Category: Whales

Whale Journals – December 2015 – Netflukes – whale movies

Not much going on in whale world on the water for us these days. I heard reports of 4 or 5 humpbacks hanging out between Vancouver Island and Texada Island but we’ve been quite busy working.

Last month was about books to curl up and hibernate with during the dark days of winter.This month it’s time for cultural celebrations. And what better way to celebrate than by watching films about whales and interspecies communication?

Youtube is full of close encounters between humans and cetaceans, which I love. The excitement of the humans is in their voices. Even adult voices become squeaky as they leap up 2 octaves when confronted by the awesome presence of a 30 tonne whale approaching their boat. It’s a palpable primal reaction.

But there is little to fear. SLOW DOWN, don’t crowd, make sure you know where they are and they know where you are. It’s best if they can hear you so a slow or idling engine is helpful. If they approach you? it is an experience you will never forget and a story you will retell hundreds of times. Maybe you’ll even make a video!

Back to the many wonderful films about whales:

Of course any of the BBC series like “The Blue Planet”, “Planet Earth”, “Life of Mammals”, “Nature’s Great Events” offer state of the art production values and thrilling footage. The “making of” shorts they made of how they got the footage are fascinating too, especially for budding filmmakers.

National Geographic has become quite sensationalist in their approach to nature films since being bought out  by Rupert Murdoch but this is a good one .

“Ocean Voyager” Whale Documentary – The Biggest Sea Creatures || National Geographic 2015

Story of a humpback mother and calf. The video repeats at 51:16

“The Birthplace of the Giants”  in Northwestern Australia – Nat Geo 2015

Some other smaller productions companies produce great ocean nature films too

Ocean Stories 3 – “Dolphins and Whales” NONA NATUREDOCX and SEALIFE PRODUCTIONS 2011

“The Giants of Rurutu” Humpback Whales of Tahiti: SOUND & VISION/CINEMARINE 2011

 

The French Godfather of all ocean nature documentaries – Jacques Cousteau made hundreds of films. Find them in Wikipedia and Search for them in Youtube.

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau – “Whales” rerecorded 1991

and “The Singing Whale” about Humpback whales rerecorded 1991

The English Godfather of nature films, David Attenborough is still making features for the BBC. Find his filmography on Wikipedia and Search the series “The Blue Planet”, “Planet Earth”, “Life of Mammals”, “Nature’s Great Events” among others on Youtube

Planet Earth about the Oceans

The Life series about mammals includes cetaceans

Nature’s Great Events Series: Everyone feeds on Herring in the Pacific Ocean

and Feast of Sardines off the coast of southern Africa

Civil war in Sri Lanka protected a recovering population of Blue whales

Planet Ocean [UK]- by Yann Arthus-Bertrand & Michael Pitiot                

 

Habitat of the Orca Killer Whales & Sea Creatures – Feodor Pitcairn Productions Ltd. 2000

 

Intelligence and Communication in non-human species that may surprise you

And finally, humans who can communicate with other species:

“The Animal Communicator” with Anna Breytenbach and Jon Young by FOSTER BROTHERS FILM PRODUCTIONS for NHU AFRICA

And how it might be possible

 

International Film Festivals

where you can find amazing nature films that don’t get Hollywood or network distribution.

Blue Ocean Film Festival

Ocean Film Festival

Halifax International Oceans Film Festival

Cuban Ocean Environmental Film Fest

Asia Ocean Film Festival (Hong Kong)

ENJOY!

Whale Journals – November 2015 – Winter’s Whale Tales

I’m climbing up to a moss and lichen bluff near the cabin. A flake-barked old fir and battle-scarred arbutus cling to the shattered rock which constitutes the geology of this cliff on the ridge above our bay. During these dark November days this is the only place I can be sure of catching some sun – only in the middle of the day – if there is any sun – which there hasn’t been.

After the thrills of October it’s not going to be much of a month for whale watching. I’m off to Ontario for a few weeks leaving Terry to hold the home front and video the jellyfish invasion of our bay.

