Whale Winds
Between
the coast and the end of the world is what we are here for. Because,
here be monsters.
by D.K. McCutchen
Posted: April 25, 2007
All images thanks to the Provincetown
Center for Coastal Studies
Bay of Fundy, Lubec, Maine
September 20, 1996
Lubec is dying. There are no fish left. The lovely
old, paint-peeling houses are for sale because the fishing families
can't feed their children anymore and they are leaving. The stores
on Main Street are boarded up, sometimes burnt-out by desperately
bored and angry teens. The R. J. Peacock fish-packing plant is the
only cannery still operating, the seagulls lining its roof like
vultures. We see the rare tuna out there in the bay, but the draggers
have ruined the shallows for the bottom feeders. Many fishermen
have grouped together on tuna boats, working for free in the hopes
that just one fish will bring in enough to pay the bills. There
aren’t many lobstermen left. A few will go after whelks and
a few more for sea urchins. No local will eat that stuff. On the
main road into town there is a big weathered sign that reads: "Easternmost
Point in Maine." The teens at the local Red & White will
tell you, like a litany, “Lubec ain’t the end of the
world, but you can see it from here.” And we do see it, looking
out from Lubec toward the immense Bay of Fundy guarded by its thirty-foot
tides and whirlpools with names like “the Old Sow,”
and her numerous “Piglets.” Between the coast and the
end of the world is what we are here for. Because, here be monsters.
...
Hurricane coming. It is the last week of field research
and we can’t get out on the water. On the cliffs overlooking
the giant rip called Quoddy Road, the waves are spectacular, sheeting
up into the air as if monstrous island-long whales are blowing,
atomizing the ocean after a planet-deep dive. The storm whips so
fiercely Rox's small dog, Stretch, is half windborne, her ears sailing
out from side to side like airfoils.
Looming out of the driving horizontal rain, New England Aquarium's
field lab at 2 Bayview Street is a weathered land Leviathan, its
stacked maze of rooms overhung by steep slanted roofs bearing up
solidly under the assault. Inside, the chill is dissipated by the
buttery fragrance of popped corn, the hum of computers, and a landlocked
crew murmuring over newly arrived slides of the right whales we
are here to study, and, perhaps, simply witness as their numbers
dwindle. Light tables glow, and keyboards tap.
North Atlantic right whales were once so numerous that the sea
was black from Georgia to Fundy during their migrations along the
coast of New England. They are baleen whales, filtering minute copepods
in vast quantities from what are now, sadly, the same fast currents
used as shipping lanes. Even a fifty-ton right whale won’t
do well in a collision with a tanker, and the boats sometimes run
over whole courtship groups on the surface. Ship strikes, entanglements
in fishing gear, and polluted food seem to be finishing the job
the Basque whalers started a thousand years ago when they targeted
these whales, so rich in oil they were later termed “oil-butts.”
The whales became commercially extinct in the twentieth century.
The few left have been protected from hunting since 1935, but it
is a small population now. So today, instead of whales feeding across
the horizon, one can see humans sitting in a staggered line stretching
from one end of the research lab’s long workroom to the other,
feeding information about the few remaining North Atlantic right
whales into luminous blue computer screens.
The stormy fringes of Hurricane Fran have stopped all work out on
the water. The town dock is empty of fishing boats, even the seagulls
have scattered away into the gale. Our research vessel, Nereid,
is moored in safer harbor over in Eastport. Phil zipped over in
the Zodiac to check her lines and came back wringing stormwater
from his sleeves. Amy has been on the cliffs with Stretch, taking
a break from her computer and the incessant search to quantify the
living and forestall the dying of whales. The wind has sucked the
air from her lungs and she sails breathlessly back into the lab,
flushed with the exhilaration of the storm. Scot is on the phone,
explaining how weather can hold precedence over disappointed film
crews. His daughters Brenna and Keeley are combing the long hair
of their dog in the middle of the lab floor and arguing about the
best way to eat—or wear—Oreo cookies.
