War of the Whales (37 page)

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Balcomb proposed a novel method for his orca census: counting each individual whale by photographing its distinctive dorsal fin. Previous whale censuses had relied on population estimates based on local surveys extrapolated over entire migration routes. Until recently, the premise that each killer whale could be differentiated visually was considered as laughable as photo-identifying every salmon in the Salish Sea between Washington and Canada. But for the past several years, a team of researchers to the north—led by the marine mammal director of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Michael Bigg—had been doing just that.

When Balcomb proposed conducting a photo-identification census of the orcas in greater Puget Sound, marine biologists still largely derided Bigg’s approach. But the first time that Balcomb examined Bigg’s catalogue of black-and-white photographs, he was convinced. Each magnified image of the left side of a dorsal fin revealed unique patterns of nicks, scratches, and scars, as individual as a human fingerprint. Balcomb managed to persuade Fisheries of the merit of the method, beating out the University of Washington for the seven-month survey contract.

That first season, Ken and Camille worked alone in a Boston Whaler they bought with the first Fisheries check, using the same Nikons that Ken had been carrying with him since his first expeditions on the
Lynnann
. They rented the house on Smugglers Cove, with its commanding view of Haro Strait, and worked nonstop through that first spring, summer, and fall.

First they distributed questionnaires to boaters, lighthouse keepers, and fishermen throughout Puget Sound, asking them to record all killer-whale sightings. Then they were out on the water at first light, every morning, tracking and photographing orcas until dark. Each night they developed and printed the day’s pictures, and then catalogued them. After collapsing into bed for a few hours of sleep, they’ d be up at dawn again to begin the next day’s survey.

Bigg had assigned a letter to each pod in the Northern Resident Community, A through I, and he gave each individual whale a number. Balcomb began his survey with J Pod, and he and Camille identified the distinct K and L pods. By October, they were convinced that they’ d documented each of the orcas in greater Puget Sound and had sorted them by sex and family grouping.

Their total was 70 killer whales. Balcomb calculated that the 50 juveniles that Griffin and Goldsberry had collected and sold in the preceding decade, plus the 13 orcas killed during capture operations, had depleted the Southern Resident population by almost 50 percent.

Balcomb’s bleak results were not welcomed by Fisheries or by the local aquariums, universities, and marine parks that had applied for permits to collect more orcas. If Fisheries accepted Balcomb’s assessment that the local orca population had been severely depleted, it would be obliged under the Marine Mammal Protection Act to implement a recovery and protection plan. No further capture permits could be issued until the species had recovered to sustainable levels. Fisheries declined to renew Balcomb’s contract.

That same fall, Michael Bigg submitted his final report to Canadian Fisheries. Prior estimates had put the Northern Community’s population in the thousands. Bigg’s count came to just 252. When he concluded that ongoing orca collections from British Columbian waters were unsustainable and recommended strict limits on wild captures, Canadian Fisheries shut down his survey and reassigned Bigg to other projects. Universities and aquariums on both sides of the border attacked Bigg’s and Balcomb’s methodology and results.

The following spring, John Twiss of the Marine Mammal Commission in Washington, DC, awarded Balcomb a $7,000 grant to conduct a confirmation study. That was the last federal or state funding Balcomb’s survey would receive for 28 years. Canadian Fisheries didn’t renew funding for the Northern Community survey until after Bigg’s death in 1990. But by the end of 1976, Balcomb and Bigg had resolved to combine and continue their annual surveys of the Northern and Southern populations of orcas, with or without government funding.

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Each summer, from 1976 onward, Balcomb found a way to keep his survey boats in the water and film in the cameras, despite his lack of funding. The orcas themselves proved to be powerful magnets for volunteers. Local islanders and far-flung whale enthusiasts would simply walk up the road at Smugglers Cove in early summer, knock on the door to his house, and offer to help. Balcomb enlisted other volunteers during his winter cruises aboard the
Regina
, and he covered gas and photo expenses by selling orca buttons and T-shirts and calendars in town. In the leanest summers, he resorted to eating roadkill rabbits.

The summers were always tight financially, but there was no shortage of camaraderie among the survey partners. The researchers on both sides of the Canadian border were constantly helping one another get by, sharing data and volunteers—including Naomi Rose, who was conducting her graduate research with Michael Bigg’s group. After Camille left that first winter, during the
Regina Maris’
maiden voyage, Balcomb recruited his half brother Howie Garrett to be his boat buddy. Best of all, Balcomb’s son Kelley, now a teenager, started spending summers on San Juan Island photographing whales alongside his father.

In 1979 Balcomb launched the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, at the tourist end of the island. He wanted to educate the public about orcas, build support for the ongoing census, and have a permanent repository for all the bones and skulls that were piling up at his house. A few years later, Balcomb founded the nonprofit Center for Whale Research to support his research. As his local reputation grew, he attracted a few high-dollar donors who contributed money and boats to the survey. Earthwatch began sending paying volunteers, which gave him a little breathing room. In the 1980s, whale watching started up in earnest as a local commercial enterprise, introducing the public to wild orcas and injecting tens of millions of dollars into the community each year.
²

Summer after summer, the census continued, and the database grew into one of the most complete profiles ever compiled of a wild animal population: births, deaths, diets, social associations, and complete family trees across two distinct communities and 18 pods in British Columbia and Washington. Balcomb’s and Bigg’s research offered the first science-based understanding of orca behavior and communication, and an appreciation of a mammal group whose social complexity equaled that of elephants and great apes. Perhaps most significantly, their census had uncovered one of the only matrilineal societies among whale populations. Male orcas stay with their mothers and maternal relatives throughout their lifetimes, and the matriarchs maintain a central position in the pod as multigenerational transmitters of the pod’s culture.

