tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73848513677034306122024-02-18T18:53:10.162-08:00Forest for the Finsmind, nature, spiritherongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-3589536595553859462016-03-27T18:43:00.000-07:002016-04-07T12:06:53.143-07:00Here We Are AgainSo, it has been a while...again. I have spent my fall and winter learning a new job, something that promises to balance my year out nicely with the summer season on the whale boat. I'm currently doing classroom presentations about resource conservation for K-12 students, and the work is rewarding, challenging, and really teaching me a lot. As someone who has identified as an environmentalist for my entire adult life, it is humbling to learn what I don't already know. Not sure my household agrees, as I am asking them to be more careful about their own resource use. But more on that later, that's not the point of this post.<br />
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My household is privileged to own a small sailboat. And truly, it is a privilege. We are not a household of high means in the very expensive place that we live, but sailors figure it out because once you've lost your heart to the sea there can be no other way. It is, however, sometimes hard to get time to enjoy the boat, and moorage can sometimes be tough to make after all the other expenses of the month. We have been keeping our boat at a marina about 2 hours away, and so not using it nearly as often as is good for us, or for it. We made the decision to move to a closer marina, and moving the boat was the longest period of time I have spent on our boat so far.<br />
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In late March, the weather is anyone's guess, but we were blessed with a placid day of puffy clouds and sun. Since we weren't planning to sail (we needed to make time to the new marina to get there in daylight, and the winds along our planned route are fickle and capricious on the best of days), the calm waters didn't matter.<br />
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I think this picture captures pretty perfectly why it is worth it to keep the boat. Moments like this, in the sun on gorgeous water in the inland sea, are precious and restoring in the midst of the demands life. But of course, if you're on a boat in this inland sea, there is another thing you might encounter...whales!<br />
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As we entered the north end of Saratoga Passage, I checked <a href="http://www.orcanetwork.org/Main/" target="_blank">Orca Network's</a> Facebook page, knowing that gray whales had been seen in recent weeks and wondering if any had been spotted that day. What I learned there was that there was a group of Transient Killer Whales moving north toward us in the passage! I had deliberately not considered this possibility when moving the boat, I didn't want to be disappointed if we didn't see them. But there the were, heading right toward us.<br />
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We caught up with them just north of Holmes Harbor. The water was mostly devoid of other vessel traffic, just one other boat on scene with them. In the still afternoon we could hear the blows clearly as the whales passed us, and we turned and followed them a short while since we had a little bit of time to spare.<br />
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When I'm on the whale watching boat in the summer, I often notice people completely missing the experience of being out with the whales and enjoying them because they are so very focused on getting just the right shot--something that is extremely difficult to do if one does not have specific equipment and a lot more time, if not patience and experience, than we have available on one of our tours. Sometimes I suggest to people they might want to just look at the whales and buy postcards with nice pictures on shore--of course, there aren't as many postcards to buy anymore, in this age of email and text messages. But the point remains. If this is the only few hours of your entire life that you are going to be here with these animals, maybe put the camera down and just experience it for what it is, appreciate the beauty and magic of that moment.<br />
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And, apparently I am true to my word on this in my personal behavior. Here is the unedited footage of my encounter with the Transients, taken with my phone. Clearly, I am not paying attention to the frame, because I am focused on the whales!<br />
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<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/160560056">Transient Killer Whales in Saratoga Passage</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user2556535">Herongrrrl</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-69053587796003944352015-09-07T19:57:00.003-07:002015-09-07T19:57:42.253-07:00Another New Baby!The <a href="http://www.whaleresearch.com/" target="_blank">Center for Whale Research</a> has just announced (on Facebook, so I don't have an article to link to yet) that L91Muncher was seen this morning with a newborn calf! This makes the fifth baby born into the SRKW this year, and there is rumored to be another one due any time now in K pod...after nearly three years with no surviving babies, this is fantastic news! Welcome, wee L122, and may you live a long, healthy life!herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-12117918398589532432015-09-05T09:25:00.000-07:002015-09-05T10:31:08.174-07:00Something BeautifulFinishing my week on the boat, the last weekday run of the season for me, I was challenged to figure out how to describe the sunset. All evening as we came home, the water was pewter beneath the storm clouds except where shreds of green and blue reflected the patches in the sky where the clouds were not. Little wisps of rainbow appeared along the eastern sky, never a whole rainbow, just these little patches where the Sun is hitting the virga in just the right way. It gave the southbound trip a surreal feeling, as though somehow we sailed inside the facets of giant crystal all around the Salish Sea.<br />
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Just naming the sunset's colors would make it sound garish: every shade of blue from periwinkle to neon electric blue was there, somewhere through gaps in the the clouds, and every shade of blue, purple and grey visible in the water. The setting sun backlit cumulus clouds rising over the Olympic Mountains in colors I couldn't decide what to call and finally decided were the color of dahlias, the dahlias that range from orange through yellow through pink that grow in my front yard. Really the clouds were cantaloupe melon colored, but to describe them so makes them sound opaque and thick. The light was clear and lambent,the color of embers in a lively fire: bright, clear pink-orange. But that makes it sound warm and the weather was chill this evening, cooler than it has been for months and months.<br />
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The seasons have turned, of a certainty, although the calendar still gives us a few more weeks of official summer. The redneck phalaropes are back on the Salish Sea, erupting in flashes of white underwings from the seaweed mats where they hide on the water as the boat approaches. Golden big leaf maple leaves drift beneath the water surface when I tie the boat up in Friday Harbor. The Heermann's gulls are beginning to leave, while the Steller sea lions are coming back in droves; the jellyfish become scarce, and I have seen the first grebe of the season. At home, I prepare for a new off-season job and the coming school year, and find myself thinking about putting in my fall garden and hoping a few of my green tomatoes will ripen before Samhain. But mostly I appreciate the beauty of the change. It is refreshing to end the day not covered with a sheen of sweat, not exhausted from the heat, which has been well above average and challenging for me this summer. That is the intangible beauty of the summer-fall transition, the change in attitude that comes from the cooler air, the feeling of the change more than what it looks like, the shift in energy as the other animals and plants change behavior, location, and sometimes state in the face of the oncoming darkness.<br />
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How do you describe what cannot be seen? How can words capture and convey the feeling of standing between sea and sky, below the edge of the forest, the great vault of air and water before and above that lifts my soul as though I could effortlessly spread wings and fly out into it, beneath a sky more autumn than August, in the living stillness of a late afternoon devoid of mechanical human sound yet alive with the small noises of water and woods? That was <a href="http://www.parks.wa.gov/540/Lime-Kiln-Point" target="_blank">Lime Kiln State Park</a> on a recent weekday evening, a few people scattered on the shore in reverent silence, watching and waiting. Here is where we come in hopes of the whales passing famously close to shore, so close you can make eye contact with them, because the water gets deep immediately offshore and they come in to play in the kelp there. The park is locally known as Whale Watch Park, although it was originally established as a scenic preserve around the lighthouse and historic lime kilns; now it is a Mecca for those who wish to observe the SRKW in their natural habitat.<br />
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I had been to Lime Kiln a few times before, and one time was able to glimpse the whales in the far distance. This recent trip, I hoped, of course, for the close pass, the whales up against the rocks where I could see their eyes and feel their breath on my face. Although they do sometimes surprise us with a close pass by the boat, it is something I can never get enough of, and here, at the park , it would be on my own terms, not having to maintain my professional demeanor for the passengers. I arrived, with my daughters, a couple hours before sunset, with the idea that we would have a picnic dinner and enjoy and evening there, and hopefully the whales would come by. We had seen them from the boat earlier in the day, to the south of the park, so it was certainly well within the realm of possibility. We had dinner, and the girls began to explore the rocky shore, while I kept a vigilant watch toward the south, my last known position for the whales.<br />
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Miraculously for this busy stretch of Haro Strait, where the deep draft cargo ships pass between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Georgia Strait on their way from the port of Vancouver, BC to the Pacific Ocean, there wasn't a boat in sight. In the stillness, I heard the first blow...and there, well offshore, was a whale passing to the south. They were far enough out, and the day warm enough, that heatwaves along the surface of the water distorted the view through my binoculars. It sounded like there were many more whales out there than I could actually see...but hearing their breath, the distinctive PHWOOSH that I can't quite capture accurately with English phonemes, was spellbinding. I stood transfixed, watching the distant fins I could see. And then, out of the corner of my eye, a fin sliced the wrinkling water much closer to shore! "Look!" I shouted to the girls. "Oh, look look look look look!" As though it was the first time I had ever seen one. And this one, I knew! It was L92 Crewser, and a moment later, his aunt, L90 Ballena. They were the closest to pass by, still a few hundred yards offshore, but clearly visible. Others followed, and I watched raptly through my binoculars, particularly intrigued by a group of females and calves, too far to identify, who traveled in a thick knot together, as though just coasting along the current while they engaged in different social activities, pectoral slapping (we could see the slaps, then hear them a moment later as the sound traveled over the water), spyhops and logging. I was mesmerized, entranced, enthralled. As always.<br />
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About a week later, I found myself in the company of a transient killer whale superpod. At least two family groups, I'm still not sure exactly who, but for the time we were with them they appeared to be resting. Killer whales don't sleep like we do; to give up their consciousness while sleeping would mean they would drown, since for them breathing is a conscious act. So, like other members of the dolphin family, they "turn off" half their brain at a time and cruise along slowly, often in a long row, synchronising their breaths so they surface and dive together. When a group of "sleeping" killer whales comes to the surface, you see a lot of fins at once, and even if it isn't the breaching everyone hopes to see, it is a very impressive sight.<br />
