, having passed from the front to the back of the whale’s head and back to the front again, is this powerful, refined sound emitted from its nose and out into the ocean. Then the whole procedure begins again (and all this at rates of a hundred times a minute). The highly directional sonar pulse bounces back from its target to be received, not through the whale’s outer ear, which would barely admit my little finger, but through its huge tuning-fork jaw. From there it is conducted to its inner ear. It has even been suggested that the rows of teeth along a sperm whale’s jaw act as regulators of this industrial-scale sound system.
Reduced rather than amplified through Jo
ão’s puny loudspeaker, the whales’ clicking scans the ocean a thousand metres below. It is the sound of control, at its peak, the loudest noise made by any animal, louder than a jet engine; but it is also entirely subtle, obeying its own laws of sequence, timbre and rhythm.
First come the chattering ‘codas’ as the whales appear to discuss what they are about to do, or tell a waiting calf, ‘I’ll be right back’ – not unlike the shearwaters. Then follows a regular pulse, scoping out the ocean bed, sizing up the field, as it were. Next come the regular clicks that indicate a diving whale is searching for prey. If it is successful, it will emit a series of accelerated buzzes that mean it has locked onto something to eat, and on which it may still be feeding as it returns to the surface to resume its social codas. These may mean nothing more than ‘I’m back,’ but they could have more complex, conversational associations. These are, after all, animals with the biggest brains in nature, with a matrilineal culture reaching back for millennia. They are as different from other whales as ravens are from other birds; über-whales, a species set apart.
If we pay attention, says João, we can hear the rhythms of individual whales, as characteristic as a Cory’s cry. ‘Some are more metallic than others – it’s their different voices,’ he says, in his own clipped fashion. This is the cocktail-party effect on a gigantic scale, but it doesn’t always do to shout. ‘At the surface, they’re silent. They don’t want to be heard by predators. And since they can see here, they don’t need their sonar.’
Together with Yuri, João’s first mate – a tall French boy with cropped dark hair – we discuss the naming of the whale. In French, as in other Latin languages, the sperm whale is known as the cachalot; Yuri points out that this has a double meaning: it sounds like cacher à l’eau – to hide in the water. To speak is to draw attention to yourself, and beyond the bounds of your tribe attention is seldom welcome. That’s why the whales are silent at the surface, where they come closest to us: in silence they might also be invisible, these hiders in the sea.
Yet shouting is what whales do best. They live in an element in which noise travels five times faster than in air. Their brains are wired for sound; their auditory cortex is larger than our visual cortex. Such a capacity is essential for animals that hunt in the lightless depths. Theirs is a very different experience of the world from ours, because their world is so different. For toothed whales blessed with pin-sharp sonar accuracy, everything is transparent; nothing is concealed. They live in another dimension, able to see into and through the solid, to discern structures inside. A whale or a dolphin can see the interior of my body as accurately as I can see the exterior of hers; I must resemble one of the educational models we had at school, clear plastic figurines of a man and a woman with their organs indecently displayed. The world is naked to a cetacean.
In his book In Defense of Dolphins, Thomas I. White, a professor of ethics, notes that his subjects are able to use their sonar to detect one another’s emotional states by the way their temperature falls or rises, like a human lie-detector test. As a result they cannot dissemble about the way they feel, as we do. They know if another dolphin is angry or excited. Citing the dolphin’s enlarged amygdala, the primary processing centre of the brain that deals with emotional and social connections and which is proportionally much larger in dolphins than in humans, White suggests that they may actually be more emotionally developed than us, partly as a result of their high level of social activity: they need to get along with one another since they travel in such close proximity and great numbers. This may be even more important among sperm whales, as Hal Whitehead, the eminent cetologist, says, since at any time they could turn their powerful sonar on their neighbour and cause serious damage. Whales must have codes of etiquette, perhaps even morality. Good manners may be as desirable in cetacean gatherings as they are in ours.
For humans, emotion may be merely a product of our evolved brains, a function of the spindle cells that distinguish us from other mammals. But it has recently been discovered that some cetaceans – including sperm whales – also possess these bundles of nerves, up to three times as many as humans and primates, and evolved them thirty million years ago, twice as long ago as us. Such cells process social organisation, speech, and intuition about the feelings of others; as to what use whales put these emotions, or even if they are anything like our own, we simply do not know, and can only imagine. If it is empathy that marks us out from other animals, what if that same sense of fellow feeling exists among cetaceans? Could that be a reason for their predilection to strand en masse? Hal Whitehead relates an incident in which a single male sperm whale beached itself on a remote shore, while two of its fellow whales swam up and down the bay, becoming ever more distressed. Eventually they too stranded themselves, to die alongside their comrade.
It is another refinement of our humanity that, unlike other animals, we know we are going to die. Research has shown that cetaceans have a sense of individual self, and are aware of themselves as sentient creatures. What if they shared our existential angst, too? We are unable to interview animals; they leave no autobiographies. Despite our science, their interior lives remain a mystery.
