Written By :James Pilkington

Janie and her mother had been planning on going to Cameron Cove to walk the river to see the salmon run and the rich assemblage of life that gathers around estuaries like bears and wolves. While Janie and her mom were enjoying a nice walk up the river among giant sitka spruce, western red cedar and pools filled with spawning salmon, I was waiting out on the boat with Cohen and Neekas in Barnard Harbour, hiding from the strong outflow winds coming down Whale Channel, and just enjoying the quiet stillness of the harbour in the rain. I began heading back into Cameron Cove and received a call from Janie saying they’d be ready in 15 to 20 minutes for pick-up. I was pretty close to the river so I turned the boat back around into the breeze to wait for them and found myself looking at the distinctive blows and dorsal fins of orca, in the exact location where I was sitting just 10 minutes before! The next few moments were a flurry of excitement deciding whether to wait 10 more minutes to pick up Janie and her mom and hope the orcas will still be there, or head back into the harbour to find the orcas before they disappeared. Well, I chose to head out and see if I could meet the orcas! They’d just taken a dive and re-surfaced even further into Barnard Harbour, about 500m from King Pacific Lodge! These were transient orcas, a group of 7, including one very new calf. I was able to get a couple ID photos while the whales milled around in the harbour, then they began making their way out of the harbour to the West towards Red Fern Pt and Ashdown Island. I picked Janie and her mom up, and we went out to follow.

Large waves caused by strong outflow winds, and pelting rain greeted us as we exited Barnard Harbour. In light of this, we decided to slowly make our way back to Whale Pt while keeping an eye out for the orcas and were lucky enough to re-spot them crossing from Red Fern to Ashdown. After dropping Janie’s mom off, thinking the chances of re-locating the group was poor in the even poorer conditions, we set off to Ashdown hoping to get lucky. After spending a few minutes searching at the north end of Ashdown with no black dorsals in sight, wind buffeting and rain pelting, we were about to turn around and head back home when we decided to take a quick look into Casa Nave passage. To our relief and amazement, as we came around the corner of Ashdown into this productive little channel, we spotted the orcas tight together, like they’d just made a kill!   The group broke up and began travelling S very tight to shore. Juvenile sea lions were seemingly everywhere, poking their heads up from inside kelp forests and tight along the rock wall shoreline, yet the orcas weren’t interested. They continued travelling within feet of the shoreline, and as they travelled a growing group of young sealions began porpoising along the steep shoreline feet from the orcas, moving in the same direction!! This occurred for about 200m until the shoreline gave way to a small crevice into which 4 to 5 sealions leapt out of the water. As the orcas pushed forward, and reached the SE tip of Ashdown, a group of at least 30 young sea lions began porpoising like a pod of dolphins around the corner away from the travelling orcas! As the whales veered their course towards the sea lion rocks, we had a strong feeling that we were about to witness the true mastery of these apex predators.

As the whales approached the rocks, they did not try to conceal their presence or make a stealthy sneak attack as one might have expected. They swam up to the rocks and seemed to systematically ‘test the waters’. About 75 to 100 sea lions were hauled out on the rocks, another 75 or more were in the water gathered close the rocks’ edges while another group of 30 were tightly packed in a floating group over a submerged nearby reef. The sea lions were obviously agitated and aware of the orcas presence; the sea lions grew very attentive, poking their heads out of the water, bellowing calls. Some sea lions were jumping out onto the rocks, others were jumping into the water; there was a state of worried confusion. With the sea lions in a frenzy, the orcas travelled around the rocks, through small narrow passages between the rocks, and up to the sea lions over the reef. They then began to make tighter and tighter passes in a coordinated effort that was carried out in an almost rehearsed fashion. The group would move towards the rocks together, sea lions porpoising out of the way and jumping onto the rocks, the orcas making quick maneuvers within inches of the rocks, then moving away to group up, and repeat, heading back to a different area of the rocks. There were no obvious moments signalling that a kill was made, no injured sealions or floating sealion parts! But the orcas were obviously hunting, and whenever they re-grouped after making a pass of the rocks it looked like they may be sharing a carcass under the surface, but there was no direct evidence of any kills. I wonder how many sealions, if any, the orcas successfully caught and consumed?

Janie and I were wet, it was getting late and the light was fading quickly. Hermann had reported on the radio that he was watching the whole event unfold from the comfort of the lab at Whale Point via the Sealion Rock Camera! The Sea lion rock camera is a joint venture between Pacific Wild, the Gitga’at First Nation and the North Coast Cetacean Society, and the Nature Conservancy. Making use of some nifty wireless technology to send live video from a camera mounted near the rocks to the lab at whale point, we are able to monitor activity at the rocks remotely. Eventually we hope that this can be live-streamed over the internet so everyone can experience the majestyof this place, but for now Whale Point will have to do. This encounter had been very successful thus far, we acquired the ID photos that would allow us to tell who these whales were and were able to observe their hunting behaviour.   With the thought of having a warm place to watch the rest of the show from and darkness closing in at sea lion rocks, we decided to yank ourselves away from this unforgettable encounter. As we pulled away slowly, the orcas were still busy working the different groups of sea lions, showing us why they are at the top of the marine food chain.