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There are moments when time moves differently, seeming much faster or slower than it really is. Being on a whale boat with people who have come from all over the world to see whales, and you have seen them in the distance but the others haven't yet, and you're waiting for them to come back up, all eyes on the water, watching and waiting, and you don't know where or when they will appear again, five minutes can feel like forever.<br />
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This particular morning with the sleeping whales, they were diving for 5-6 minutes. I stood on the bow, watching all around the boat and waiting, knowing they could show up anywhere although they had been moving in the same general direction for a while. We hadn't seen them for a good six and a half minutes, a pretty long drive even by transient standards. And then, suddenly, immediately in front of the boat--not in a danger of being hit but so close it takes all our breath away--they rise as one, tall columns of steam rising above their backs as they exhale. A little boy in front of me who has been asking great questions all morning suddenly cries out that the boat shouldn't be so close to the whales. He was listening when I explained the rules earlier! I tell him he's right, they surprised us, hear how is just turned off the engines? And then he says, "There's mist on my face," and I realize it's on mine too--the very breath of those whales is on my skin. A slow building euphoria takes hold of me, as I register this way in which I have been touched by a killer whale for the first time. Incredible, and wonderful. And we weren't even to the San Juans yet. The day continued with close passes by L22 Spirit and L85 Mystery off San Juan Island, and some time with a pair of humpback whales in the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, who also chose to surface right next to the boat after a long dive. Beauty in the water, beyond my ability to adequately describe.<br />
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<br />herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-91214445119790823972015-08-24T14:29:00.000-07:002015-08-24T14:29:06.205-07:00On Environmental Education at the End of the WorldAs I am writing this, my state is on fire. Massive wildfires are sweeping across the eastern half of Washington, always the drier side, but in this year of unprecedented drought and heat, even moreso. I cannot fathom what it is like to be there, to witness these enormous storms of flame racing over the landscape, to be a firefighter trying to do anything to make a difference in the face of this literal inferno.<br />
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Even here on the "wet" west side, which is of course dangerously dry this year too (and there are fires on this side, though not nearly as large), we are impacted by these enormous fires. The prevailing winds sweep most of the smoke eastward, but our sunrises and sunsets are lurid red and the horizon is heavy with haze from westward-leaking smoke. As my boat heads out each morning, the skies are grim with smoke the further north we go. I haven't seen Mt. Baker in a week at least.<br />
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Last week, on a day off, I went to a local zoo with my daughters and some extended family. We decided to watch a stage show at the zoo, which was clearly a very sophisticated presentation with a customized stage, great special effects, really entertaining animals and a good overall message emphasizing that it is good to go outside, suggesting geocaching as a fun thing to do while you're there, and that getting involved with <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/citizen-science/" target="_blank">Citizen Science </a>efforts was a worthwhile thing, too. But. The show began with a little vignette in which Our Hero was trying to figure out why frogs weren't eating all the mosquitoes this year. After a brief search, Our Hero discovered that the frogs in the pond were "covered with trash" so they couldn't catch the mosquitoes. And that is where my faith in humanity faltered a bit, and the dedicated environmental educator in me wanted to weep.<br />
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Now, I can't say of a certainty that the massive wildfires in Washington (and other parts of the west) right now are a result of Global Climate Change, but it's a pretty good bet that the drought that is exacerbating them is part of it. It is certainly possible that a massive drought all up and down the west coast of North America, that has been going on for years in some areas, is just a coincidence, a part of the normal cycle that is bigger and deeper than we understand with our limited data (weather and climate have, after all, been doing their thing far longer than we have been keeping track of it, and when one considers that<a href="http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter17/chapter17_04.htm" target="_blank"> it takes 20,900 years for all the possibilities of astronomical influence on the tides</a> to play out, it is worth considering that we really don't know that much about the overall cycles of climate with the limited records we have available to us). But I kind of doubt it.<br />
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I confess that I have kept my head in the sand about issues of Global Climate Change, figuring selfishly that I would not live to see the worst of it. I wanted to save myself from the profound grief of watching the ecosystem that I love with every cell in my body dying a slow, painful death. Turns out it might be a faster death than anyone anticipated, as the very <a href="http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/snowpack-drought-has-salmon-dying-in-overheated-rivers/" target="_blank">salmon in our rivers are dying from water that is too warm</a>, which of course will have dire consequences for the SRKW. The impacts of climate change are happening swiftly and mercilessly, and I am left with only my faith to believe in any possibility that those species I count among my non-human family and friends will adapt as swiftly as they need to in order to carry on.<br />
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In the face of this, frogs covered with trash seems to me to be the most trite, useless example of an environmental problem that could possibly be given. Especially since frogs are creatures that actually move, so generally speaking even frogs living in a garbage-laden environment will be getting out from under the garbage. When I coordinated a kids' environmental club some 20 years ago, the "cost" of membership was declaring something that the new member would do to help keep Puget Sound clean. The overwhelming majority of kids said "pick up trash." Even then I felt a little despair, reading these responses, because it is such a superficial, cosmetic issue.<br />
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Trash is unsightly. Trash can injure wildlife, and does so, although this is not so common or critical a threat for most species as one might imagine (if ten salmon are swimming in a river too warm to have enough dissolved oxygen to sustain them, and one gets caught in a 6-pack ring, they will still all die). Trash is really easy to pick up and put in the garbage or recycling. We can feel like we have control over trash, so it is an easy target and low-hanging fruit for an introduction to environmental responsibility and activism. And when you are speaking to a general audience, you need to consider the lowest common denominator, and start with that low-hanging fruit.<br />
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What makes me want to weep over this example is that we are, very literally, facing the end of the world as we know it. I am not so doom-and-gloom to imagine that the human race is going extinct or anything like that, but massive change is happening and will continue to happen, that will almost certainly have an enormous impact on some very basic things about our lives--like where our food and water come from, and what plants and animals will remain to share the world with us. Unless every single one of us, starting today, goes out and starts planting hundreds of trees (and realistically, most of those seedlings would die here right now for lack of water, unless we were also allocating water resources our region may not possess to keep them well watered), climate change is going to keep careening headlong toward whatever the new normal will be. As someone who loves the ecosystem I grew up in and finds ambient temperatures over 75F to be miserably uncomfortable, I am not really excited about what that new normal will be.<br />
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And faced with these rapidly occurring uncomfortable changes, I question whether or not we can ethically limit ourselves to discussion of "safe" environmental activism with general audiences. Sure, keeping it simple like that is comfortable and doesn't cause anyone anxiety or concern. But we MUST be made uncomfortable, anxious and concerned in order to get to the point of changing our behaviors if we want to continue to live on a planet that has things like comfortable temperatures, green forests, coffee, chocolate, seafood, and the ability to continue making irresponsible choices about having too many children in the name of religion. Failure to recognize that and act on it, and we'll all be eating soylent green and applying to government agencies for the privilege to breed in a world where you wouldn't want to be a kid anyway.<br />
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Generally, I subscribe to the "no catastrophes before 4th grade" rule in environmental education. Why raise your kids to be sad and anxious about issues they have so very little influence over? It has, rightly I think, been suggested that children raised from the cradle with awareness of larger environmental issues will disengage out of a need for emotional safety and therefore not become the problem solvers of the future that we need. As a child of the Cold War, I understand; many of my peers believed very seriously they would never see adulthood and made choices in their adolescence that had some pretty serious impacts for their adult lives. Global Climate Change and the dire predictions of what might happen could certainly create the same kind of fatalistic zeitgeist among my daughters' generations. But in the recent conversations about race issues in the U.S., I heard someone mention that white children are often sheltered from the idea of racism while children of color must be raised with knowledge of racist realities for their own self preservation. White privilege begins at home, because who wants to teach their kids how awful people can be to each other? Every parent wants their children to grow with hope and a positive outlook on life, and what better way to destroy that than by holding forth the evidence of how untrue it is? Yet some parents have no choice but to present their young children with this information for the sake of their survival.<br />
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I submit that, in the same way white parents must start teaching their young children about racism (beyond the scope of this post, but for now I'll just say that until social justice is achieved, environmental recovery will be impossible, and if it makes you angry or upset to consider that possibility I beseech you to examine the source of those feelings), we must also start teaching all of our children about the ecological realities we are living in, because our children's survival depends on it. We can no longer soft-pedal reality, of race or environment, and expect any positive long-term outcome in either realm.<br />
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This post is a lot darker than what I like to put out into the aether, but I've been feeling it strongly. If you've read through this far, thank you for sticking with me. I recommend you go outside now and find a little patch of space to share with some nonhuman beings for a while. We humans are very resilient creatures, and we can survive through a lot. I still believe it is possible for us to reverse (to some degree) and restore things in a way that most of us (human and nonhuman) can survive, even thrive, and carry on. But in order for that to happen, all of us need to allow ourselves to be educated to an uncomfortable level, and change our behaviors as we see fit to do so, unless we want to wait for forces beyond our control to force those changes. It's already happening...my city has voluntary water restrictions in place, but may have to impose mandatory ones if enough people don't respond to the voluntary request. A small example in a huge bigger picture. Take the initiative, and take action. If you have to start with picking up trash, because it is quick and available and actionable, go ahead. But promise me you'll make that the first step to doing much more.herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-24808974419916745262015-08-14T09:18:00.002-07:002015-08-14T09:18:46.332-07:00Love and UncertaintyI lost my first pregnancy to miscarriage.<br />