Below us, the steady searching clicks continue. João listens some more. Then, satisfied with what he’s heard, he predicts the reappearance of ‘our’ whale as his speaker falls silent. Has the hunter found its lunch? Is it even now sucking in squid through its narrow, tubular mouth, swinging open its slender jaw, glistening white, as if to lure them in? Whether it got lucky or not, the whale is ready to return to our world. And we will be ready for it.
Up on the rocky headland that overlooks this spectacle, I sit alongside Marcelo on a wooden stool in his concrete cell. Silently, we watch the waves unroll. A few moments before, from the top of the field behind the vigia, up the grassy path where lizards scatter with every step, I had spotted dark shapes in the sea, moving swiftly. Five or six of them, long and sleek, with dorsal fins set far back. Dashing back to the vigia, I consulted with Marcelo and his charts. I realised there’s only one type of whale that matches this fast-moving group – which has now vanished into the silvery expanse and is nowhere to be seen.
Beaked whales are bizarre animals. Some have heads that resemble a bird’s, while their bodies are spindle-shaped, more like archeocetes, the ancient whales; their sharp beaks evoke even older ichthyosaurs. In 1823, when the French naturalist Georges Cuvier discovered the skull of the beaked whale that would bear his name, he assumed the animal to which it belonged was extinct. It took fifty years for scientists to establish that the species was still alive.
More than any other whale, the family of Ziphiidae elude our scrutiny, swimming in the deep ocean, far from land. Later, in New Zealand, Anton van Helden, a world expert on beaked whales, would show me the skull of a spade-toothed whale, Mesoplodon traversii. The cranium, a scooped-out ski-slope of calciated matter, more abstract sculpture than bone, its lower jaw studded with what look like stumpy tusks, stands on a shelf in a storeroom of the Te Papa museum in Wellington, until now one of only three known specimens; it is the world’s rarest whale, and has never been seen alive. Only recently a cow/calf pair was washed ashore on the Bay of Plenty, giving the first true idea of what these five-metre-long animals look like. In the past two decades alone, three new species of beaked whales have been identified, raising the total to twenty-one, although they’re constantly being revised – six exotic genera in search of themselves, with names as strange as the animals they evoke: Ziphius, Tasmacetus, Berardius, Indopacetus, Hyperoodon, Mesoplodon.
One reason for such obscurity is that beaked whales spend so much of their time below the surface, foraging in the depths where they suck squid through their mouths. So seldom seen, they exist in a category of their own. They are (mostly) defined by their prominent beaks, often with a pair of teeth that jut out even when their mouths are shut. Their slender bodies are perfectly suited to diving; their pectoral fins fit into ‘pockets’ to reduce drag. They’ve found
their evolutionary niche, these middling-sized whales; one lying on my garage roof would just about overhang it. As varied as any family of songbirds, they suggest some avian-cetacean hybrid, especially the Cuvier’s beaked whale, Ziphius cavirostris, which I once saw from the unlikely vantage point of a cross-Channel ferry.
As we approached northern Spain over the deep underwater shelf of the Trevelyan escarpment, which plunges to four thousand feet and thence towards the Azorean plateau, three brownish shapes appeared. Through my binoculars I could see the scratches on their backs, the results of battles with one another and with squid; one even breached in front of the prow. But more striking than anything – and more tantalising – were their heads, oddly pinkish as if veiled with an amniotic caul, and distinctly bird-like in shape. It was easy to see why its common name is the goose-beaked whale, a chimerical confusion that invokes tales of barnacle geese born of molluscs.
Like the Cuvier’s, other common names commemorate a list of long-dead scientists: Arnoux’s beaked whale, Andrew’s beaked whale, Longman’s beaked whale, Hector’s beaked whale, Gray’s beaked whale, Baird’s beaked whale, Blainville’s beaked whale, True’s beaked whale. Other, equally cumbersome denominations amplify their owners’ dentition: the strap-toothed whale, the spade-toothed whale, the gingko-toothed whale. A cetacean orthodontist would surely shake his head and say, ‘What can I do with teeth like that?’
Yet their owners surely rejoice in such splendid canines. On Blainville’s beaked whale, as on others, the teeth are resplendent with purple-stalked barnacles as exuberant, weedy adornments dangling from their mouths. Like a deer’s antlers, such tusk-like teeth may be used as a secondary sexual signal, enabling females to sort out males of their own species, since even to beaked whales, other beaked whales look the same. But the animals themselves are, on closer inspection, subtly coloured, a muddy range of greys and browns and blacks, striated and crisscrossed by innumerable scratches, as if subjected to cosmic strikes. Each might be a heavenly body, like Saturn’s icy moon Europa with its ‘chaotic’ terrain cracked and riven by an unknown ocean. (Indeed, astro-biologists speculate that the exosolar planet Kepler-22b could be a watery world where whale-like animals swim through atmospheres of sea; the word planet, after all, means ‘wandering star’.)