It’s a month for whale research though. I’m reading a lot about cetacean communication. There’s a wealth of information from biologists, naturalists, writers –  basically cetacean lovers of all ages and backgrounds. There are books for children too.

I thought it might be useful to list some books with links to the websites of their authors.

In no particular order:

Dolphin Diaries by Denise Hertzing: She wanted to be the “Jane Goodall” of the dolphin world and she is. Diane has been studying the Spotted Dolphins in one shallow bay in the Bahamas. the book chronicles the first 25 years of her work. Lots of information about communication and dolphin society. http://wilddolphinproject.org/

Among Whales by Roger Payne: Inspiring and devastating. The idyllic life of a family living alongside magnificent right whales and the sadistic blood lust of whalers mad with greed. An eye opening expose of the International Whaling Commission. http://www.whale.org/

The Moon by Whalelight by Diane Ackerman: poetic writing informed by Roger Payne’s (‘Among Whales’) research into Humpback whale songs, behaviour and emotions. http://www.dianeackerman.com/

Dolphin Dreamtime, The Art and Science of Interspecies Communication by Jim Nollman: Back in the 1960s, before it became trendy, Jim Nollman was playing music with whales, wolves, wild turkeys and buffalo exploring their cultures and communications. Check out his articles in back issues of Orion magazine.

http://www.interspecies.com/pages/audio%20main%20page.html

Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us by Alexandra Morton:  Alelxandra Morton is a British Columbia hero. Before her campaign to save wild pacific salmon from the diseases brought in by Norwegian fish farms and denied by Canada’s dysfunctional Department of  Fisheries and Oceans she wrote this book about her first loves – Orcas.   http://www.alexandramorton.ca/

Journey of the Pink Dolphins: An Amazon Quest by Sy Montgomery: weaves together ancient myth and modern science to tell the story of one woman’s journeys searching for the elusive “boto” dolphin of the  Amazon River.

http://symontgomery.com/

Among Giants: A Life with Whales by Charles “Flip” Nicklin: “Flip is equal parts photographer, adventurer, self-trained scientist, and raconteur, and Among Giants reflects all those sides, matching breathtaking images to firsthand accounts of their making, and highlighting throughout the importance of conservation and new advances in our understanding of whale behavior.”   from ‘Whale Trust’   http://www.whaletrust.org/

Hawaii’s Humpbacks: Unveiling the Mysteries by Jim Darling (author), Susan W. Barnes (illustrator) and Flip Nicklin (photographer) “ideal for both novice and experienced whale watchers – answers all of your questions and tells you exactly what researchers know and have yet to learn about the humpbacks that gather annually on the Hawaiian breeding grounds.” from ‘Whale Trust’

Mind in the waters: A book to celebrate the consciousness of whales and dolphins by Joana McIntyre Varawa: fascinating comparison of human motor controls, which are in varied areas of our brains, with cetacean motor controls, which overlap  and apparently cross-stimulate in their brains. We can only imagine how whales and dolphins perceive the world! A collection of science and intuition which appeals to the imagination and heart as well as the scientific mind.

The Delicate Art of Whale Watching: by Joana McIntyre Varawa: “swimming with porpoises, fishing, learning to hunt with bow and arrow; a quiet quest for harmony with nature, especially with the sea”

The Whale Rider by Ihimaera Witi: a wonderful coming of age and rescuing whales story for adults and children. The movie is a must-see too.

 Whale Nation by Heathcote Williams: a coffee table book of historical photos that will amaze along with excerpts and quotes about whales and whaling. From Aristotle to Carl Sagan and Herman Melville to Edmund Burke, scientists, writers and activists like Paul Watson weigh in on whales.

Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage From Baja To Siberia by Dick Russell:  a combination of science, history and travel writing about gray whales and how their relationship with humans  transformed from “devil fish” to family friendly. Lots of historical information.

Eye of the Whale: there are at least 5 more books with this title. Obviously looking into the eye of a whale does something profound to a human being.

