The Dolphin in the Mirror (2 page)

***

Soon the dock in the little town of Rio Vista was brimming with local townspeople, CMMC volunteers, and government officials, all of them holding hammers and pipes provided by a local construction company. Local boat owners and fishermen generously volunteered their boats and skills, so we had our flotilla. Ken joined us on the water that day and directed us on how to stay in formation and hammer on our pipes.

We found Humphrey circling slowly even farther north than before. He had passed under a very small overpass, named the Liberty Bridge, made for single vehicles and pedestrians. We stealthily moved north of Humphrey and carefully formed a tight arc behind him. We put our pipes in the water and began to hammer. The sound was like loud underwater wind chimes, a chaotic clamoring that at times created a syncopated rhythm of its own. The small arc of boats moved up behind the whale, and we herded him southward, closer and closer to the Liberty Bridge. The technique worked well, although Humphrey occasionally managed to turn around, slip through a "hole" in our sonic net, and briefly head north again.

As we drew close to the bridge, the whale slowed down. He abruptly stopped within six feet of the bridge's wooden pilings. The pilings were about two feet in diameter and were spaced twelve to fifteen feet apart. Would Humphrey pass through them? He wasn't budging. We moved the
Bootlegger
into a lead position, ahead of the other boats, banged our pipes, and practically rode up onto the whale's tail in an effort to urge him under the bridge. He could easily have brought his enormous eighteen-foot-wide tail down on us hard if he'd wanted to. Humphrey didn't, but he held his ground. He rolled onto his side, raised his huge, fifteen-foot-long pectoral fin, and repeatedly slapped it on the water surface. The Latin name for the humpback whale is
Megaptera novaeangliae;
megaptera
translates to "giant-winged." Humpbacks have the longest pectoral fins of all cetaceans. They often lift their fins and slap them on the water surface. The specific purpose of this signal is unknown, but we understood Humphrey that day: he had no intention of moving under the bridge. I watched him slap his fins in obvious agitation and protest and wondered,
What is spooking him?

We decided that the Coast Guard and NMFS would continue to monitor his movements while the rescue team met to figure out the next steps. As we stood on the riverbank and discussed the situation, I looked back at Humphrey. He was still swimming in the vicinity of the bridge. It was no surprise to me that the whale refused to move through the wooden pilings and under the bridge: marine mammals generally don't like to pass through narrow openings. I had seen this with the dolphins at my lab. We had to acclimate them slowly before they would move through gates or from one pool to another. Man-made passages are unnatural to dolphins and whales. They live in an unobstructed sea.

Yet days before, Humphrey had swum through the pilings heading north. His refusal to do so now couldn't have been due to a lower water level, because we had purposely waited for high tide that day before attempting to herd him through.

I tried to imagine the situation from the whale's point of view. Suddenly, I had a flash of intuition. To this day, I cannot explain it. I just suddenly knew that there was debris—perhaps some old rebar left over from when the bridge was constructed—reaching up like twisted metal fingers from the river bottom. What if the whale had injured himself during his previous passage and didn't wish to repeat the experience? I don't know why I thought this and I know it sounds far-fetched, but as I stood on the riverbank looking at this poor lost whale, I was convinced.

Oftentimes, working with an individual animal, one gains an intuition about the species' general behavior. As suggested by the well-known ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, in human and animal interactions, subtle information can be conveyed and interpreted by both sides because "familiarity breeds interpretation." My familiarity with the behavior of dolphins specifically, and whales in general, may have led me to my intuitive glimpse. In any event, it seemed worth exploring. Peigin's eyes lit up at the idea, and she pulled me toward Dave.

With great trepidation we presented the hypothesis and suggested that we check out the river bottom under the bridge with a ship's sonar. Dave said the idea was ridiculous and immediately rejected it. But luckily, at that point California state senator John Garamendi, a tall, elegant, and handsome figure, joined us in the discussion to see if he could help in any way. The senator listened thoughtfully to the idea and agreed that it was worth investigating. A very displeased Dave just shook his head and walked away. The results of a sonar scan proved my hunch correct: old rebar was indeed sticking up from the bottom of the slough under the bridge. That night, a construction crew dredged and removed it.