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Finally, after being so careful for so long, waiting for the "right time" to start a family, I was pregnant, and completely thrilled. I was young and healthy, no family history of reproductive problems, and had no reason to expect that, ten weeks in, I would receive the devastating news that I was not, after all, going to have a new baby in my arms in a few short months.<br />
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I found a great deal of solace and support on an internet forum for other women who had experienced pregnancy loss. Some had faced multiple losses, and every time a new pregnancy was announced there was a collective holding of breath through the first trimester to see if this one would be "sticky."<br />
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There was a conversation on that forum about dealing with the uncertainty of another pregnancy that may or may not result in a living baby. Some women felt like it was easier to try to remain emotionally unattached to the potential baby until they had passed the point in the pregnancy of their previous losses, and then it would be "safe" to start investing in the idea. But one woman said she loved her babies from the moment she knew she was pregnant, because she knew that she might not see them born, and wanted to love them as much as she could for long as she could while they were alive.<br />
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I was reminded of that conversation earlier this week.<br />
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One of the passengers on my whale watching boat asked the question, will the drought have any implications for the whales? And the honest answer is, yes, it absolutely will. Baby salmon need a lot of dissolved oxygen in the water for their tiny, inefficient gills to function. Cold water holds more dissolved oxygen than warm water does. Normally, the heavy snow pack in the mountains around the Salish Sea melts slowly over the summer and keeps the salmon-bearing waters nice and cold. This past winter, the snow didn't happen, and now the water temperatures in the rivers are higher than ever recorded, and fish are dying in that water because it is too warm for them. What this means is that the rate of "escapement" for baby salmon this year will probably be very low, which means that, in another five years or so when this generation of Chinook returns to the rivers, the return rate will be very low. And that means the SRKW will have a hard time finding enough to eat here.<br />
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One of the difficulties in managing the salmon population (leaving aside for the moment the supreme arrogance of the assumption that humans actually do know enough to "manage" any natural system appropriately) is that every single salmon-bearing stream has its own genetically distinct population of salmon, and every stream is uniquely vulnerable to circumstances that can have a huge impact on the escapement and eventual return of each generation born in its waters. Maybe conditions are perfect for high escapement on a given stream in a given year, but a landslide blocks salmon passage on a given year, or heavy rains carry too many toxic substances to the stream from surrounding streets and the salmon of that generation die off or have their reproductive capabilities destroyed.<br />
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When something like that happens to an isolated stream or river system, the others can sometimes make up for it. A couple years ago, the Fraser River Chinook return was dismally low, so the SRKW took themselves out to the Washington coast, where Chinook runs were at record highs. It was a tough year for the whale watching boats, but the whales themselves did very well--all the SRKW babies born last winter were conceived that summer amid an abundance of food. But if climate conditions mean that <i>all </i>of the rivers are experiencing low salmon escapement in a given year, when that generation of salmon is supposed to return, it will be a very low return all around. And that low return will likely continue in a cycle into the future, until and unless conditions improve significantly, and maybe even with a little nudge from humans to help. This, of course, assumes that conditions to sustain salmon continue to exist at all here in the Salish Sea, which is a real question as climate change accelerates.<br />
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At the moment, Washington State and British Columbia are only in the first year of drought. And hopefully (a wholly inadequate word to express my feelings on the matter) it will only be one isolated year of drought. But looking south to California, where the drought has been dragging on for years now, it can't be assumed that we aren't heading down the same long, dry road. The SRKW rely on salmon from rivers along the west coast, from about Monterey Bay in California to the Fraser in British Columbia. That's it. That's what they've got. A long term drought along the west coast could very literally be a death sentence for this population. Each of the matrilines I know and love could starve to death in the next 5-10 years, easily. The fish they rely upon are already endangered, with little public will to change behaviors as necessary to restore their populations. And, while I try to stick my fingers in my ears and ignore the evidence, there is more than a little reason to believe that at this point, all the public will in the world won't make a difference if the climate is moving beyond the point of being able to sustain Chinook salmon in the Salish Sea.<br />
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Now, the SRKW are remarkably intelligent animals. I believe they are aware of their plight, to some degree, and that they are intelligent enough to try to address it in some ways. Changing their diet is an obvious one; if they didn't insist on eating Chinook salmon nearly to the exclusion of anything else, they could do just fine. And we know they <i>do </i>eat other kinds of fish, although not nearly so regularly. In the past week or so I have seen some reports about some members of Kpod harassing a porpoise, and there have been past reports suggesting that some of the SRKWs may occasionally indulge in some marine mammal hunting, if not eating. There are other food sources available, should the whales choose to use them. But, intelligence and wisdom aren't the same thing. There are plenty of examples in human culture of groups of people doing things that are maladaptive, because that's the tradition. And maybe the whales are bound up in the same kind of thinking. There is no way to know, we can only observe and see what they do with the situation as it develops.<br />
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But every day I spend with my beloved SRKW, in the back of my mind I know that I may outlive them, that there is a very real possibility they will be nothing but stories to my grandchildren, should I be lucky enough to have any. Perhaps one day I will hold one of my daughter's daughters on my knee and tell her about the day J42 Echo waved at the boat, the day L77 Matia brought her tiny baby L119 Joy right up to the bow, and Joy did a headstand and flipped her flukes at the adoring passengers. I will try to explain what it was like to see all of Jpod surfacing together in Rosario Strait against the backdrop of snow-covered Mount Baker in mirror-smooth waters. I will try to describe how thrilled I always feel when I first spot the tall fins from a distance. As I write this, I hope and even pray with every fiber of my being that those stories will just be the precursor to taking my grandchildren out to meet the grandchildren of Echo, Joy and the others. <br />
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What do you do with your heart when you learn a loved one has been diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness? How do you guard your emotions when you are newly pregnant for the second, third or sixth time but you have no living children yet to show for it? How do you care for a species that so captivates your heart, soul and imagination when there are only 81 left and their food source is dwindling? Not questions anyone wants to answer, but questions we are faced with. Maybe it is easier to disengage, close the emotional connection, and lessen the potential pain.<br />
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My choice is to love them as much as I can for as long as I can, while they are still alive.<br />
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<br />herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-87694385733583394172015-07-31T00:46:00.002-07:002015-08-01T15:40:28.417-07:00Arbitrary CategoriesWe humans are really good at categorizing things. Pattern recognition is, after all, a survival skill: these plants are edible, these will kill you if you eat them; this animal is good to eat, this one will steal your food, this one thinks you are good to eat, etc. These things can be somewhat arbitrary, though, since different human cultures disagree on which animals are good to eat vs. which animals are good to keep as pets or working animals. Maybe the killer whales do, too. After all, to a large carnivorous cetacean, a harbor seal pup and a mature Chinook salmon are about the same level of filling, but a resident will pass by the first to eat the second and a transient, vice versa.<br />
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I find it a curious thing, how humans categorize things and then just assume that categorization has some inherent truth to it, when most often those categories are totally based on a particular experience or perception that may have no bearing in greater reality. Critters on the beach at low tide are a good example. If you study intertidal marine invertebrates, you will learn about tidal zones and the different animals who live in different zones. It's presented as a kind of gospel truth: you will never find sea stars above the lower intertidal, there are just some animals who don't ever occur up high on the beach because they would dry out and die in the hot sun.<br />
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Once upon a time I was asked to do a beach walk for a group of girl scouts who had been doing a unit on oceans. It happened to be late November, and the time of their regular meeting was not really a great one for having a low-tide beach walk, but we worked with what we had and explored a narrow strip of rocky shoreline just at sunset. It was cold, but at least mostly dry that day, and the season was a typically wet one. I was a little disappointed that, given how low the tide was, we were only going to see a few things--the things I had been taught to find in the upper intertidal, because you only found certain animals there...right? Imagine my surprise when we discovered <a href="http://www.wallawalla.edu/academics/departments/biology/rosario/inverts/Echinodermata/Class%20Echinoidea/Echinoida/Strongylocentrotidae/Strongylocentrotus_droebachiensis.html" target="_blank">green sea urchins</a> and <a href="http://www.beachwatchers.wsu.edu/ezidweb/animals/Aeolidiapapillosa.htm" target="_blank">shaggy sea mice</a> waaaaaaay up high on the beach where they "didn't belong." I couldn't understand it, not a single reference I could find could explain this anomaly.<br />
<br />
And then I realized: all the research that had been done to categorize the intertidal animals of the Salish Sea had been done during extreme low tides, during the day. As it happens, those daytime low tides here happen near Summer Solstice and into the summer, and our usual summer drought climate means all those tender squishy critters need to stay low on the beach or risk becoming anemone-leather before the next high tide. But in late November, when the days are much shorter, cooler, and wetter, hanging out near the high tide line is not nearly so risky. It makes good sense, biologically, to mix up your territory, because if you're too predictable, you make easier prey.<br />
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Still, it seems this kind of categorization is something humans can't do without. We need categories, hierarchies, levels of affiliation and allegiance. "Favorites." I am forever perplexed by the idea that each individual needs to have a single, favorite something...color, food, sport, whatever. Whenever I am posed with a security question for an online account, I need to choose very carefully the question that doesn't require me to declare a "favorite" something, because my favorite now might not be my favorite in a month or a year or even an hour. Consistency, as they say, is the hobgoblin of a small mind.<br />