Jennifer and Carolyn sit and trade insults while they re-invent
the world on computer, creating models of the bay and our track
lines. Marty is bent earnestly over a light table, sorting slides,
her cockatiel on one shoulder nibbling at an ear. Lisa is going
through files and regaling the room with the raucous inside story
on the latest whale politics. Marilyn has printed corrections of
her aerial survey sheets spread over the kitchen table, keeping
company with Rox who is painting Admiral's tail flukes stirring
the wall above the stove. Once a ship called in a dead right whale
floating tail-up out in the bay, but it was only Admiral, our mad
matriarch, who loves to stand on her head and stir the air with
her tail. She’s the only whale I can identify from a mile
away. Phil knows them all.
I ask Phil to help ID a whale from the video clips I'm organizing,
while Moe and Chris debate methods for re-fletching the arrows used
for darting and satellite tagging in a narrow room between the lab
and kitchen. Everything being done and said around the huge old
house has something to do with right whales. The right whales to
kill that are almost no more. Giant, blubbery, buoyant, knob headed,
comb-toothed, North Atlantic right whales. It is thought there are
fewer than three hundred left and their numbers are dropping. We
seem to be on the brink of an irreversible act, to save or lose
this other species, so unlike us. I've read about these whales,
dreamed of them rolling in their giant tides. But with the arrival
of Fran it becomes uncomfortably clear that our time is running
out. Our field season is nearing its end and this long week of bad
weather rules out everything but indoor work, data analysis, and
lab repair.
Finally, the winds shift to a kindlier direction and Phil invents
a plan to get us all back out on the water. Amy, our captain, will
take most of the crew south to Bar Harbor where Moe has gotten the
use of research vessel Indigo to survey Brown’s Bank.
I'm envious, thinking of all the new sights I'll miss. But I have
to leave Lubec before the rest of the crew, and days out on the
Nereid are worth gold now. The party leaves and we few
go out to see what effect Fran may have had on Fundy, our Bay of
Fun, and on the right whales.
I fully expect not to see a single whale my last day. I think I
am as relaxed as I've ever been on Nereid, knowing it is
the end of something that may never be repeated. I thought I'd already
had my perfect moment.
...
It is the thickest fog we've had yet. Sounds are reduced;
the slosh and creak of the boat seems muffled—and the water
is unnaturally still. With no horizon we might be sitting on a pond.
We are still feeling the effects of the storm in its antithesis.
No one cares what happens next. The mist forces us to exist in each
quiet, eternal moment as if that is all there is. We play whale
roulette with the fog and just keep going. "I think we should
try over here," Marilyn insists, moving us from one
identically opaque spot to the next, keeping us out far longer than
would normally seem reasonable, considering we can see about fifty
yards or less. But then there is a pod of white-sided dolphins moving
with quiet puffs of breath through our circle of calm. And then,
"I think we should be over there." Marilyn insists
again and we are all so relaxed we go on and on, leapfrogging through
fog. I finally fall asleep, only to wake an hour later to the familiar
calls of "What frame are you shooting?" "Was that
whale broken or continuous?" "Does it have lips?"—whale
researchers identifying whales from the island-like callosities
on their heads and mouths. I sit up to a whole new day of bright
sun, and not a single wispy shred of fog left to smooth waters now
animated by whales.
I grab a notepad to draw, on a template, the identifying
patterns of white callosities on black whale skin. The callosities
are categorized as “broken” or “continuous”
islands and peninsulas, scattered in individual configurations around
the whales’ upper jaw and lips, like islands on a sea chart.
This drawing of “Broken, Two-Islands back,” will later
help us organize our photographs and match this whale—using
callosities like fingerprints—to the catalog of known whales.
We record her presence and behavior in this time and place, leaving
her unnamed for now, and move on to the next.
Rox spots a small whale breaching on the horizon and there seem
to be other whales arrowing in on a parallel heading. It looks as
if a courtship group is about to form. I want to move toward the
breaching calf and that seems to be Phil's intention, but somehow
we are on the same tack as the converging whales and we are drawn,
as if by whatever force draws them, toward a sight Phil says has
never been observed in all the years the Project has been monitoring
right whales in the Bay of Fundy.