September 24, 2011

By James Pilkington

Winter feels like it has arrived early this year;  the big Aleutian Low is getting pretty comfy out in the Gulf of Alaska.  For the past two weeks, storm force winds and pelting rain have become the norm, until today! Last night, conditions were calm enough and the tide high enough to get the boat off of the beach (where we safely stow it during storms), which meant today was going to be a day of working on the water!

 The first order of the day was to head to the Squally Channel hydrophone station to try to fix it after it ceased working during the last big storm.  On our way across Squally to the hydrophone site on Campania Island, Hermann and I were amazed at the large flocks of Pacific Loons on their southward migration.  And they are not the only ones looking for southern latitudes; flocks of scoters, Mallards and Sand Hill Cranes have also been passing by in the masses the past week, marking the peak of the fall waterfowl migrations!  The waterways around Gil Island and Caamano Sound are major migratory bird corridors for both the northward and southward migrations for thousands of waterfowl; the birds follow precisely the same routes around Gil Island as the proposed tanker traffic for the Northern Gateway Pipeline proposal.

 On our way back from a successful trip in Squally, we spotted a humpback whale on the west side of Ashdown Island and went over to try to get ID photos.  It wasn’t a surprise to spot a blow over there, the west side of Ashdown Island is notoriously productive.  Half a mile W of Ashdown Island, the bottom lies nearly 1000ft below the surface, but as you move closer to Ashdown the bottom rapidly ascends to within  less than 100ft of the surface.  This well-placed steep underwater cliff forces tidal currents to rise to the surface in an event known as ‘tidal upwelling,’ which brings cold water and rich nutrients to the surface where they create amazing amounts of productivity.  And just to make it even more interesting, the tidal currents from Whale Channel, Squally Channel and Campania Sound all collide at this particular location, potentially driving even more upwelling!  Well, if it wasn’t a surprise to see the humpback there, it also wasn’t a surprise to find hundreds of Bonaparte’s gulls and Black-legged Kittiwakes, dozens of Common Murres, Pacific Loons and Red-necked Grebes, several marbled murrelets, and the odd Rhinoceros Auklet gathered along the entire length of the shoreline.  The whale was moving erratically and making shallow dives, typical sub-surface feeding behaviour, but there was no indication at the surface of the type of the prey it was feeding on. Krill? Herring? Pilchard?  The birds were not any help in this respect either, as they seemed to be just ending a big feeding session soon before we arrived.

 This humpback eventually took us down to Sea lion Rocks at the South end of Ashdown, where at least 250 Steller Sea lions were hauled out growling, roaring, and gurgling in their special sea lion way.  We tried looking for one sea lion in particular, like trying to find a needle in a haystack.  Last week, a guide from a local ecotourism lodge called us to report seeing a subadult sea lion at the rocks with a plastic packing strap stuck around its neck, so tight that it was close to causing an open wound.   Plastic debris in the ocean is a major cause of pinniped (seals, sealions, furseals and walrus) deaths, and there is a large public awareness campaign underway to try to bite this bad littering habit of ours in the butt.  Even though most of us do not place trash directly into the oceans, it finds its way there in the wind, the drainage systems, by falling off boats, etc.  Which means we need to do one more thing to those packing straps and plastic can holders before throwing them out; break the loop!  All we have to do is look at something before throwing it out and ask ourselves if the article has a closed circle.  If it does, cut it or break it so that the circle no longer poses a risk to sea creatures in the event that the piece of trash does make it into our oceans (which happens much more than any of us realize, even if we live in places far from the ocean like Saskatchewan or Ontario).  We did not end up finding the sea lion, and were forced to ponder the thought of the painful few years it has left to live as we made our way back to whale point.