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This is true on online quizzes as well, although it is something of a frivolous example. Often a quiz will show a number of pictures and ask you where you would prefer to live. If there's a picture of water and a picture of forest, or a picture of a waterfall and a picture of the sea...how do I choose?? I live where all of these things are beautiful together in ways they can't be alone.<br />
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So it is gratifying to me to observe one of my favorite summer phenomena in the San Juans: the salt water dragonflies. They do not, of course, breed in salt water, because they are fresh water insects. But often at the dock, and sometimes even out in the middle of the straits, I will see a big, beautiful, blue darner dragonfly flying past. I first encountered these creatures at alpine lakes in the Oregon Cascades, and remember vividly an afternoon I sat very still letting one hatch out of its larval form on my knee, unfurl its gossamer wings, and eventually fly free. They are one of many species of dragonflies here in the Pacific Northwest, and among the largest. Their abdomens are like chips of cloudless sky, so vividly blue. (This will sound ironic, but they are among my favorite creatures...yes, I have several, but I can never choose one above the others, even though it might seem like I could given the primary subject of this blog.) To see these creatures that you will never find in any field guide to a saltwater shoreline flitting about over the open water reminds me that, whatever categories our human minds place on the world, the world will keep on doing what it likes. The dragonflies love to fly over saltwater here, and to me it's a marriage of the marine and upland environments that I recognize in my soul as well.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix04Uhe_fkIxkizUJUpLw6AoXe90cpxT3vvH1BkvqbSW4Q2EKwl84Jbss5RYEzTvk71N2Ly2GfVtKAnUMUbkNUWT4qatz2xk4ws91c0Z_d2bCL51CkvpIZkvK0cqbM_yvZthxJt65Ycww/s1600/Blue+darner+from+Smith+Island.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="269" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix04Uhe_fkIxkizUJUpLw6AoXe90cpxT3vvH1BkvqbSW4Q2EKwl84Jbss5RYEzTvk71N2Ly2GfVtKAnUMUbkNUWT4qatz2xk4ws91c0Z_d2bCL51CkvpIZkvK0cqbM_yvZthxJt65Ycww/s320/Blue+darner+from+Smith+Island.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></h4>
<h4>
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<center>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This blue darner flew into the cabin on my whale watching boat near Smith Island, miles from any freshwater source. It circled the cabin and landed, apparently exhausted, on a window sill. I kept it safe for the rest of the cruise and let it go at home, where I knew it would find plenty of companions.</span></center>
herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-12325854744731554842015-07-25T12:23:00.001-07:002015-07-25T12:23:16.515-07:00Busy, busy...lots of time on the boat and various other obligations are keeping me from writing a proper post just now. But two quick things:<br />
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1) IT'S RAINING. This is wonderful. The temperatures are cooler and there has been rain off and on for the past couple of days. It doesn't break the drought, but it sure feels and smells fantastic.<br />
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2) <a href="http://forwhales.org/blog/item/197-rescue-of-stranded-beach-transient-orca" target="_blank">A happy story from further north, of a young transient killer whale who found herself stranded but, with a little help from some humans, rode out the low tide and swam free again. </a> herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-77987771646975700622015-07-18T19:55:00.001-07:002015-07-18T19:55:12.735-07:00Drama in the deep?No sooner do I post about Onyx and Granny when there seems to be something up between them. Apparently J2 Granny is spending more of her time now with the J19 family group, composed of J19 Shachi, J41 Eclipse, and new grandbaby J51 (not yet given a nickname). Whale watchers out yesterday reported Onyx traveling along and making some pretty loud, piteous calls on the <a href="http://orcasound.net/" target="_blank">San Juan Island hydrophones</a> last night. Onyx was spotted with a K pod family group today. This is all very curious and I am wishing, not for the first or last time, there was some way to know what was going on with the SRKW socially, some way to understand it aside from the human assumptions that are all we have with which to interpret their behaviors.<br />
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L87 Onyx was born into L pod, but lost his mother as a subadult. He hung around with K pod for a while, before J8 Spieden seemed to adopt him when he was a young adult. Spieden, who often traveled with Granny and Ruffles, died in 2013, and it was at that point that Onyx and Granny seemed to become close companions. <br />
<br />
Recent research has shown that <a href="http://www.livescience.com/23191-mama-s-boys-may-explain-killer-whale-menopause.html" target="_blank">adult male orcas who lose their mothers are significantly more likely to die themselves in the subsequent year</a>, although don't know why that is. This research points to a compelling mother-son relationship, which seemed in Onyx, Spieden and Granny's case to be so important as to generate a foster-son relationship between the younger male and the matriarchs. But at the end of the day, we've only been researching this species, and specifically this population, for about 40 years now, so to claim that we "know" anything about animals whose interactions we can only observe for the fraction of their lifetimes they spend at the surface of the Salish Sea is pretty presumptuous.<br />
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In any case, I'll be watching what happens with Onyx closely. He is a favorite of mine (really, which of them aren't? But he is one I can identify easily at a distance, so I am more aware of time spent with him), and I hope everything works out in his favor. Hopefully I will be fortunate enough to see him tomorrow, when I'm out on the whale boat for the day.herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-63436593143684883402015-07-17T09:00:00.000-07:002015-07-17T09:00:05.673-07:00On Names for Living ThingsNames are curious things. What we call another living thing says as much about as, or more, than it does about them. Think of what we call each other, the endearments and the epithets, inspired by our own perceptions and feelings toward another and not necessarily about any inherent truth. In the Western world, most often our parents choose our names for us before we are born, based on the memories of past relatives or their hopes for the person we will be, without knowing anything about our personalities.<br />
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There are some who find the name "Killer Whale" problematic. How can assign the name "Killer" to these animals, who demonstrate such strong family bonds, emotions, and intelligence? Who can be so like us, gentle and curious, expressive and loving? A passenger once said to me, "Killer? But they're so beautiful!" as if beauty and killing are somehow opposite. <br />
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If you've ever seen the Transient Killer Whales hunt, you know where the name "killer" comes from. They are vicious, calculating, cunning hunters. They are merciless toward their prey, seeming to employ psychological warfare as much as their powerful jaws in the hunt. I have seen a transient killer whale drape the entrails of a seal over her rostrum like a trophy. I have seen porpoises hurled through the air, frantically flailing their tails in an effort to escape the killers. There is no question why this is one of their common English names.<br />
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Many prefer to refer to these animals as "orcas," derived from their Latin name, <i>Orcinus orca.</i> However, the Latin translates roughly as "demon from hell," which isn't really much better than "killer" in my estimation.<br />
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Locally, "blackfish" was the term I was raised with. My grandfather, a commercial fisherman, railed against the blackfish who competed with him for salmon. When my mother saw them swim past our house one morning, when I was in my earliest throes of whale obsession, she burst into the house calling, "the blackfish are out!" It is the name preferred by my Snohomish <a href="http://lushootseedresearch.org/index.php" target="_blank">Lushootseed</a> language teacher (the Lushootseed word for this animal is impossible to print in an English alphabet, and nearly impossible for a native speaker of English to pronounce). When I made the mistake of using the word "orca" in class, he informed us that he refused to use the word because it "was from a dead language meant to confuse people," and that statement has been the source of much reflection for me about how we use language to relate to other living things. Of course, <a href="http://blackfishmovie.com/" target="_blank">"blackfish" is also the name of that famous movie about Tillikum and Dawn Brancheau. </a>Because I still occasionally run across a passenger who doesn't know that killer whales are mammals, though, I don't use "blackfish."<br />
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And then there is the matter of which population of killer whales we're talking about. The SRKW are usually referred to locally as "residents," more recently "rezzies," (not a term I use). That is the term that distinguishes them from the "transients," with a much more offensive shorthand term. But then some people were upset that "transient" had a negative connotation, and decided to call them "Bigg's" killer whales. We might just as easily have started calling them Salmon Eaters and Mammal Eaters, but that wasn't how it happened.<br />
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As I mentioned in my last post, I dislike naming one animal after another, which is why I still refer to the mammal eating killer whales as Transients. I also prefer to call Dall's porpoises by their alternate name, "spray porpoise," which I feel is more descriptive of their behavior anyway. Of course if I refer to them that way nobody knows what I'm talking about, because Dall's porpoise is the accepted English common name...not so, yet, with the "Bigg's Whale."<br />
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It is my impression that naming one animal after another (human) animal reinforces a perception of humans owning animals, being somehow removed from the animal experience and superior to it. Any student of animal behavior can tell you how different from animals we are <i>not</i>, the desire to anthropomorphize aside.<br />
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After all, if I told you I was thinking of a beautiful living creature that lived all over the world, had different diets, customs and languages among its different populations, but had in common strong family ties and emotional bonds as well as intelligence and curiosity, and the ability and propensity to be a vicious killer...would you know if I was talking about a human, or a killer whale?<br />
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<br />herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-21851199294057085142015-07-16T17:28:00.001-07:002015-07-16T17:28:23.092-07:00RenewalIt has been a long time!<br />
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When it was confirmed that J1 Ruffles had died, I lost heart for posting. The whales seemed to lose heart too. Fewer breaches, less excitement. And very few babies, a big concern for the fragile Southern Resident population.<br />
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Two years ago, the Fraser River Chinook salmon run was dismally low. We hardly saw the SRKW at all. Transient Killer Whales* came in to the Salish Sea and gave my whale watch boat something to see, but I missed my friends. Happily, they were gorging on record Chinook runs on coastal rivers, far beyond the range of my boat. <br />
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Beginning last fall, we started to see the fruits of those record runs, when a new Lpod baby was spotted in late summer. But sadly, that baby didn't survive. Another huge blow came last December when J32 Rhapsody was found dead on a Vancouver Island beach, pregnant with a full-term female calf, her first.<br />
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And then J16 Slick, 42 years old, surprised us all with a brand new calf first spotted on New Year's Eve. Two more calves were born to Jpod--including Slick's own first grandcalf--and another newborn was seen with Lpod. Four new babies! And so far, all are doing well. I am so grateful.<br />
