War of the Whales: A True Story

by Joshua Horwitz

  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

  DAY 35: APRIL 19, 2000

  Smugglers Cove, San Juan Island, Washington

  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.

  Balcomb respected Ben’s all-in commitment and his willingness to get arrested for what he believed. But civil disobedience and dressing up in costumes weren’t Balcomb’s style. Neither were press conferences. He was determined to keep up the pressure on the Navy and Fisheries to investigate what had happened in the canyon. But he wasn’t ready to carve “whistle-blower” across his forehead. He’ d worked hard to earn the respect of his peers for his surveys on orcas and beaked whales. He worried that if he stepped onto a podium with Reynolds and Rose, he’ d put his credibility as a researcher—and the orcas—at risk.

  Despite having spent decades under the spell of whales and working to protect the orcas of Puget Sound, he’ d always been wary of the Save the Whales movement—or, for that matter, save-the-anything movements. Animals, he revered. It was the humans who rushed to their rescue with their political agendas that Balcomb often had trouble with. In his experience, the animal rights crowd tended to look down on the “humane” community as mainstream sellouts who cared only about cat-and-dog rescue. Meanwhile, the humane players called the conservation groups “species-ists” because they were enthralled by charismatic megafauna such as elephants and pandas that looked good on refrigerator magnets. And the animal liberationists thought that anyone who wasn’t ready to break and enter to liberate a captive animal was a hypocrite.

  Balcomb only met John Lilly once, at a 1977 marine mammal conference where Lilly was shunned by his colleagues. But he was well acquainted with several other Navy-funded researchers who had crossed over to become public advocates for whales. He always found it ironic that the Save the Whales movement was jump-started by a SOSUS acoustician like himself. Frank Watlington was a legendary figure in the secret world of SOSUS and something of a men
tor to the acoustic analysts of Balcomb’s generation. Since 1950, he’ d run the first proof-of-concept sonar station constructed offshore from Bermuda. Like Balcomb and every other SOSUS operator listening for Soviet submarines, Watlington heard lots of whales calling to each other. Over the years, he became an aficionado of the eerie vocalizations of the Atlantic humpbacks that wintered in the Bermuda waters, compiling their distinctive calls on hundreds of hours of audiotape. As whaling continued to deplete the North Atlantic humpback population throughout the fifties and sixties, Watlington worried that his personal archive of recordings would soon be the only surviving record of this dwindling species and their unique calls. When he met a bioacoustics researcher named Roger Payne in 1967, Watlington decided to draw back the curtain of SOSUS just enough to show the world what it risked losing forever.

  Payne had studied bat biosonar under Donald Griffin at Harvard, earned a PhD in biology at Cornell, and conducted ONR-funded research into whether or not owls echolocated during their nocturnal hunts. He determined that owls used acute night vision rather than hearing for hunting and navigating in the dark.

  In 1966 Payne read an article in Scientific American that reversed the direction of his research. “The Last of the Great Whales,” written by one of Lilly’s bioacoustics disciples, Scott McVay, was a cri de coeur against the lethal toll of international whaling on endangered species of cetaceans, including the Atlantic humpback population, which had dwindled to barely 5,000. When Payne learned that the closest resident humpbacks were based in Bermuda, he persuaded the New York Zoological Society to sponsor a study.

  Soon after arriving in Bermuda, Payne and his wife and research partner, Katy, were introduced to Watlington by a mutual friend. Watlington played them the tapes he’ d been recording for the past decade from the SOSUS hydrophone array mounted on the ocean floor 30 miles off the coast. Roger Payne was taken immediately with what he described as the humpbacks’ “exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound.” Watlington lent him a copy of a tape to analyze.

  Payne brought the tape to Scott McVay at Princeton University, where the biology lab was using sonographs to analyze bird songs—the same type of sonographs that Balcomb had used at his SOSUS stations to diagram the sound signatures of submarines. McVay graphed the humpback whale calls, and he and his mathematician wife, Hella, and Roger and Katy Payne assembled to analyze them. They reached a startling conclusion: the whale calls featured discrete phrases that were repeated regularly, revealing an underlying musical syntax and composition. Payne concluded that the humpback’s chorus of baleful moans were songs, perhaps some sort of mating aria performed exclusively by male humpbacks. Later, when he studied humpback populations in the South Atlantic and the Pacific, he discovered that the songs differed from one whale community to another.

  In 1971 Payne and McVay published their findings as the cover article of the journal Science. The article stirred considerable academic debate and interest. But Payne wasn’t content to make waves merely in academic circles. He wanted to rescue humpback whales from extinction. So he did something rare, and professionally risky, for an academic researcher. Like Lilly before him, Payne decided to promote the whales’ talents directly to the public.

  Instead of writing a book, Payne produced an album of their music. While the Science article was crawling through the peer review process, he convinced a small California record company to release Watlington’s recordings as an LP entitled Songs of the Humpback Whale. It was an immediate sensation, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and joining the Beatles’ Let It Be and the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty as iconic albums of 1970. Near the end of the decade, in the largest album pressing ever, National Geographic inserted ten million flexible vinyl sound sheets in its magazine. Payne proved a tireless evangelist for the wonder of whale songs. He traveled the talk-show circuit, from The Tonight Show to The David Frost Show, while McVay delivered the message of singing humpbacks to the whaling industry’s ports of call in Japan.