So does reading about it. Try it.

 

 

Whale Now! 2 – October 2015

BlowDorsalTerry, Jamie and I are perched together on rocks as far out as we can get at low tide waiting for the whales to come around to our side of the inlet. Jamie, who knows their routine, is sure they will make their usual circle and cruise by our campsite. It is dusk already. We can see 2 or 3 whales out in the middle of the inlet. Some of the resident sea lions seem to be playing around them but the light is fading.

These dark cloudy nights aren’t the best for transcendent visions of whales breaching in the moonlight. We can’t conjure a 3D CGI humpback bursting from the ocean in fountains of phosphorescence like the scene in “Life of Pi”. So I sit on the rocks in the light drizzle and wait, one arm extending an umbrella over the microphone I’ve wedged between rocks, the other arm draped in mic cable, listening to the waves in my headphones.

Now! Out of the blackness, Pooooooocccchhhhhh! tyuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUUUUUuuuuuu! Through headphones the sound is electrifying!  The whales could be almost on top of me! Thrills shoot up my back and hairs shoot out my neck. I’ve been plugged into a live electric socket. Their outbreath is a gale-force gust  and their inbreath bugles like a herd of bull elk. They aren’t even singing, just breathing and the music is awesome. We sit erect, enthralled by oceans of whale breath across eons of time. The whole universe is whales.

Sound of whale blow and “bugle” inbreath. Increase ||||||| for more volume

The next morning we are in citizen science mode.  Who are the whales we are seeing and hearing? As many as five humpbacks have been feeding and frolicking in the waters between Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast. It would be useful to researchers if we could identify them. The best way to do this is to photograph their tail flukes.

WhaleTail1

Tail fluke patterns  are unique to every individual whale, like human fingerprints. There is a catalog of tail fluke photos that researchers have been compiling for decades. If we can get clear enough photos to identify the whales we are seeing we can find them in the catalog. This is easier said than done. Tails don’t pose for photos before disappearing after a diving whale body.

KelpCreatureTail2Being positioned at a good angle while close enough to capture detail is a challenge. However, if we can identify our whales, we might be able to find them again at their southern migration points in Mexico, Hawaii or even Japan.

Blissful visions of snorkeling in warm, clear waters surrounded by relaxed mother humpbacks with curious calves while upside down males saturate the water with reverberating song  temporarily transport me. I forget the cold rain dribbling down my neck and dream of tropical whale paradises.

There has been exciting news: a Mom and a calf have been in the area. A friend who was fishing while drifting in his little runabout, had to bang on its gunwhales to ensure the Mom and calf noticed he was there when they surfaced right beside him. 

We are sending out psychic invitations to the whales to come around and visit us when we spot 2 whales heading up our side of the inlet. They aren’t wasting any time so we launch our 9ft. inflatable, row out from shore, and drift. Here they come! passing about 30m in front of us. I hold the dinghy in a good position while Terry wrestles the camera from the dry bag. He manages to  capture some video as they cruise past.

It’s a good day.

 

Whale Journals – Sept 2015 – Land Locked

“It’s a simple carburetor” So says the salty dog with 70 + years experience sailing and repairing old motors.  Terry and Jude got the correct carb kit sent to their local dealer, picked it up and trundled over to Michael Smith’s garage, where a simple tuneup turned into a long afternoon’s work. Marguerite, Michael’s wife peered around a parked car “Are you coming up for dinner dear? You’ve missed your Tea.”  Lots of little parts and carburetor cleaner later we had it back together.

Kim, the commodore of our local sailing club who also has an old Atomic 4 engine in his sailboat, recommended another inline fuel filter to keep the carburetor free of any bits of corrosion that might sneak in from the old manual fuel pump and sediment bowl. So we removed the  copper fuel tube between the fuel pump and the carburetor. Then we installed a fuel grade rubber hose from the fuel pump to the inline fuel filter we had mounted on the wall of the engine compartment and another hose from the filter into the carburetor. We removed and cleaned the sediment bowl and reinstalled it. We replaced the copper scavenge tube which carries uncombusted fuel from the manifold back to the carburetor float bowl. Then we carefully scraped old gasket material off the carburetor, put on new gaskets, fitted the halves back together and reinstalled the carb on the engine. After all this intricate work we were quite pleased with ourselves, believing  we had solved all problems and now the carburetor would function like new.