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This summer has provided me a lot of time with my friends, watching the new babies play, seeing Ruffles' grandson, Ripple, growing into a healthy subadult, and Ruffles' son Blackberry growing his adult fin that looks more and more like his father's each time I see him. L87 Onyx has been given the coveted spot of J2 Granny's foster-son, and it makes me glad to know that the orphaned Onyx and Granny have each other.<br />
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The whale boat delivers curious gifts sometimes. A couple weeks ago, I met a pair of women on the boat who were just finishing a week at a writers' retreat on Whidbey Island I have sometimes considered applying to. They encouraged me and extolled the wonders of the retreat location, and were captivated by the whales and what I could tell them about their social structure. We spent most of the southbound cruise in deep conversation, speculating about the whales' ways of being. I felt really energized by the encounter. In what I am sure is a related development, in recent days my muse has been pestering me to write for a wider audience than just myself, so I'm reactivating this blog to that end. We'll see what the muse has in mind for me next.<br />
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*There are those in the research community who insist upon calling these whales Bigg's Killer Whales, or even Bigg's Whales, after Dr. Michael Bigg, who is considered the "father of whale research" in these parts. (J26 Mike is named in his honor, too.) My personal feeling is that we shouldn't call animals after people, who are, after all, animals too. More on this later. herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-10401330327153081082011-03-12T10:41:00.000-08:002011-03-12T10:41:42.246-08:00DrearySpring is really trying to happen here now. A robin woke me up before dawn last week, singing its spring song, and I have since heard a few robins singing the same song morning and evening. The elderberries are showing tiny green leaves at their branch-tips, the ornamental plums are blooming pink and white, the daffodils are starting. But the weather is uncertain; turbulent winds and roaring surf one day, relentless pouring rain the next. This being a weekend when I could have worked outside in the garden, it is, of course, a dreary, wet day. Rain rattles in the downspouts and the western shore of the Salish Sea is hidden from me by fog.<br />
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My mood is a dreary, too. I haven't wanted to come here for the past few weeks, because I didn't want to commit it to writing, but others have now, so. J1 Ruffles is missing. He hasn't been seen by any of the researchers since late November. Jpod had split up, though, with J2 Granny and J8 Speiden (J1's frequent companions) off on their own somewhere and the rest of them cruising southern Puget Sound off and on, so I figured he was off with J2 and J8 and the others. But now the others have rejoined the pod, and J1 has still not been seen.<br />
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The worst of it is, there's no way to know, not for months. We don't know their ways. L87 Onyx has been traveling with Jpod lately, which is a bit unusual. Lpod has been spotted in Californian waters over the winter, which means L87's family is a long ways away; maybe J1 is with them? The Ks came back for a little while over the winter and now are off doing whatever they do this time of year. Until all three pods come back together in the summer, we can't know for sure if Ruffles is really gone or not. But I noticed that the Whale Museum has taken him off their list of adoptable whales.<br />
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I can't give up hope, but I am preparing myself. Ruffles is such an easily identified whale, he is a favorite of many, but I think he also had a way of creating connections with individual humans. He is never shy of the boats, likes to come up close and take a good look, and give a good look to all the clamoring monkeys on board. He has been, as I have mentioned before, a regular visitor in my dreams. Late last October I dreamed of him; he had come into shallow water with the rest of the pod, and I was with a number of other people who were in the water interacting with the whales. I felt very close to him, a deep friendship, a contentedness in each others' presence. But I was left with an unsettled feeling when I woke, a feeling I tried to banish but that has grown since I watched the sighting reports over the winter months and noticed he was not among them.<br />
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At 60, Ruffles would be the oldest male in the SRKW population. The next oldest male is many years his junior. I attended a lecture last week about <a href="http://conservationbiology.net/conservation-canines/">Conservation Canines</a> and the work they have done with the SRKWs. While there, I overheard a well known researcher saying that his last day out with Ruffles, following downwind, he could smell Ruffles' breath and it wasn't a healthy smell. Not encouraging. Still, I can hardly believe that Ruffles would fall when his own mother, J2 Granny, will be reaching 100 years old this year (give or take a few years; her birth year is an estimate). <br />
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Female orcas have a sad advantage over males in these days of toxic contamination of the ocean food chain: they are able to offload some of their toxic body burden to their calves and the milk they feed them, but the males have no such escape valve. Obviously, this fact is not a happy one in terms of the calves' health, and indeed probably contributes to their high mortality in the first year. In Granny's case, though, she probably stopped reproducing before the worst of the contaminates entered the orcas' food stream, so her body burden is probably pretty high. (This is conjecture; maybe the data actually exists somewhere because I know samples were taken from the SRKW in the past, but I don't know where I would find that information about specific individuals.) In any case, it seems that Granny and Ruffles may be genetically predisposed to long life and some resistance to the toxins they have been faced with.<br />
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One of my sister naturalists did report that she thought she had seen Ruffles, traveling with Granny and Speiden about a mile ahead of the rest of Jpod, in late February. She is someone who knows the whales on sight well, but she couldn't confirm it. I know she is worried about him too. A lot of people are--<a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ruffles-J1-Celebration-PAGE/154328891292008">Ruffles even has his own Facebook page now</a>, where some are already eulogizing him and others are expressing their hope that he will be returning soon. I'm firmly in the second camp. I won't let go of hope until a full year goes by with no sightings, which has been the traditional time that has to elapse before the researches declare a member of the SRKW presumed dead.<br />
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I will welcome the spring's returning, the calls of the brants flocking along the shore, the salmonberry blossoms bringing the rufous hummingbirds back. I will find peace with my hands in the earth, preparing the garden for the season. But my heart is heavy with worry for my dear friend.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM6Z5uNxuQt2gS1vEHYfWF3FuGY1c8xuRHckB-WY_JN8duE9blUMA9OhZMdyTB3a4KguaS72_9jhbD8CTzbmP8R4ig2iSJnWJGsK_ncY58mR7ABU0hEaB-Uy6DY3Gx5Dic8Jj-UOK5lAA/s1600/DSC_0065+Cropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM6Z5uNxuQt2gS1vEHYfWF3FuGY1c8xuRHckB-WY_JN8duE9blUMA9OhZMdyTB3a4KguaS72_9jhbD8CTzbmP8R4ig2iSJnWJGsK_ncY58mR7ABU0hEaB-Uy6DY3Gx5Dic8Jj-UOK5lAA/s320/DSC_0065+Cropped.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo by R. Milke</span></div>herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-61476794481837712052011-02-08T17:45:00.000-08:002011-02-08T17:45:27.610-08:00The Patooties Return!Stepping out late in the day to feed our chickens, I startled a <a href="http://www.birdweb.org/birdweb/bird_details.aspx?value=search&id=339">Bewick's wren</a> from our back porch. I presume it was setting up housekeeping; if so, this will be the sixth year in a row we've had a Bewick's family nesting on or near the back porch. <br />
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Bewick's are cavity nesters, but also set up decoy nests to fool predators. The first year we saw them here, they nested between two Coleman fuel canisters on a shelf by our back door. Here's mom (or dad) on the nest:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBvItdv3uuB-qtFiJdnq6yE20JtnseCQXtK6JJgJdE8pAeQHVoLFJHNouhElHY4m6H9q1rB0KKMZio0waP8fUPmM7g91iTlqpeGcKNxzRtG2NpqVMDjAJEX0k0NxIZx1OXhyphenhyphenZRF-vo8Mo/s1600/Wren%2527s+Nest.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBvItdv3uuB-qtFiJdnq6yE20JtnseCQXtK6JJgJdE8pAeQHVoLFJHNouhElHY4m6H9q1rB0KKMZio0waP8fUPmM7g91iTlqpeGcKNxzRtG2NpqVMDjAJEX0k0NxIZx1OXhyphenhyphenZRF-vo8Mo/s320/Wren%2527s+Nest.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And a few weeks later....</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2sq9T6nNAlUuWnUBQWuRT5lzTWY59DzVFd_VGEzGqum3JKe2RPTIlm8SVrZqIB05aljcHPk82-SbwqzF_lTaVCxL2oBoaCX9bdH8jiXOUsMlpJi-qLH1TKHswkiXh4iiLwkYGnUOZmRQ/s1600/Bewicks+Wren+Babies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2sq9T6nNAlUuWnUBQWuRT5lzTWY59DzVFd_VGEzGqum3JKe2RPTIlm8SVrZqIB05aljcHPk82-SbwqzF_lTaVCxL2oBoaCX9bdH8jiXOUsMlpJi-qLH1TKHswkiXh4iiLwkYGnUOZmRQ/s320/Bewicks+Wren+Babies.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In one of the subsequent years, they built a fake nest in a large hollow tube on a windchime hanging near the porch.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">They are sweet little birds, quite bold when they get used to you, and I will often see them out of the corner of my eye as they creep near while I'm gardening in the spring. We've dubbed the wren family the "Cutie Patooties," and I am happy to know that Mr. and Ms. Patootie are joining us again this year!</div>herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-9932585481619040802011-02-07T22:45:00.000-08:002011-02-07T22:45:08.047-08:00Today's DistractionI find that many of my wildlife sightings come from observing my fellow primates' behavior. A small crowd gathered on the shore across the road from home this afternoon, pointing and staring at something I couldn't see but that was attracting a lot of seagulls. I knew the SRKW had been spotted quite a ways north, but I had seen some Dall's porpoises earlier in the day and I was curious what might be causing all the fuss. Heading over to inspect I discovered a sea lion (or several?) rolling and thrashing as they fed; the gulls were diving after scraps. That makes four marine mammal species sightings in 24 hours (SRKW yesterday, a harbor seal spotted while watching them, and todays sightings), not bad for not being out on the boat.herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-21431397127280719382011-02-06T21:43:00.000-08:002011-02-06T21:43:51.516-08:00Nice SurpriseWell, it's been awfully busy around here. Lots of deadlines to meet, not so much time to enjoy being outdoors or write. But this afternoon turned out to include some unexpected down time, made even better by the appearance of part of Jpod traveling close to shore past the house. <br />
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It isn't usual for them to come in so close to the eastern shore of Puget Sound, but there they were. I was able to follow them for the better part of an hour, along with a crowd of neighbors armed with binoculars and cameras. When February came and the SRKW hadn't been spotted in my local waters for more than three months, I figured I was out of luck and would have to wait for summer and the San Juans to see them again. Today was a lovely surprise.<br />
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Here's hoping life doesn't keep me too busy to be present here. There's a lot to say, if I can find the time to get it down.herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-69287013577273573512011-01-14T15:52:00.000-08:002011-01-14T15:52:36.745-08:00First Song of SpringEven though it's only January, as I mentioned <a href="http://forestforthefins.blogspot.com/2010/11/tis-season.html">here</a>, the signs of approaching spring start early in this part of the world. This morning, despite the incessant blustery rain and wind we've been having for the past several days, I was thrilled to hear a <a href="http://www.birdweb.org/birdweb/bird_details.aspx?value=search&id=419">song sparrow</a> in a shrub on the sheltered north side of the house, testing his trills in what was undeniably a spring song. What I heard this morning sounded more like the first of the two song recordings found<a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Song_Sparrow/sounds"> here</a>.herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-27648394908912027772011-01-13T16:13:00.000-08:002011-01-13T16:13:13.108-08:00Human, NatureThe subject of humans in nature (and nature in humans) is one I'd like to explore a bit in my next few posts. I've been asked to give a guest sermon at a local Unitarian Universalist Church in early February. This will be a new experience for me. I have done many public education programs for work, and lead many ritual services for my own church, but actually standing at the pulpit will be a new box to check on my life list. I'm planning to discuss the relationship between humans, spirit, and nature, specifically with regard to the Place of the Salish Sea ecosystem. There's a lot to say, but I only have twenty minutes, so hopefully musing here will help me to pare down my thoughts into a coherent sermon.<br />