First we stop to photograph a mother and calf that haven't been
seen before. Phil is excited by the possibility that they may be
new animals to the Bay. We are all focused on documenting the pair
for a brief flurry of time, and then, looking up, are stunned. In
a full circle around the boat, in water so calm and smooth you can
see entire whale bodies below the surface, there are twenty right
whales skim feeding, open mouthed. A single basking shark moves
among them, its triangular dorsal fin like a giant billboard. Some
of the whales are feeding in formation, a staggered line of dark
heads moving together through the blue-green surface. I am frantically
trying to get it all on video until Phil quietly tells me I am missing
the sight of a lifetime. I take the camera away from my eye and
really look. We are surrounded by a quiet whirlpool of whales. They
are no longer the lovely sleek animals we have seen playing and
courting, but suddenly sea-monsters at a glassy table, creating
new ocean wavelets with their huge open mouths. Wide gums show slick
above baleen plates overlapping as heavily as wet feathers. Stocky
tails pump forward like pistons. Eyes peer out sideways from jutting
cones where one expects sockets, like the independent, revolving
eyes of a chameleon. For the first time I can see the whole whale
and not just what shows when they surface to breathe. That may be
the one thing our species have in common after all. We both breathe
air.
I suddenly know where the odd sea-monster drawings in the museums
come from. I see these creatures that I am just beginning to recognize
as individuals—Mauveen and Knottyhead, Kleenex, Punctuation,
and the high-spirited Admiral our tail-stirrer—and they've
turned into incomprehensible beings simply by opening their mouths.
Their long baleen plates are tucked into a lower jaw almost separated
from each side of the head, leaving a wide triangle open in the
front where water streams in, filters through baleen, and rushes
back out over curved lips.
"Now I know why their tails are so big!" Marilyn says
softly, "They have to be incredibly powerful to push that mass
of water forward, like dragging a bucket over the side when the
boat is moving."
The double blowhole of the nearest whale snaps shut after a bubbling
rumble. It sinks and we can see the entire pattern of the head callosities
laid out beneath the water like one of our templates. The head swells
back to a bulbous body covered in the fungoidal circles of a moss
agate, the body is shorter, the flukes proportionally wider than
I pictured, after seeing them only in parts. The entire crew is
hanging, open mouthed, over the railing and for a brief moment not
a single camera shutter is snapping. We record the whales feeding
for hours. How can we possibly know what it is like to be them?
In the end we stop all pretence of work and cut the motor, drop
a hydrophone over the side, and listen to the moans and groans of
feeding. The sun is setting once again. In the dim light we continue
handing the headphones back and forth between us, sitting dead in
the water, not even attempting to follow when finally the group
drifts gently away from us, still feeding.
The moans grow fainter and I take a moment alone at the bow, rocking
and listening to the first and last sounds I'll ever know of right
whales. The forceful, shushing, trumpeting sigh of breathing on
every horizon.
...
There have been calving booms and droughts since 1996, but
ship strikes and entanglements have been among the primary factors
keeping right whale numbers down, currently, to around 392 known
individuals according to Phil’s 2006 count. The Right Whale
Gang has worked diligently toward changing the shipping lanes, helping
vessels avoid whales with aerial surveys and acoustic warning systems,
and attempting to develop whale-safe fishing gear. They have instituted
a yearly North
Atlantic Right Whale Consortium open to every discipline that
impacts or studies the whales. Their ability to incorporate multiple
disciplines is a landmark in joining advocacy and research. One
hopeful theory is that preventing the deaths of even two mothers
a year could turn the population around. But even after more than
twenty-seven years of research, funding is always uncertain.
Then, December 2006, Marilyn wrote that Admiral, the grand
old dame of the Bay of Fun, had become entangled in fishing gear.
Admiral, first photographed in 1979, age unknown, was big and old
and strong. She was the boss of the fleet, the tail sailor, identifiable
from miles off as she waved her flukes at the sky. Always biggest,
healthiest, most exuberant, Admiral got free of the nets that left
deep wounds on her peduncle and fluke. The net didn't kill her outright.
But, Marilyn wrote, she looked unhealthy and it seemed clear later
that she was failing. As I grieve for playful Admiral and hope for
her survival, she somehow personalizes a great sadness for all of
the less known creatures and species that are disappearing in this
century of drastic change. We've all shared air.
Note: All photos here have been taken with NOAA Fisheries permit
633-1763, under the authority of the U.S. Endangered Species and
Marine Mammal Protection Acts.
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