On our next free day we headed to the Parrot ship to take her on a test run out of the harbour.  I had charged both batteries so she started up right away. But we still couldn’t find a low idle. We backed her out of the slip anyway and got out of the harbour on a sunny day with no wind to enjoy a couple of hours putting around.

Back inside the harbour we were heading down the fairway when Terry pulled back on the throttle and the engine quit while still in gear. I steered while he pulled the gear lever into neutral and tried to start the engine – nothing. Battery check, restart – nothing. more throttle – nothing. Full choke, less throttle -finally the engine fired into life on the fourth try – whew! Deftly shifting back and forth between forward and neutral we manouvered Blue Parrot into her slip and docked her. Then we checked the engine compartment. The carburetor was still leaking.

This is the month of giving up on vehicles. Beluga, our 1999 Chevy Express cargo van that we insulated and fitted out with salvation army furniture 12 years ago is no longer safe to drive. That white whale of a van ate lots of fuel but we only used him once or twice a week. He was our 4 season 5 star accommodation in the bush and got us into many places that urban SUVs feared to tread. Somehow the back end of his frame rusted out even though we had never used it in the salt water. Crappy metal? Who knows. Between the demise of Beluga and the Parrot ship’s leaky carburetor we are not having good luck getting to the places where the whales are hanging out.

Whale Journals – May 2015 – Sonar Senses

Some thoughts about human – whale relationships: Humans learned about sonar from whales and dolphins. Death by lethal sonar blasts is our gift to them in return. The ROAR of a sonar blast rips through delicate tissue and bone that compose the hearing systems of cetaceans. A killing frequency shooting through the water resonates in their jaw bones exploding fat cells, wreaking havoc with a cetacean’s equilibrium. They race to the surface to escape the ocean water pummeling noise vibration into their bodies. No time for a slower ascent to allow nitrogen to be absorbed. Decompression sickness [the bends] is swift and deadly. Or they race to shallow water – to the shore where whole pods beach themselves in devastating pain and delirium.

A naval exercise can be 200km away but whales can transmit and receive sound waves over 2000km. This is how they communicate over vast distances, how they find each other in different parts of the ocean. And those lines of communication are being blasted apart by naval sonar and blocked by supertankers that run interference. Then there is the constant whine of outboard motors or rumble of deisels.

Cetaceans have finely tuned senses but modern urban humans have so blunted ours that we’ve lost the joy of connection with the Earth and her creatures; the smells, sounds and tastes.

But all is not lost – not yet . The rest of nature is calling us to return and no one is calling more sonorously or more seductively than the cetaceans. Whale and dolphin cultures may hold wisdom for human societies in ways we haven’t even dreamed. But we’ll never know unless we learn how to communicate with them.

Two centuries ago there were 10 times as many whales swimming and frolicking in the ocean. There were steam ships and sailboats and fishing boats. And there were some unfortunate collisions. But humans and whales managed to share the ocean currents. With all the capacity humans have now to design ships and fishing gear that would be whale friendly what are we waiting for?

Whale-Journals – April 2015 – Our Inner Whale

I’ve been listening to Penelope Smith’s “How to Communicate With Animals” training course. It’s a CD set available through her website http://animaltalk.net/AnimalTalkStore.htm. I understand more of what she’s saying every time I listen to her instructions and her commentary and encouragement. Both Penelope and Anna Breytenbach [see March 2015 Whale Journals]are gifted telepaths. They assure those of us who feel we have fuzz for brains that intuitive communication is every human’s birthright. “It’s just educated and shamed out of us at a young age” they say. Obviously there are those for whom this comes more easily. I don’t seem to be one of them. However, I persevere.