  Rock, pop, and jazz critics debated the musical merits of the humpback songs, whose ethereal melodies resonated with the New Age genre of electronic music. Kids who had grown up on the theme song from Flipper could now clamp on their Koss headphones and tune in to the vibes of a 40-ton contralto. The album’s cover featured a humpback breaching against an all-white background, and the liner notes included an antiwhaling manifesto calling on listeners to help save the humpbacks.

  Whale scientists, for their part, were divided on whether or not humpbacks were actually singing, and if so, what about and to whom. But there was no disputing the influence of humpback whale sounds on the listening public and on the burgeoning movement to save the whales. The album was released two years before passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, when whale oil was still a heavily promoted ingredient in many American consumer products, from motor oil, to cosmetics, to soaps. Sperm whale oil, the highest-viscosity substance on the planet, was used as a lubricant in US nuclear-powered submarines. The breakout success of Songs of the Humpback Whale went a long way toward stigmatizing whale oil in consumer products—and elevating whales from by-the-barrel commodities to rock star celebrities.

  In 1977, when Voyager I was launched into space to probe the outer solar system for intelligent life-forms, its cargo included a gold-plated audio disc engraved with greetings from the secretary-general of the United Nations and the president of the United States, as well as a medley of musical works by Beethoven, Chuck Berry, and—courtesy of Frank Watlington and the Navy’s SOSUS hydrophones—the songs of the humpback whales. John Lilly, no doubt, was smiling up at Voyager I from his hot tub atop the cliffs of Big Sur.

  • • •

  If Payne used whale melodies to win the hearts and minds of the public, it was another bioacoustics researcher—a colleague of Balcomb’s in the Pacific Northwest—who aroused more militant opposition to whaling.

  Paul Spong, a neuroscientist from UCLA’s Brain Research Institute, was hired by Dr. Newman of the Vancouver Aquarium to study two wild-captured orcas it had acquired in the late 1960s. Spong quickly grew fascinated by their vocalizations and their responsiveness to sound and music. Just as quickly, he lost interest in trying to evoke conditioned responses with dead-herring rewards. Like so many whale and dolphin researchers, the intense personal bond Spong formed with his study subjects eventually turned him against research on captive animals. During a 1968 lecture at the University of British Columbia, Spong declared his research subjects “intelligent and articulate communicators unfit for captivity.” When he recommended relocating them to a semiwild penned environment in Vancouver Sound, he was fired.

  Spong later moved to nearby Hanson Island and launched the nonprofit OrcaLab devoted to the observational study of orcas in the wild. Spong’s ethos of “research without interference” was modeled after the noninvasive, long-term studies of gorillas and chimpanzees in the wild conducted by Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall. It was a novel approach to whale research in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, whale researchers at international meetings were debating both the scientific and ethical merits of studying whales and dolphins in captive settings versus wild environments.

  For Spong, it was a natural progression from opposing captive research to confronting the whaling industry. Greenpeace began its first oceangoing protests in 1971, when a handful of young activists in the Pacific Northwest plotted to disrupt nuclear bomb tests on the Alaskan island of Amchitka and subsequent bomb tests in the South Pacific. A few years later, Spong convinced Greenpeace to redirect its oceangoing protests at the Russian and Japanese whaling fleets.

  In April 1975, with a rousing send-off by 30,000 supporters gathered at the Vancouver docks, Spong and a small Greenpeace crew launched Project Ahab aboard a vessel Spong had equipped with hydrophones and underwater speakers so he could soothe the whales with his flute playing. A month out, they intercepted a Soviet ship chasing a pod of whales. Armed with bullhorns and video cameras, they boarded inflatable
Zodiac rafts and inserted themselves between the whalers and the whales. In the midst of the hunt, they captured dramatic and gory footage of a sperm whale being harpooned.

  Two weeks later, a somber Walter Cronkite broadcast the video clip on the CBS Evening News, detonating what Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter called a “mind bomb” in the American psyche. Overnight, Greenpeace became a media darling. “For the first time in the history of whaling,” spouted the New York Times, “human beings had put their lives on the line for whales.” When the next Spong-directed Greenpeace expedition sailed from Hawaii, it was trailed by a crew from ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

  Greenpeace’s direct-action antiwhaling campaigns would remain a staple of network news for the ensuing decade, until the International Whaling Commission announced its worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986.

  APRIL 20, 2000

  Smugglers Cove, San Juan Island, Washington

  Balcomb was awakened early the next morning by the sound of a chain saw. He didn’t have to guess whose it was. Whenever Ben White came to visit, he carried a chain saw in the back of his Natural Guard pickup, just in case Balcomb had some trees that needed pruning.

  When he crawled out of bed and went outside to look, Balcomb could see White hanging from a safety line strung between two 80-foot firs behind his house. The trees were full of dead branches, and White was perched atop the tallest one, cutting away the bad wood. He worked his way down the topmost layer of the first tree, and then fastened the chain saw to his belt and swung across to the other.

  Balcomb guessed that White was showing off his blue-collar cred, perhaps to establish parity with Balcomb, who could dismantle and rebuild any kind of car, truck, or boat engine ever made. For the next hour, Balcomb tried to focus on pasting photos into his J Pod catalogue and ignore the chain-saw racket and the acrobatic figure outside his window working his way back and forth between the two trees. An hour later, White had reached the ground and reduced the dead timber to a neat stack of firewood.