At eight o'clock the next morning, the small flotilla reassembled and arced the boats to guide Humphrey. We waited for high tide and then tried once again to get the whale to pass under the bridge. This time, Peigin and I were observing the action from the bridge, and I tried to record any vocalizations the whale produced. I didn't want Humphrey to see us on the bridge—it might spook him—so we stayed on its extreme left side, lying on our stomachs on the cool asphalt road. I had my hydrophone dangling below me in the water, and I monitored my recording equipment for sound levels and listened through my headset for vocal signals from Humphrey. Before the din of the
oikomi
banging commenced, I heard a few plaintive-sounding calls from Humphrey. I had no idea what the low-frequency, resonant
hurumph
s meant.

Then I observed Humphrey moving his head from left to right and back again in a scanning motion. I heard what sounded like individual clicks. This was extremely interesting to me because it suggested that humpback whales might use echolocation—biological sonar—to orient themselves, navigate, and detect objects in their environment. (At the time, there had been only one report, by my colleague Hal Whitehead, that suggested the possible use of echolocation by a humpback whale; that case had involved a whale that was trapped in ice.) A subsequent analysis of the clicks at Ken Norris's lab could not confirm that all of the clicks were produced by Humphrey; some of them might have been made by the boats' changing gears. However, some researchers have since suggested that certain whales use low-frequency, repeated sounds as a rudimentary form of echo-ranging. The question still lingers.

It was high tide, and the
oikomi
band began. At first, Humphrey didn't budge, but then he slowly edged forward and stuck his head between the pilings. The boats slowly moved forward behind him. Humphrey proceeded halfway through the pilings and then just stopped. He began to rock his torso from left to right. It appeared that he was stuck, his gigantic pectoral fins wedged close to his sides between the vertical bars. Suddenly, with my stomach pressed to the roadway, I had a sickening feeling. The road below me shook from side to side as Humphrey tried to free himself from the pilings that bound him. Peigin shot me a look as we both imagined the entire bridge collapsing. But we stayed and watched, terrified for Humphrey and for ourselves. Miraculously, with one more shake, Humphrey wiggled free and was through. Humphrey exhaled an explosive blow of rainbowed misty air and then quickly inhaled. I mirrored his behavior in reverse, inhaling deeply and then quickly releasing an explosive breath in relief.

***

At the Operation Humphrey meeting later that night, all hell broke loose. Dave was clearly agitated. He opened the meeting with an accusing look in my direction. He asked who was responsible for getting someone in the government to turn off the low-frequency coastal monitoring system—a system used to detect enemy vessels—on the theory that the sounds were attracting Humphrey! At the first meeting at Operation Humphrey headquarters, I had heard some rumblings from local residents who believed that Humphrey might have somehow been attracted to or influenced by the coastal acoustic monitoring system. I hadn't taken this concern seriously and therefore was quite shocked to hear that the system had indeed been turned off for a brief interval that morning while we were trying to get Humphrey under the bridge. Apparently, a rumor was circulating that a few members of the rescue team had somehow convinced the powers that be to turn it off. I was surprised to hear that the system had been turned off and also a bit angry; had we known about it, we might have been able to monitor the whale's behavior more closely. But frankly, I never understood why anyone would think that sounds on the coast would affect the whale's behavior inland. I didn't even know where these sounds were being broadcast from. I made it very clear to Dave that I had no involvement whatsoever. Ironically, this event foreshadowed the current concern that midrange sonar may be damaging to marine mammals. In fact, it is quite possible that the navy's sonar monitoring system harms whales, but at the time, the idea seemed far-fetched.

***

Back on the water, our sonorous fleet continued to herd Humphrey seaward through a succession of increasingly larger and more formidable bridges and possible barriers. With each bridge we faced new challenges. The next hurdle on our southward route was the Rio Vista Bridge, a much larger—half a mile long—steel expansion bridge that spanned the Sacramento River at the small town of Rio Vista. Before I'd joined the rescue operation, rescuers had tried and failed to move Humphrey back southward under it.