Penelope Smith says that telepathy exercises work better with a partner who can give you feedback about how they received your transmission or whether you received their’s clearly. Human partners who speak the same language as you are good partners for beginners. After that you can graduate to pets who can give feedback through their behaviour and the way they respond to you. This sounds all well and good but I think the best partners for me are trees. We seem to have an understanding. I am under, they are standing. Truly, I seem to receive a lot of positive energy from trees. Which is more than I can say of some domesticated dogs or peckish roosters or rowdy parrots.

I had an interesting experience with the humpback whales though. Today I went to the ocean. It was calm and sprinkling rain. I was walking on the beach, over cobbles slippery with seaweed, becoming one with the cobbles, feet fluid in the landscape. I thought of Penelope Smith’s telepathy exercise to “open the doors of your heart” and let the messages from other beings in. I stood on the beach and looked SE down Georgia Strait in the direction that the humpbacks would be coming and opened the doors of my heart to the whales.

It’s like they almost FLEW OPEN! And here are the whales inside of me! What a strange feeling – it took me by surprise – how fast it’s happened – WAIT! – did I slam the door in shock? COME BACK!! – No, here they are. They seem to be with me in a companionable sort of way now – very low key. I show them the beach through my sense perceptions. Maybe this is just my imagination. I can live with that. Everyone has to start somewhere, nest paw?

Whale Journals-March 2015

Celebration and relief! I just finished a Research & Creation Grant application for the Canada Council for the Arts and sent it to Ottawa via Canada Post. I’m calling this project “Welcoming Whales”, a double meaning [one for each blowhole]?

We won’t find out whether the jurors on the committee like my proposal enough to give me money for it until July. But whales don’t wait until a grant comes through to show up. So my plan is to get out in April/May and sail the waves in the trusty Blue Parrot ship. It would be a dream come true to meet the humpback whales as they return to play and feed in the Salish Sea.

Until then it’s time to work on this website which has a working title of “the nature of women & girls” I’m sorting through photos, video clips interviews etc. that might be of interest to folks who want to deepen their own connection to the rest of the natural world.

In November of 2013 Terry http://amphibiographer.tv/ and I drove US Interstate Highway I 5, negotiating monsoon rains and torpedoing transport trucks, to deepen our nature connection by participating in a course given by Anna Breytenbach and Jon Young. “Animal Communication & Intuitive Tracking” opened the possibility of mind to mind sharing with other sentient beings and reading the life energy of a being while tracking. Both of these ancient indigenous arts invoked profound experiences in us that inspired this project. If you do not know their work you can find Anna at http://animalspirit.org/ and Jon at http://8shields.org/ They are incredible human beings and awesome mentors of humans of all ages and cultures.

Well, it’s expensive to get out in a boat, even an old sailboat for a few months so I’d better sign off and invent some means to do it.

until next time.

Whale tails – the way it used to be

It wasn’t too long ago that 10 times as many great whales courted, mated, sang and frolicked in the oceans of Earth. Their songs danced over thermoclines in the water – interfaces between layers of water of different temperatures. Using the temperature differences of adjoining layers of water as their musical instruments and their huge resonant heads vibrated chamber music, filling the oceans with song the way birdsong fills the air above. There were 10 times the whales and dolphins and also 10 times the fish, krill coral but we all know that. Someimes it’s the little things that make a huge difference, a cellular change. And someitmes it’s the big things, like banning sonar blasts in frequencies that kill whales and dolphins like giving up war and sourcing energy and food and resources locally so less tanker traffic croeds the useful ocean currents. And designing whale friendly ships and fishing gear.

Then there will be whales again – lots of whales and krill and algae and the oceans will come alive.

Whales and dolpnins can helo us if we help them. They can help us reconnect with our love of mother ocean, our love of plannet earth, our love of our own natures.

Communing and communicating – learning from each other it’s what we’ve always done. We can do it again – not to destroy each other or exploit each other but to enjoy each other’s company. Let’s do it!