In 1979 Balcomb and Bigg presented their findings at the third biennial meeting of the Society for Marine Mammalogy in Seattle. The rousing reception they received from their peers was unimaginable just a few years earlier. In 1984 Balcomb and Bigg were invited to present their findings to the scientific committee of the International Whaling Commission in Eastbourne, England, signaling to Balcomb the final acceptance of photo identification by the worldwide whale conservation community. That was the same spring he met Diane Claridge aboard the
Regina Maris
. Somehow he always linked those two happy events in his mind. Two years later, in 1986, the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling worldwide.

His orca surveys had continued every summer since, the last 12 of them with Diane. Now that the beaked whales of Abaco had been battered and scattered, Balcomb felt even more determined to safeguard the Southern Resident Community of orcas that he’ d been watching over for the past quarter century.

A continent distant from the Bahamas, he struggled for perspective on the catastrophic event he and Diane had witnessed. After all the winters spent cataloguing the beaked whales, they had been powerless to protect them. Had they been lulled into complacency, he wondered, by the idyllic Caribbean seascape, blinded to the dangers that had lurked below the blue waters? Their efforts to document the mass stranding might turn out to be the most meaningful legacy of their work in the Bahamas. If so, had they done enough to force the answers to the surface?

* “Orca” and “killer whale” are interchangeable and correct names for the whale species
Orcinus orca
.

19

A Call to Conscience

Spending a few days on the water with the orcas was tonic for Balcomb. But by the third night alone in his house above the cove, he began to feel isolated and anxious. He kept trying to imagine what was going on back east at Woods Hole, at Fisheries, and at ONR. Ever since he’ d handed over the heads to Darlene Ketten, he had a queasy feeling he couldn’t shake.

Then his friend Jim Mead at the Smithsonian emailed to say that the necropsy had gone forward at Woods Hole without him, with just Ketten and Ruth Ewing attending. Balcomb didn’t have the heart to share the news with Diane, who was 4,000 miles away on Abaco welcoming a new group of Earthwatch volunteers.

That evening, Balcomb sat out on the deck eating some leftover lunch that passed for dinner, watching the last light fade on the cove. The underwater hydrophones were hooked up to the deck-mounted speakers, so he could hear the chatter of J Pod moving out toward Eagle Point. When the phone rang, he hoped it was Diane.

It was Michael Jasny from NRDC, calling to invite him to a press conference in Washington, DC, in a couple of weeks. It was being hosted by the Animal Welfare Institute to publicize the Bahamas strandings. Joel Reynolds would be there from NRDC, and Naomi Rose from the Humane Society. They wanted Ken to come talk about what he had witnessed and screen whatever video his team had recorded.

Balcomb told him thanks for asking, but he was tied up with work in Abaco and here on San Juan Island.

“You know,” said Jasny, “Ben White is flying in for the press conference.”

“I’m sure he is. Ben never met a press event he didn’t love.”

“Maybe you two could come together.”

“I’ll think about it,” was all Balcomb said.

Ben White lived down the road from Balcomb on San Juan Island. He was a no-holds-barred eco-warrior, a one-man band of environmental and animal rights activism. Balcomb liked Ben. Everyone did. He was smart, bighearted, and an effective instigator of protests that got press attention. Rarest of all in the world of animal rights, Ben had a sense of humor.

Part prankster, part hard-core ideologue, White had perfected the stagecraft of guerilla street theater. He understood that if you wanted to protect the environment or animals, you had to give the media something to lead the six o’clock news. When he joined the campesinos’ “peasant protest” against a porpoise hunt in Cancun, Mexico, he brought along 350 handmade dolphin costumes to make sure that Mexican television covered the event. And when he dressed hundreds of demonstrators in full turtle regalia to protest the World Trade Organization’s policy on turtle catches, papers around the world ran front-page photos. Humor was his favored tactic, but for White, having skin in the game was more than a figure of speech.

Long before he dove into the water during the Navy’s low-frequency sonar tests in Hawaii, White was scaling New York City skyscrapers to unfurl huge antifur banners during Fashion Week. Before he began defending animals, he was putting his body between ancient forest and loggers. A college dropout turned arborist and tree surgeon, White launched the first tree-sitting campaigns, perched 200 feet off the ground for four days to save redwoods in Humboldt County, California. Then he masterminded a blockade of logging roads using RVs to keep logging crews out of the Oregon forests.

White traced his special connection to whales and dolphins to a face-to-face encounter while swimming with a herd of wild dolphins off Hawaii in the 1970s. As he wrote to a friend at the time, “I had never seen such complexity, humor, and recognition in the eyes of any creature other than humans, and rarely enough in those.” On the subject of captive dolphins and orcas, White was an unyielding abolitionist. Balcomb had often heard him rail against SeaWorld’s Shamu Shows as pointless displays of dominance that degraded humans as much as orcas.

“What does it do to us to become so violent that we grab these animals out of the wild and then starve them until they’re willing to eat dead fish out of our hands and let us stand on their faces and brush their teeth with oversized toothbrushes? What does that do to our humanity?”

When White got arrested—for the 20th time, by his own count—for liberating captured dolphins in the Florida Keys, he used freedom of religion as his courtroom defense. He had recently incorporated his Church of the Earth and sanctified the defense of wildlife as its sacrament. When he moved to San Juan Island, he founded the Natural Guard, a tree care company that trained teenagers as organic arborists and organized protests against development projects that threatened the local orcas.