 Another item that was on the list for today was to go to the Skinner Island hydrophone and remove it before the storms removed it for us!  The Skinner Island hydrophone is a very special hydrophone because its purpose is to record the deep subsonic vocalizations made by fin whales.  Fin whales have been sighted very frequently in the past 4 years in the waters between Caamano Sound and Douglas Channel, and now have a near-constant spring and summer presence; one of the only nearshore coastal areas where fin whales are consistently seen close to shore (we do not yet know why, or whether they are also present in winter).  One of our major research questions right now is to try to understand how daily oil tanker traffic could affect fin whales in this unique area, but to answer this question we need to know a few things, like how many use the area, what they do while here, how frequently they are here, and whether they vocalize while in the area.  This last one is where the recorder on Skinner Island comes in.  Because fin whales vocalize in a frequency that is too low for us to hear, we do not know if they are making any sounds or communicating in these waters.  To get past this,  we have teamed up with the DFO Cetacean Research Program who generously supplied the equipment (recorder, hydrophone, cable, battery and solar panel).  After installing the hydrophone about 50-60ft below the surface, we set the recorder to record for 10 minutes every 20 minutes (or 10 minutes of every 30 minute period), all day every day.   We then download these recordings at the end of the season and analyze them using spectrograms (visual representations of sound) to look for the low frequency calls made by fin whales.  If we find that they are vocal then we can look at how frequently they vocalize, and what types of vocalizations they are making in order to get a sneak peak into their behaviour and better understand how the loud low-frequency sounds made by tankers could impact fin whales.

On Friday, after catching the bipolar British Columbian weather system in a particularly good mood, I headed out with living whale encyclopaedias Janie and James for our Gil Island boat survey. There aren’t many better ways to enjoy a beautiful day than cruising on the boat, taking in the scenery, across a sea so calm it looks more like mirrored fabric than water, rippling lightly in the breeze.  The islands here are stunning in themselves - and that’s before you even start on the wildlife.

Interspersed in the waters around Gil, we sighted around 30 Humpbacks and one Fin over the course of the day.  Our first “pocket” of whales was up around Ashdown, a feeding group who had broken up but were still lounging around a while after.    They surfaced at similar times, despite keeping quite a distance between individuals, kindly allowing Janie her ID shots, carefully documented by yours truly.  James, who I’m pretty sure has underwater vision, spotted a load of krill around the boat (several minutes before I was able to, despite the day’s astounding visibility).   The hovering school appeared like the patter of rain on the surface of the still water, as if the droplets fell from underneath the ocean instead of down from the sky.  Unfortunately for the krill, we were not the only observers of this beautiful spectacle, the disturbed surface acting like a beacon to seabirds in the area.  Snack time!  Seeing the little guys up so close, I was struck by how crazy it is to think that something as enormous as a whale has evolved to feed off miniscule krill.  But then a Mitch Hedburg quotes sprang to mind -‘rice is great if you’re hungry and want a thousand of something’ (I now think of krill as whale rice).   After getting the best we could in fluke shots from a rogue two who’d split off, we headed up Squally channel in search of more whales.

After stopping to check out a solitary Fin whale (by Fin Island – I was amused), several blows in north Lewis passage brought us to a halt.   I have to clarify that I’m a whale enthusiast, not a scientist, and I don’t think that when I arrived in Prince Rupert, grinning naively at the thought of seeing my first humpback, that I could really comprehend just how huge and detailed these creatures are.  Each encounter re-wires the way my brain understands whales – I nearly jumped out of my skin the first time one breached by the boat.  The size!  When we’re spotting whales from afar, we’re really only looking at the smallest part of the whale: the fin or the fluke.  It’s a given, but to really grasp the entirety of what’s happening under the water is something I don’t think you can ever really visualise accurately.   The size, the movement, the details, the action, the sound. After being lucky enough to observe a group bubble-net feeding next to the boat couple of weeks ago (and sneak a listen through the hull), I found that the close proximity to the animals influenced the way I perceive them from a distance.  With each new experience, I feel a little *bzz* in my brain as it adds another piece to the puzzle, building up a mental picture of the way these creatures exist.  It’s a jigsaw which I think very few people have come close to completing.

Luckily for me, there’s a whale out there that’s intent on showing the good people of Caamano Sound just how epic his species is.  After a nearby whale went for a dive, leaving us without a good ID shot, we scanned the nearby water to see where he might surface.  Janie casually joked that he was probably under the boat, when James (employing his superhuman underwater vision once again) pointed out that was indeed his location.   Before the whale had even surfaced, both had their suspicions it was Ox, a local whale notorious for turning the tables on whale-watchers and embarking on a bit of people-spotting.  He had evidently decided that we were in need of a full close-up.  No complaints from our end.

The light, the visibility of the water – everything worked perfectly to let us take a full look as he swam from one side to the other (we scurried quickly back and forth as he passed under the boat, nearly flinging ourselves off the sides to get a better look).   Just a couple of feet away were his long, white pectorals, his vast body so much larger than our little boat, and as he drifted by our side he showed us in one panning shot all the subtle nuances of his body  that distinguish him as unique.   The size, the detail, and also the control with which he executed his movements were incredible.   I got the feeling he knew he was being admired, and a little smug about it at that, appearing for us again and again at arm’s reach.    After he finally took off, we got back to ID’ing the others in the area, buzzing from our encounter and my brain rewiring, again.

