We co-produced two major trips this past summer: the interspecies tour of Japan in June; and an exploratory communication foray with humpback whales in Southeast Alaska in August. Both were memorable. Both leave the door open on future projects.
The humpback whale is a canny feeder. It dives directly beneath a school of herring or krill, swimming in a circle while releasing bubbles that rise in the water column and eventually form a cylinder of air around the prey. The fish won't pass through the bubble curtain, perhaps seeing it the same way it sees the water's surface. Then the whale vocalizes a slightly more monotone version of its famous courting songs. It sings this hunting song so loudly that the sound waves effectively paralyze its prey . The whale rises into the bubble curtain, open its huge mouth and gives entrance to several thousand pounds of salt water and incapacitated fish. It closes its mouth, immediately starts pushing its car-sized tongue up against its baleen mesh. Salt water is forced out. The krill or herring are caught up in the mesh. The whale sucks the animals down its throat. Another meal complete.
The humpback whales feed this way all summer long in the waterways of southeast Alaska. They are so numerous in parts of Frederick Sound north of Petersburg, that when the day is clear, it sometimes seems that a person would have to stay below decks if, for some crazy reason, he or she wishes to avoid seeing them. On a day when the water is flat like a mirror, there may be no better place in the entire world to experience large whales. A person might drop a kayak into the becalmed waters, and then just float on the surface waiting for a whale to draw near. This they do consistently, sometimes bobbing up and down on the surface, even staring into a person's eyes as if calmly and amiably taking the measure of any two-legged being who would enter their do main.
Gazing upon twenty or thirty whales at a time on a coastline with no signs of human habitation, no logging and a noticeable lack of airplanes or other boats, dredges up palpable memories of richer times, times before human beings commenced their killing ways with nature. One can imagine that this is the way the Bay of Biscay must have looked to a Basque fisherman a thousand years ago. This is what the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Maine looked like to the first European explorers. This is what the whaling grounds off Antarctica looked like as late as the 1930's. All gone. Knowing that, it is difficult to gaze upon this remnant population of humpback whales without cheering them in their innocence. And yet one also feels a deep sense of melancholy recognizing the fate that could await them with the mere flourish of a pen on some hifalutin document written a continent away in Washington DC.
It is these two contrary emotions that linger longest from the Interspecies Workshop held this past August; the one of being uplifted and a bit overwhelmed by the sheer majesty of nature, and the other of being saddened by nature's utter vulnerability in the face of the human marketplace.
The famous songs of the Humpback whales occur only in the warm water where the whales spend their winters---Hawaii, Bermuda, Mexico, Ogasawara Japan, Hervey Bay Australia. Like elk, like human teenagers, their singing is a courtship ritual, males showing off their vocal talents to attract females. When the winter is done, the Hawaiian whales, as well as many whales who winter in Mexico and Japan migrate north to the cold waters of Southeast Alaska where they concentrate on feeding their massive bodies. These Alaskan whales make no courtship songs. It was their intense, monotonic feeding song that interested us.
Playing music into the water via an underwater sound system definitely had its influence on the whale's behavior. One afternoon we came on a group of twelve in open water, stopped the boat three hundred yards behind the nearest one. Some of the whales were resting, a few others were feeding. I plugged in a guitar and started playing a pondrously slow raga in the key of E. Fifteen minutes after my music began, two pairs of whales came up on either side of the boat and started making circles around us at a distance of fifty feet. They remained silent as I played. Two disappeared, the other two moved in closer and simply hung there off the stern, twenty feet from the underwater speaker. In the raga, I began spacing my repetition of the tonic bass note so that it fell on the two whale's exhalations. Intriguingly, they began modulating their blows so that short melodies were produced. A woman picked up a drum and began playing an even beat. A man in a kayak ventured nearby and reflected the rhythm by slapping the sides of his kayak. The whales circled a few times and then lay on the surface just a few feet off the stern where the musicians had gathered. Listening through headphones, we began to hear a sound that someone described as angels crying. The low volume and the persistent echo indicated to me that the sound was actually being made at a substantial distance, and clearly not by the two animals hanging off our stern. The song persisted for several minutes as the raga developed in intensity. Then everything ended nearly synchronously. The two whales slowly moved off, I stopped playing, the faraway whale stopped singing.
We came on a large group of humpbacks the next day, although no one aboard the boat was versed enough in fluke ID to say if it was the same group as yesterday. These whales were feeding actively. I've been doing communication work with cetaceans for a long enough time to intuit that these whales would not respond. I doodled a few notes on a guitar to test the waters of our interaction. I soon stopped playing. There had been no change in movement or behavior, and ample evidence that these whales were too busy to mingle with us. We watched them making bubble curtains for a few minutes and then traveled on.
copyright, 1995, Jim Nollman
Interspecies Communication Inc. and
Interspecies Communication Inc. for Pacific