Notes From The Archipelago: Life in Profusion

December 1998 - January 1999

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.

by Alexandra Morton

As I speed west towards Queen Charlotte Strait, the distinctive splashes of Pacific white-sided dolphins catch my eye. They look like a fierce little wind ruffling the water's surface. My last dolphin sighting in the archipelago was ten months earlier on Christmas day. As I veer my boat in their direction a gang of youngsters comes bounding towards me. This species' attraction to boats stands in stark contrast to all other marine mammals I have worked with. The dolphins collect around my bow. I try to count them, but the task is akin to counting rain drops as they fall. I pan my eyes over the group, counting ten, twenty, thirty, until I run out of dolphins. I do this over and over throughout the time I spend with them and after a few hours I start feeling confident about a ball-park number.

This group is huge. There are at least 100 visible on the surface at any given moment. As amazed as I am, I keep counting and soon reach about 1,000 dolphins. There are probably even more.

Pacific white-sided dolphins

Next I split my time between photographing the little gray streaked dorsal fins and recording the dolphin's underwater sounds. I have 600 ID photos so far, and by continuing to shoot pictures of the fins, I hope to piece together an understanding of the dolphin's social life. The fins themselves are very similar and many are not unique enough to be identified, so what I am looking for are nicks, tears and dots. Using photographs I can document how long the same dolphins are seen traveling together. Some pairs have shown up side-by-side in two photos taken years apart. Some day I hope to find out if the dolphins are organized in harems, matriarchal groups like orca, age segregated groups or some other system. With so many dolphins, this is going to take a long time to figure out!

Dolphin sounds are interesting, but very fast and complicated. To the human ear they sound like a stuttering series of di-di-dis and da-da-das. I record the dolphin sounds on one channel and my spoken notes about what the dolphins are doing on the other track of my tape recorder. Back home, I examine the sounds with an Apple Computer program called Canary. This marvelous program gives me pictures of the sounds, slows them down to my frequency range and speed, and best of all, stores each sound I enter. I am trying to catalogue the sounds of the Pacific white-sided dolphin. By looking through the sounds I have stored on Canary, I can be sure if a sound is new or already identified.

As I watch the group of dolphins, three massive brown heads surface and flash canines. They are Steller sea lions. I watch closely to see if they are being harassed by the dolphins, but they look relaxed and appear to be feeding. They dive straight down and then reappear in the same location to grab some fresh air and go back down. Later the dolphin group goes after a harbour seal, pushing it and hitting it. I have learned these dolphins are very aggressive and often attack other species of whales; porpoises and seals.

I am always trying to figure out what dolphins are eating. This group careens all over Fife Sound and then a school of pilchard erupts to the surface. Tightly balled by the dolphins, fish are trying to swim into the sky to get away from the snap of tooth-lined little jaws. Gradually, more and more species of fish eaters in the archipelago are getting the hang of eating pilchard, a fish only recently returned to these waters after a fifty year absence. Every day with the dolphins is another little snap shot into their lives

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Almost every one of the thirty people in this community of Echo Bay spent several days helping catch chum salmon broodstock last month. The Viner Creek chum salmon population had earlier crashed during a Bacterial Kidney Disease outbreak on a salmon farm. They were seen jumping by the thousands throughout the archipelago, but never materialized on the spawning beds that year. Then heavy logging destabilized the slopes rising up from the creek and now the creek is flash flooding and drying to a rhythm which can not support salmon reproduction

The remnant population of chums is trying to spawn in silt choked gravel. The eggs never get into the gravel because all the little spaces between the pebbles are full of silt. If the fish do dig a successful redd, many of the nests are left high and dry days after spawning, killing the eggs. There are not enough trees left to absorb and release the rainwater in a steady flow. It is a pitiful cycle of mud laden floods and then hours later barely any water at all.

So we are taking the fish trying to spawn in the most destroyed portion of the creek, raising their eggs in the hatchery to the eyed-stage and putting the eggs back into the gravel in the cleaner tributaries. Although enormously labour-intensive, we hope this will work. Entire families of people and whales used to fish this stock, as well as 300 eagles, bears and wolves.

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The community of Echo Bay has shrunk considerably in the past fifteen years. When the logging companies changed their policy from housing families to running bunkhouses, we lost quite a few people. We had hoped the fish farming industry would bring families, but there isn't one child in our school from that industry either. So we are down to less than ten children in the school. The children, however are flourishing. Imagine an entire school with less than ten children. Children graduating from Echo Bay School do very well because there is no back of the classroom to wither and die in.

I thought children raised in the wilderness would be shy and uncertain, but it is the opposite. They become highly self sufficient because they are partners in the business of life from day one. They help can the winter supply of food, carry firewood, tend the gardening and they take to boats at an early age. Instead of being left behind, children are included in all social activities. The fishing families take their children fishing, I take mine whale researching, the woman running the hatchery takes her two year old son, those starting their homesteads have their children alongside. It isn't easy, but the benefit is clear. Children have a long childhood so they can learn the complicated ropes of human society. Echo Bay is a remnant of what communities used to be like before the high production, age-segregated life most of us lead today

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The swans have moved in for winter. I see them circling overhead choosing which lake they will spend their day in. The geese and Sandhill cranes are also overhead, but they are going south. I am very lucky to live in a bay so sheltered from the winter storms that ducks winter here too. The Golden-Eye have been by to check the place out and they'll be back when the winds howl. I am still studying the absence of whales; only one member of the fish-eating resident pods of orca came through this entire year and it was B pod. Maybe next year will be better.

Happy New Year to all of you. We are moving into a new and uncertain age where it is up to us to shape our future. Best Wishes from the Archipelago.

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Alexandra Morton is a marine mammal researcher and author living in BC's Broughton Archipelago, and regular Wave-Length columnist