It was late afternoon when we approached the bridge. Two small roads flanked the river, and as we drew closer to the bridge, our arced fleet gripped tightly around Humphrey, I noticed a line of cars and trucks stopped on each side. It looked like people were waiting at the finish line of a great race; children were sitting on their parents' shoulders, and people were standing on the roofs of their vehicles, cheering Humphrey on.

And then it happened. Humphrey stopped within feet of the bridge and refused to move any farther. Ours was still the lead boat, and we gingerly maneuvered the
Bootlegger
and the other small boats around the whale and gently but firmly tried to nudge and encourage him under the bridge, but Humphrey held his ground.

And then Dave took control. He called us on our shipboard radio and told us he was coming aboard. He quickly approached the
Bootlegger
in a small Coast Guard skiff and boarded, carrying a small case. Without any discussion, he opened the case, pulled out a dark roundish object, pulled a pin from it, and hurled it toward Humphrey. I watched in disbelief as the object flew through the air as if in slow motion. It was a seal bomb, an explosive device that's often used in construction sites to clear the waters of unwanted marine mammals. It hit about ten feet behind the whale, sank, and detonated.

Within seconds, Humphrey began twisting his huge body; he made a sudden turn away from the bridge and swam right past us, going north, then promptly beached himself in two feet of water. So now we had a beached whale sixty miles inland!

Our rescue group from the CMMC couldn't believe what had occurred. Some key members of our team exploded in anger and quit the rescue immediately. Peigin and I were equally astonished and angry, but we felt we could not quit. We had a forty-ton whale stranded on the riverbank, and if we didn't do something fast, the physical forces acting on him would soon result in irreversible physiological damage that could kill him. This is a real danger when large-bodied whales become stranded or beached. They often have to be euthanized if they are out of the water too long.

We needed to help Humphrey survive the few hours remaining until high tide would set him afloat again. We had to find a way to keep Humphrey's entire body wet, or his skin would dry out and become damaged. I called the local fire department and asked if they could get fireboats on the river and keep the whale under a fine spray of water. Miraculously, they arrived in minutes. I watched from the bridge, and what a surreal image it was: a whale on the riverbank, with arcs of water over him, rather than arcs of boats surrounding him, saving his life.

Many of the CMMC staff were with Humphrey on the riverbank, some trying to calm him, others digging away the earth beneath him to try to get him afloat. I walked quickly along the small roadway past all the stopped vehicles and through the crowds to get to Humphrey. I was amazed at his size and presence out of the water. His forty-five-foot-long body dwarfed mine. I pressed my hand gently against his skin. It was warm and soft, like the skin of the dolphins I was so familiar with at my lab. I walked farther along and looked into his eye. I had never been this close to a humpback and certainly had never had the opportunity to look one in the eye. But now, despite our two species' ninety-five million years of divergent evolution, I felt a familiarity I hadn't expected, a pattern that connected me to him. His eye was warm and dark purplish brown, rimmed in white like ours, and he followed my movements as I walked near him. I wanted to find some way to let him know we were trying to save him—if only we had some means of communicating. But all I could do was be there with him.

I tried once again to imagine being this whale, to see the situation from his point of view. The noise levels under the Liberty Bridge were quite low, but the noise under the Rio Vista Bridge was another story. I had examined sonograms—sound pictures—of the noise levels in the waters both north and south of the bridge. It was clear there was a dreadful din just under this bridge, probably created by the traffic passing over it and somehow magnified by the metal bridge itself acting as a resonator and projecting the sound into the water. Much of the sound was low in frequency—right in the sensitive hearing range of humpbacks. It hit me: the noise from the bridge was stopping him.

Perhaps when the whale had swum under the bridge before there was less traffic and thus less noise. But now it was close to 5:00
P.M.
and the bridge was packed with heavy two-way traffic. My idea was simple: To move Humphrey forward, we had to remove that wall of sound in front of him. We had to stop the traffic.