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Western thought has famously created an artificial separateness between humans and nature. The idea that the body, our physical selves, reliant upon the products of the natural world to survive, is completely separate from the soul, the thinking part of the Self, goes back thousands of years, even before <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/descmind/">Descartes did such a good job of fleshing it out</a> (if you'll forgive the pun). When your religion, rulers and scholars keep perpetuating a message like that, either by words or deeds, pretty soon it starts to feel like it is an eternal truth, and like nothing was ever any different...and here we are in 2011, most of us still acting as though what happens to the earth has no bearing on what happens to our bodies, and that how our bodies relate to the earth has no bearing on what happens to our minds, our hearts, our souls. Indeed, the average human being living in the United States today has no idea where their food or water come from, or where their waste goes. North American school children today might be able to tell you the names of several different kinds of exotic endangered wildlife living on distant continents, but can't name a single plant or bird species they might see out their windows. Some of them won't even see birds out their windows, living as they do in such highly urbanized environments that even the most adaptive, invasive species don't often show their faces there.<br />
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To our ancestors a few generations back Nature was merely uncivilized, unknown, unexplored, and dangerous. In modern times we look at Nature through our television screens and see in the shows about wild weather, aggressive wildlife, and the perils faced by those who seek adventure beyond the suburbs that it is still dangerous, maybe even more than it was before. As the news media bleats an endless stream of stories about weather and wildlife anomalies, earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, we see that Nature is uncontrollable. And above all, Nature is dirty--this last, perhaps, the greatest threat to modern humanity if the advertisements for anti-bacterial cleansers for every surface of your home and your own filthy body are to be believed.<br />
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In addition to reinforcing an artificial separateness between humans and nature, the Western world has for centuries viewed the relationship between humans and nature as adversarial. Christianity, with its teachings that the body is inherently sinful and that all things earthly should be eschewed as much as possible in order to receive an intangible eternal reward in some disembodied Heaven, helped to widen the gap between humans and nature. Living on earth, toiling through one's life with the physical discomforts of weather too hot or too cold, illness, the pains of childbearing and old age, these were the trials. Suffer through them, and go to your reward. There were no rewards in nature, unless you were a wicked heathen who enjoyed your food, sex, and other earthly pleasures. Although we don't consciously articulate this idea in a lot of modern discourse about the human relationship with the natural world, it is still very much there, just beneath the surface, vividly coloring the way we consider our place in the web of life.<br />
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I don't feel the need to dwell to deeply on the physical impacts of this way of thinking. It should be fairly obvious to anyone who is conscious in this time that the results of this Western attitude toward nature, combined with the imperialistic push that has spread this worldview to every corner of the planet, has not resulted in a harmonious relationship with nature. Stories of environmental degradation and imbalance and the way it is finally making humans uncomfortable are everywhere in the news. Some even embrace it, welcoming what they interpret as signs of an impending apocalypse because it means that intangible heavenly reward might come sooner. Indeed, in the United States,<a href="http://www.grist.org/article/scherer-christian/"> recent administrations have even encouraged various types of environmental destruction as a means of hastening these "End Times".</a> But this pervasive believe of separateness has had a profound affect on our very souls--the souls Descartes and others claimed could exist independently of the body, and, therefore, the earth. <br />
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Why, then, do so many of us feel in our souls a sense of being incomplete, a yearning for something that speaks to us in a sunrise, a birdsong, the smell of rain-washed leaves?<br />
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Next: pining for the fjordsherongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-59852521614221779962011-01-03T09:15:00.000-08:002011-01-03T09:15:02.862-08:00SightingsI never seem to notice that the robins have gone until they come back. This time of year they are spending a lot of time hanging out in the trees, like big orange fruit leftover from last fall. A small group of them appeared in our yard on New Year's Day and have been passing through each morning since then. It will be some week before we hear our first robin song of spring, though, announcing the time when they are beginning to nest.<br />
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Driving through <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=kenmore,+wa&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Kenmore,+WA&gl=us&ei=9AIiTbvAD4T0tgOBktT9Cg&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQ8gEwAA">Kenmore</a> at twilight yesterday, just past the Hwy 522 and Hwy 405 interchange, the kids and I happened upon a tremendous flock of crows doing their pre-roosting aerobatics. This is something I have seen crows do many times before, and have observed that it is something apparently triggered by the light levels at sunset, but never have I seen so <i>many</i> crows flocking at once. A little research reveals that in the fall and winter,<a href="http://www.crows.net/roosts.html"> crows gather to roost in large numbers</a>, undoubtedly what we were seeing. There were easily thousands of them, filling the sky and swirling around, not behaving like a flock of starlings or a school of fish with synchronized turns but just milling about in the sky. We pulled to the side of the highway to watch for a while, and even over the roar of traffic we could hear the cacophony of their calls. It was spectacular, but also little eerie...anyone else who has ever seen <i>The Birds</i> by Alfred Hitchcock would have had a shiver down their back, too.<br />
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We're in the midst of another cold snap here, hard frosts in the morning and inches of ice on top of the rain barrels. I even heard that all of the <a href="http://victoriarealestatevoice.com/post/1177644/speechless-sunday-victoria-s-harbour-front-at-night">inner harbour in Victoria, BC</a>, was iced over on New Year's Eve, a highly unusual thing. The cold weather is beautiful, offering crystal clear views of the snowy Olympics and Cascades against a perfect blue sky. The sun doesn't offer much warmth, but at least it's shining. A local news outlet reported that<a href="http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott/112766539.html"> it rained here on every holiday last year</a>, which is really only true if you celebrate the holidays they were looking at, but does indicate that our skies last year were not as sunny as they sometimes are, and that makes the sun all the more welcome now.herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-33139361204354001882010-12-28T11:29:00.000-08:002010-12-28T11:29:26.104-08:00Two in the BushComing home from our daily ramble today, the toddler and I spotted a pair of <a href="http://www.birdweb.org/birdweb/bird_details.aspx?value=search&id=344">golden-crowned Kinglets</a> in the <a href="http://www.wnps.org/landscaping/herbarium/pages/holodiscus-discolor.html">ocean spray shrub</a> in our front yard. Of course the shrub doesn't look like it does in the linked photo; the leaves are all off and only shriveled seed heads remain, which is what attracted the Kinglets in the first place. We've got quite a collection of birds hanging out in the front yard right now, everything from a tiny <a href="http://www.birdweb.org/birdweb/bird_details.aspx?value=search&id=341">Pacific or winter wren</a> to the unidentified sparrow that scuffles by the front porch (I think it's probably a <a href="http://www.birdweb.org/birdweb/bird_details.aspx?value=search&id=419">song sparrow</a>) to the flashy little Anna's hummingbirds that are a constant, noisy presence at the window feeder and in the top of the elder tree near the front door.<br />
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While the cold snap was here a few weeks ago, I hung out a suet cage for any little birds who might not be able to find other food in the frozen landscape. The only critters who have found it so far are the local crows, who have done a good job of picking most of it out. I really don't mind the crows myself, but I'm not going to refill the cage with suet until (and unless) we have another really cold spell. The crows have plenty of other opportunities for food around here.<br />
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The SRKW have been conspicuously absent from local waters lately. Since we've been having some pretty impressive winds off the coast, I hope they are in some remote, sheltered inlet to the north where no prying eyes can find them but where the new babies aren't facing the challenge of trying to breathe in high seas. I was hopeful to hear that a number of fins had been spotted off<a href="http://www.lummi-island.com/"> Lummi Island</a> over the holiday weekend, but they turned out to be transients. Here's hoping our residents show up again soon!herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-31547770385063534572010-12-16T21:55:00.000-08:002010-12-16T21:55:57.497-08:00Love Affair, Part IV<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This is a short video I made from clips taken this summer, including the encounter with Ruffles mentioned in the last post. I shot this with the video function on my Canon Powershot camera, which only takes 30 seconds of video at a time, so it may seem a bit choppy. As you can see from the light in different segments, this video represents several different days and locations of shooting.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The first orcas in the video are members of L-pod, seen here in Haro Strait along the US-Canadian border. Ruffles is shown closer to the west side of San Juan Island, also in Haro Strait. A later sequence shows J-pod off of the "Coal Docks" at Tsawwassen, British Columbia, in the southern part of Georgia Strait.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Background music is "Song to the Siren" by This Mortal Coil, a longtime favorite of mine that seemed appropriate. (Incidentally, the first time I ever heard it was during the reunion trip from the environmental studies camp mentioned in <a href="http://forestforthefins.blogspot.com/2010/12/love-affair-part-ii.html">this post</a>.)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I recommend watching the video in full-screen mode if it isn't too pixelated on your screen. Especially during the Coal Docks sequence, you'll notice a lot more detail of the orca behavior, including spyhopping, tail lobbing, and breaches.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dxYKmFhRxMRgIsYwesasey6GjVxRROGDhG5EW_Rb9AfgEpCLbE6WNv7elgn0iq1JhEGdZIUdLLYruf_r23yvQ' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Looking over these last few posts I see a timeline more than the story I was really trying to tell, of the deep connection I feel with the SRKW and the many ways in which their lives have intersected with mine. I guess that's part of the challenge of keeping a blog that isn't about being a mom while being a mom! It has been very challenging, recently, to find the time and the right headspace to keep posting. Headier stuff is on my mind for the next few posts, I hope I can do it justice. Meantime, I think this video shows more what I feel about these animals than all the writing in the previous three posts on the subject.</div>herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-80958885521835442972010-12-15T14:02:00.000-08:002010-12-15T14:02:10.572-08:00Love Affair, Part III<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">(continuing from<a href="http://forestforthefins.blogspot.com/2010/12/love-affair-part-ii.html"> here</a>)<br />