He wasn’t finished yet.

In another 15 min or so, he was back.  Evidently it takes more than a few spins around a boat to satisfy Ox.  Out of the water he popped, spyhopping just a metre away from us with all the grooves, bumps and intricacies of his face on display.   He was probably startled by the sound of three jaws hitting the deck.   I’m not sure what he was thinking when he looked at us (Are all boat people red? Why isn’t their nose on their back?), but seeing his eye on us, and knowing that the whale was as engaged and as curious about what lies on the surface as we are about what lies beneath it, really left me awestruck. It’s an experience that will ripple and resonate in my memory.   In my head, the *bzz* starts again, reconfiguring the picture I thought I had.  I think that the term “gentle giants” is not quite on the money here; I’d paint Ox as more of a “friendly leviathan”.   Curiosity satiated, he was off again, probably in search of whale rice and other boats to inspect.

It is 530am and once again we awake to the early morning bubble net feeding calls of resident humpback whales on the hydrophone speakers. I have become dependent on this routine of feeding calls filling the lab at first light as the start to another day filled with the joy of knowing whales are close by. This morning is different though. By the time we approach Squally Channel in our boat, Elemiah, not a single blow can be seen. How can this be after so many days of whales in sight with a glance in every direction? We travel, stop, listen; not a sound. It is then that I realize that just like us, whales also need to rest. Sure enough, with this moment of insight we hear a soft blow, then another. They are sleeping, spread out across the channel, floating at peace until another breath ripples the stillness of the water. We have a choice, do we disturb these sleeping giants to take photo IDs or do we show respect and move on? Of course, there is no real decision to be made and we slowly make our way out of this sleepy whale heaven. This is when karma comes into play. A call from the lab, Hermann is excited and instantly my gut senses he’s going to report ORCA!  Sure enough, James at Ulric Pt has spotted at least 20 Orca heading NW from Rennison, the R5’s (including R5, R24’s and R4’s), the R17’s, and the old man himself, R12.  If we decide to join this group of Blackfish it means crossing open ocean. We call Hermann back for a weather update; it is supposed to pick up late this afternoon but should be fine for the rest of the morning. We decide to just go for it and fly like the wind over the water to spend at least a few hours with the most dynamic whales ever encountered, the Orca! It takes us 40 minutes but the water was in our favour and the crossing was quite calm with just a bit of swell. There they are,  3 different matrilines of orca, in each group there are at least 3 to 4 large males, females and even a few juveniles, and oh, the cutest new born, so young he or she is still quite orange. To observe this new one, just beginning life, trying to keep up with her/his older siblings, moving by his mother’s side with such joy and spirit, right across the entrance to Enbridge’s proposed tanker routes, reminds me deep inside why we must save this place from even the thought of giant oil tankers traveling these waters. I must admit, in most of my days with whales, watching how they move through this environment with such grace and innocence, thinking of what may come truly breaks my heart but also fills me with the strength and courage necessary to do all we can to save this place for whales. Then, just as all these thoughts are passing I see a sight I would have never imagined.

A young fin whale is now following this group of orca. I shake my head, is this even possible! Sure enough, just as the family of orca come up for another breath, so does the fin whale, just 50 meters behind, curious and showing no fear. How does he know these are the fish eating orca? If he made this mistake with transient orca he would be risking his life. The orcas appear to accept this lone traveler at their side, as he gently comes a bit closer, now traveling 50 meters to the side of the group, then 25 meters; is this lone baleen whale trying to communicate with his fellow toothed whales? Does he instinctively know that he is safe when in close proximity to this family of killer whales? There is another group of 15 orca to the north so we decide to leave this group with their baleen companion. To our shock, when we arrive to the second group of orca there is another fin whale, this one is huge, probably about 70 feet long and is also attempting to be a part of this orca family, traveling at a distance of 50 meters behind, breathing when they breathe, diving when they dive. I am so excited to witness this unusual behaviour and desperately try to get a picture, but I cannot get both groups in the same frame. There is no doubt that the more we learn about whales, the more we realize how much we don’t know! We travel out towards the Estevan Group of islands. I have never been this far west, the rocky shorelines are an obvious hint that the weather here can turn fierce, and quickly. We know we cannot go any further but the desire to follow this parade of orca families is strong; we do not know when we will see them again. I take a deep breath in time with the orca; my soul soars as their perfect bodies glide effortlessly past the shore, giving Caamano Sound that picture perfect moment that says, beautiful BC. The wind picks up from behind, we know we must be wise and consider our own safety. We turn back and travel home to Whale Point.

Enbridge, beware; your oil tankers are not welcome here!