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About halfway through my college years, I had a remarkable dream in which I encountered a group of orcas swimming close to the shore. In the dream, people were wading in to touch them, which annoyed me because I felt that was not respectful to these magnificent and intelligent animals. But I was drawn to them, so I went into the water and approached one, asking its permission to make contact with it. Suddenly all the orcas appeared to me as humans. They took me away with them, in the water, and we traveled to an undersea grotto where they offered me food and the leaders of the pod (three female orcas, as it happened, although at the time of the dream I had no idea that orcas had a matrifocal culture) formally offered me their friendship. I returned to shore to find my mother, who was asking me where I had been and saying I had missed the orcas, and I realized that while the orcas had appeared human to me while I was with them, I had appeared as an orca to other humans during that time.<br />
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This was a first of a continuing series of dreams in which the SRKW appear and interact with me. Sometimes very specific individuals appear, sometimes not; sometimes there is specific communication with them, sometimes not; sometimes I encounter them as human, sometimes not. I have since encountered a lot of northwest indigenous lore about very similar orca experiences, and have met a number of other people who have had similar dreams. When I first read the Haida <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Boy-Owen-Paul-Lewis/dp/1582460574">Storm Boy</a> legend, it made the hair on my neck stand up because elements of it were so similar to my dream experiences. I get a little shiver just thinking of it now.<br />
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In the autumn of 1997, L-pod, one of the SRKW population's three family groups, <a href="http://www.kitsapsun.com/dyesinlet_orcas/">paid a long and unusual visit to Dyes Inlet near Bremerton, WA. </a> It was an uncommonly lovely fall, with long stretches of calm, clear weather than coincided with much of the whales' month-long visit to this tiny inlet. They were besieged by boaters wanting a closer look, and as it happened, the organization I worked for had a friend with a whale watching boat who took us over for a magical day with them. During this month I had a number of very vivid orca dreams, one of which seemed to predict part of the experience I had on that boat with L-pod a few days later.<br />
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As my work responsibilities grew, it became my job to coordinate and lead field trips for some local school groups. Sometimes, these field trips were on boats, not always for the purpose of whale watching but we did occasionally see them. On one such trip, we encountered J-pod. We were watching the pod swim past the boat when suddenly J-1 "Ruffles," so called for his distinctive rippled dorsal fin, turned to swim right at our boat. He surfaced directly below where I stood, then dove beneath the boat. I ran over to the other side and watched the length of his entire body passing beneath me as he rose to surface again. That was all, and yet, that moment will be etched in my mind and my heart until the day I die. From that moment on I felt a profound connection with Ruffles, and was not at all surprised when he became a regular dream visitor.</div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
My work, focused on preserving Puget Sound habitats, brought me in ever closer contact with other whale researchers, and I began to learn the more intimate details of the lives of the SRKW population: their <a href="http://whalemuseum.org/programs/orcadoption/whalelist.html">nicknames</a>, their habits, their personalities. Whale watch boat operators told me stories I will never forget, like the story of the orphaned unweaned calf whose uncle and brother were observed trying to chew salmon up into food the baby could digest. (This is especially noteworthy when one considers that orcas have no molars. Their teeth are designed solely for gripping and tearing. Stop and think for a moment about the thought process that was necessary for this helping behavior, and realize just how intelligent and emotionally connected to their relatives these animals are. Not very different from us, at all.) I learned that SRKWs live their whole lives with their mothers, that they eat almost nothing but salmon, that <a href="http://www.whaleresearch.com/audio_video.html">they have individual calls to identify their family groups</a>, and that every fall and winter they pass right in front of my house.<br />
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Growing up, I never knew this, because they are nearly always on the far side of the water, where unless one knows exactly what they are looking for with a powerful spotting scope or binoculars, they are virtually invisible. I started watching more carefully, and was rewarded by more frequent sightings.<br />
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And then, last year, a dream truly came true: I was asked to be a naturalist aboard one of the whale watching boats in the San Juan Islands. I spent part of each week in the incredibly beautiful waters around the islands, sharing my love and knowledge of SRKWs and the other flora and fauna in the area with hundreds of passengers, seeing them recognize the magic of this place and these creatures who embody the essence of it. I learned to identify many of the orcas by sight, using the distinct combination of their dorsal fin and saddle patch. And I spent many days with Ruffles.<br />
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One day with him stands out in particular: the pods were spread apart foraging in Haro Strait, only a few whales here and there. My boat happened upon Ruffles and stayed with him for a long time. He's a favorite among the whale watchers, both because he is so easy to identify and because he clearly doesn't mind the vessel traffic and is known for his close passes. We cut our engines to drift while we watched him approach along our port side and pass in front of the boat. Suddenly he turned and went back down the port side toward the rear of the boat, still a couple hundred yards away. He passed behind us, made a sharp turn and came up alongside our starboard side, surfacing literally so close I could have reached out to touch his dorsal fin. Again I felt that sense of deep connection with him. Some of our passengers were disappointed that we hadn't seen more whales that day, but I felt transported by the experience for the rest of the week.<br />
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</div></div>herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-43027339474301731942010-12-07T11:47:00.000-08:002010-12-07T11:47:25.841-08:00Love Affair, Part II<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">(Continued from <a href="http://forestforthefins.blogspot.com/2010/11/love-affair-part-i.html">this post</a>.)<br />
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After the trip to southern California, my focus on the orcas diminished somewhat but it was always there in the background. In eighth grade, I did a project on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly">John C. Lilly</a> and his research into human-dolphin communication. My parents were always passing along whatever news articles or books about cetaceans they thought might interest me, but as I turned my attentions to my adolescent peer group there was not so much passion for the orcas for several years.<br />
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My career aspirations changed; I decided I would be a veterinarian, and took a job working in a clinic to start down the long road to that goal. In my junior year my high school biology teacher, an amazing woman to whom I will be forever grateful, insisted that I sign up for an environmental studies camp to be held in the wilderness of British Columbia. Working part time, taking AP classes, and preparing for the upcoming SATs, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was spend a week in the wilderness falling behind. I tried to fudge the application to sound like such a rabid environmentalist that they wouldn't accept me, but as fate would have it, I was accepted and went off to a life-changing week.<br />
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I was raised with a strong conservation ethic, but one that had not really encouraged activism beyond the odd letter writing campaign. At this camp, secluded in the upper <a href="http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/bcparks/explore/parkpgs/skagit/skagit_valley_map.pdf">Skagit Valley</a> and mentored by a set of phenomenal counselors, among them <a href="http://www.thomhenley.com/">Thom Henley</a>, I was inspired to become an environmental activist, to use my developing skills as a writer and educator to share information that would hopefully inspire others to act on behalf of this precious planet we all share. I came home with hopes of a career in environmental law or journalism, began to write an environmentalist column for the school newspaper, and harried my parents about making sustainable buying choices around the house.<br />
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That fall, a group of the campers decided to have a reunion in Victoria, B.C., where Thom lived. The Puget Sound contingent set sail aboard <i><a href="http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=7478">Princess Marguerite II</a> </i>on a beautiful Friday afternoon. We were determined to stay in the passenger cabin and conquer our homework before arriving in Victoria, so we could enjoy a guilt-free weekend. This plan worked well until, somewhere in Admiralty Inlet, one of my traveling companions spotted a dorsal fin alongside the ship. He pointed, stammering in excitement, and went racing out to the deck. Our homework completely forgotten, the rest of us raced out after him.<br />
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No, it wasn't an orca. It was a pod of Dall's porpoise who stayed with the ship, weaving around and beneath the bow, for most of the rest of our voyage. Another passenger claimed they were actually Chinook salmon (!), and upon reflection I think the phenomenal ignorance he displayed was another piece of inspiration for me to share (accurate) information about the natural world with other people. (Dall's are often mistaken for baby orcas by people who don't realize that orcas that young would never be seen traveling alone under normal circumstances, but to mistake a bow-riding porpoise for a fish?)<br />
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Having an immediate experience with wild cetaceans reminded me how much I loved them. But I didn't consider returning to my original idea of pursuing cetacean science as a career. By that time, I had come to realize that a lot of the jobs available would be either in marine parks or in the military, neither of which held any appeal for me. Somehow, living just a hundred miles away, I missed connecting with the Whale Museum or the Center for Whale Research.<br />
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I continued on to university, and continued to be an active activist, without connecting this childhood love with my current reality. In my final year at school, I took an internship with a non-profit that worked on regional water quality and marine habitat issues. That internship turned into a full-time job as an environmental educator, and gave me the opportunity to share my knowledge of and love for the place I live with thousands of people of all ages over the next decade. And as part of that job, I got to go whale watching once in a while.<br />
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</div>herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-36700473124905166502010-11-24T14:19:00.000-08:002010-11-29T14:14:05.829-08:00Baby, it's cold outsideThe soft-settling first flakes of the season turned in to an all-out winter storm shortly after my last post. At about 10pm on Monday night, this was the view out my front door:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dyjKhmlrTmG5KzwQ1-Sk4rrZDUPTBuE3_w621mSo4NZoi_dwva9_c36rg93a8cKAKLN7J1Avzdlfv3i5QAWNw' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br />
The snow is sticking around for a few days, courtesy of a cold arctic air mass that has been sitting on us following the big winds, but even now the clouds are moving in and the temperatures are creeping back up toward freezing.<br />
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In weather like this, the overwintering Anna's hummingbirds are desperate for food to fight the cold temperatures. Since the feeders freeze regularly in this cold, keeping them fed is a small challenge. They prefer to start feeding around half an hour prior to sunrise, which even during the short days of this season is usually earlier than I want to venture out in the cold. But, that's part of the obligation of keeping a bird feeder. The birds depend on you, and you need to be dependable. So it's out in the cold, first thing in the morning, to set out a thawed feeder. If the feeder freezes and I bring it in to thaw, I can expect the dominant male hummer (who has officially claimed this feeder as his own) to hover expectantly outside the kitchen window in the spot the feeder usually hangs, waiting with understandable impatience for me to return it.herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-57520076640123137942010-11-22T08:31:00.000-08:002010-12-07T11:58:17.273-08:00First SnowSnow in the lowlands of the Salish Sea is always a fascinating thing. First is the question of if the snow will come, and when, and how much. Given our position between two mountain ranges, next to salt water, at the point where the jet stream swings widely north or south, predicting any kind of weather here is challenging. But when the s-word occurs in the forecast, people want to know when and how much, and that varies wildly from zip code to zip code because there are so many variables, so many microclimates.<br />
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How people respond to local snow is interesting. In my observations, people who were raised here treat the snow as nature's excuse for a holiday, and if at all possible take the day off to stay cozy at home, or play outside. People from snowier places tend to ridicule the cautious locals, until they try to navigate the steep hills of downtown Seattle and realize that flat, midwestern snowscapes are quite a different animal than snow here. And those from warmer climates either wisely stay home, or venture forth under the mistaken impression that their large 4x4 or AWD vehicles will protect them from hazardous conditions. This is another reason that those of us who grew up here tend to stay home if we can!<br />
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I would like to describe the regional snow cycle, but the reality of global climate change is that all bets are off. When I was small, we would regularly get a little snow here before Thanksgiving and after Christmas, but rarely in between. A big "snow event" meant 4" at out house, maybe 6" up the hill away from the water. Living right beside the water, snow on my lawn virtually guarantees a lot more snow everywhere else. I have known many "snow events" in which my house got a lot of cold, slushy rain, but just 100' up the hill snow was sticking to the ground.<br />
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The year I began college, we had an unusual snow year that happened to coincide with me taking Atmospherics 101. During that class I became very familiar with the conditions necessary for a major "snow event" to happen here, because we had one on January 1, February 1, March 1, and even April 1. This was following a "normal" snow event the preceding December. Another big snow occurred in 1995, and then there was a long period of mild, warm winters. The only snow we got for several years is what I call frog snow--snow that occurs around the spring equinox, after the frogs have begun their spring song. It is usually a wet, slushy snow that doesn't last more than a few hours in the lowlands. I was beginning to think that climate change had taken snowy winters away from us forever, and that my children would not have a chance to experience snow days. <br />
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Fortunately, my fears were unfounded. A few snows that fit the pattern I remembered from my childhood occurred in 2007, and then 2008 brought what is referred to here as <a href="http://www.seattlepi.com/local/393116_storm22.html">"Snowpocalypse."</a> Never had I seen snow like that! It snowed for days and was a foot deep in our yard--unheard of! Even my dad could only remember one other snowfall of such proportion, some 60 years ago.<br />
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Last year was another snow-free winter. We had cold temperatures, but the specific combination of warm wet air in the south and cold dry air in the north converging over the Puget trough just didn't happen. So this year I am happy to welcome the snow again, and hopeful that this first fall is a sign of things to come.<br />
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It began yesterday in fits and starts, and still now is just dusting the yard, but the water and islands have all taken on a soft-focus, grey velvet look. There are still bright leaves and chyrsanthemum blooms in the garden, all contrasting beautifully with their snowy garnish. The winds are supposed to pick up later today, and more snow is expected with them, so if the forecast proves true we should see the water whipped up into a dark froth, wave edges like knapped obsidian rushing southward ahead of the cold arctic air that makes it all possible. <br />
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Snow doesn't usually linger here. It is, to me, a reminder to live in the present and enjoy the serendipitous blessings life brings from time to time. Whatever other plans I had for today will be set aside to enjoy the snow--gazing out the window at the falling flakes, and walking through the silent stillness that only comes from snow. It has been a strange autumn, with an early start but somehow without the full feel of the season. Although winter doesn't officially begin for several more weeks, the first snowfall always marks the first day of winter and a special holiday on my personal calendar.herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-66199662428834789462010-11-21T09:54:00.000-08:002010-11-21T09:54:09.634-08:00Love Affair, Part IMy earliest memory of orcas is a children's picture book published by the National Geographic Society about <a href="http://www.rockisland.com/~orcasurv/changing.htm">Namu</a>, a northern resident male who was accidentally caught in a fisher's net off of Namu, British Columbia, and became one of the first orcas in captivity. I remember that this book, a gift from my grandmother, came with several other books: one about bees, one about pandas, one about recovering sunken treasure. But it was the book about Namu that I wanted read to me over and over again, and it was the pictures of Namu swimming with his captor that enchanted me. I wanted to see Namu for myself, and was devastated to learn that he had died before I was even born.<br />
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I became obsessed with whales and dolphins. In first grade, during the ceramics portion of our art class, I made a pinch-pot with the clumsy image of an orca etched into the bowl. In second grade, we went to Alaska, taking a ferry boat up the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Passage">Inside Passage</a>. I was so excited, sure that I would finally be seeing live orcas in person! I spent nearly every minute of the 3-day trip glued to a window in search of fins or blows, and didn't see a single whale. I was, however, lucky enough to visit an elementary school in Juneau on the day they happened to have a Tlinget elder come to teach a dance to the students. I recall that he gave me a dance blanket with two orcas on it to wear while I learned the dance, and I was thrilled. <br />
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Later that year, as my parents were packing our camper for a family vacation one morning, my mom came rushing into the house, calling my name. "The blackfish are out!" I remember her yelling, and I was out the door in a heartbeat, barefoot in my nightgown. There, right in front of our house, a superpod of orcas--almost certainly the SRKW--were swimming past. As I think of it now, it makes no sense that they would be there, then--it was late July or early August, a time when they are usually found about 100 miles north of here, and they were all very close to the eastern shore. I have never seen them come so close since, but I vividly remember watching them go by that morning.<br />
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I discovered a book about killer whales in the school library, and for the rest of my time at that elementary school mine was the only name on the check-out card. I had practically memorized the book before I left fifth grade. In third grade I begged my old first grade teacher to let me come back to class and teach her students about whales. That was my first stint as an environmental educator. I decided, once I knew there was a name for it, that I would grow up to be a cetologist. My tenth birthday gift was a trip to the Vancouver, BC aquarium to see <a href="http://cetacousin.bplaced.net/orca/profile/skana.html">Skana</a> (who, although I didn't know it at the time, was a member of the SRKW population) and <a href="http://cetacousin.bplaced.net/orca/profile/hyak2.html">Hyak</a>. Although Skana died in the year after I first saw her, a poster of her performing at the aquarium hung on my bedroom wall for years.<br />
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While I was in middle school, my family took a trip to southern California to visit the essential theme parks of a middle-class American childhood, including Sea World in San Diego. It was here I finally, after so many years of wishing, had the chance to interact with live dolphins at their petting tank. It's enormously hypocritical of me, and I realize that, but I am glad that I had that experience before I came to understand how awful it is to keep cetaceans in captivity. While in SoCal, we also visited <a href="http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/">Scripps Institution of Oceanography</a>, which is where we figured I would end up going to college if I pursued my goal of becoming a cetologist. The hot, humid climate didn't agree with me, though. And I didn't want to study just any whales, I wanted to be with the SRKW. Those were the whales I had fallen in love with, but I didn't know what I could do with my life that would bring me closer to them.herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7384851367703430612.post-82563226958648856502010-11-16T23:16:00.000-08:002010-11-16T23:16:08.937-08:00Finally, a SRKW sighting!In an effort to combat my impulse to hide in the house through the dark winter days, I packed the toddler up this morning for a trip to the local zoo. I was just unloading the stroller from the parked car when I got a call from another member of the household, reporting orcas swimming past the house, twelve miles away. Figures! But, learning that they were southbound, I went about my day as planned, knowing that they would more than likely turn north and pass by again before sunset. Read the toddler a book, scan the water with the binoculars. Fold a load of laundry, scan the water with the binoculars. Etc.<br />
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Sure enough, around 3:30 I spotted some blows in the distance, and was able to watch them pass for about an hour. They were far away, I could only spot the occasional tall male's fin, but saw lots of blows and there was a fair amount of breaching and cartwheeling going on too. I knew I'd loose sight of them when the sun set, but just before the sun went down it broke from behind the clouds and turned the water a peachy-pink color. The sunlight hit the orcas' blows so that they glowed a deeper pink, and it became very easy to see that there were an awful lot of them out there. Beautiful! I later heard reports that members of all three resident family pods had been identified.<br />
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<a href="http://www.king5.com/video/featured-videos/SkyKING-Orcas-in-the-waters-between-Fauntleroy-and-Vashon-Island-108483869.html">This video</a> shows some footage of the orcas taken today from a news helicopter. The lower whale of the first pair you see swimming together is young male L-87 Onyx. At about 2:04 left in the video, the male in the top of the frame is J-1 Ruffles, oldest male in the SRKW community and my very favorite. It is likely (although I can't identify her for certain in this footage) that the female swimming with him is J-2 Granny, believed to be Ruffle's mother and also believed to be 99 years old this year. The two are rarely seen apart from each other.herongrrrlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08095494729722022750noreply@blogger.com0