From the Archipelago

April-May 2000

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

Winter Behaviors, Spring Awakenings

by Alexandra Morton

Pacific white-sided dolphin, photo Alexandra Morton ©

Fog in the winter months is rare and when it happens it feels like a day stolen from summer, a gift of quiet respite from the constant motion of the southeast storms. Around Christmas-time this winter there was one foggy morning after another, giving us a "white Christmas" of sorts.

All night the voices of dolphins called over the hydrophone. During the long mornings, trapped at home by the blanket of white, I listened for them, but the sounds vanished with first light only to reappear at dusk. The dolphins have done this for the past twelve years. Perhaps there is a body of fish too deep for the dolphins to reach during the day, which rises to the surface under the cover of darkness.

A fish at the surface of the water under a bright sky is clearly visible to predators below, but at night such a silhouette does not occur. Many species of fish respond to the daily cycles of light and dark in this way. It dawned on me this year that the flock of about 300 western grebes which appear each winter out in front of my home must depend on this nightly rise of fish. I have passed them hundreds of times over the years and they never seem to be feeding, just preening or sleeping with their heads buried beneath their wings. Perhaps they are resting after a night of dining, waiting for the smorgasbord to rise again.

Throughout the foggy period this winter, the fog would lift in early afternoon and I would have a couple of hours to find the dolphins before the sun rolled back down below the steep inlet walls. Dolphins seem to pattern their lives in micro-routines. For several days, weeks, some times months, their movements are predictable, then abruptly they move elsewhere, hundreds of them gone all at once, perhaps keeping appointments with other stocks of fish, temperatures, social engagements-it is impossible to know what drives them. But for several weeks this winter I knew exactly where to find them. During the foggy spell the dolphins spent their days in Tribune Channel, schooling capelin to the surface.

Three hundred dolphins can be surprisingly difficult to see, so I look for birds. The birds always know everything that is going on in the water. They will be nowhere to be seen, then a transient whale makes a kill and they invariably appear the instant there are bits to be scavenged. It is the same with the dolphins. One or two gulls will pace the dolphins, but as soon as a school of fish is rounded up to the surface, loons, cormorants, murres, murrelets, grebes and gulls appear out of thin air. The dolphins charge through the schools sending sprays of fish struggling to get away. They make a distinctive staccato quack, perhaps to stun the fish.

I always dip out some of the fish the dolphins are eating to identify and measure them. These were the biggest capelin I have observed yet-between 9 and 11 cm long. They have a delicious scent to them, described to me once by a fisherman as similar to cucumbers. I know that sounds strange for a fish, but they certainly smell fresh. So I put a few in a bucket, and when I got home I rolled them in flour and fried them. They are a member of the smelt family and very tasty indeed. It was easy to see why the dolphins eat them with such gusto.

Watching dolphin is like watching a fifty ring circus. There is too much going on for one person to observe. When they are gathered around a school of capelin their actions are easy to interpret, but most of the past sixteen years that I have been watching dolphins, their behaviour has been confusing. Gradually, I am learning to perceive the entire group, whether there are four or a thousand, as one organism. This has helped me to understand them, but it's not easy. Sometimes the younger 'teenagers' are up to one thing, usually roughhousing, fighting over space at the bow of my boat or engaging in acrobatic sex. They provide enough action to rivet a person's attention, but if you pull back there are other scenarios simultaneously underway. Another group may be doggedly schooling fish and when they are successful, the entire group converges to feed. Most fascinating are the big guys who cruise zig-zag patterns through the entire aggregation, as if patrolling. They are very busy and completely disinterested in my boat. Once I saw several of them relentlessly pursue a smaller dolphin until it plunged into a kelp bed. When the big guys left, the little one came out and quietly moved back into the group.

This winter I got several good looks at a remarkable behaviour where several hundred dolphins knit themselves into a small circle of solid dolphin bodies. They always did this near shore. There were never any fish evident. Every few minutes a gull would glide over them to check out the action, but it would depart after a few circles. The dolphins were in such a dense mass that they were in constant physical contact with each other. Instead of chirping and clicking, they whistled during this behaviour. Whistling is considered social talk in many species of whales and dolphins, and so that, combined with the lack of fish, makes me think the swirling behaviour forms and strengthens the bonds between community members. I have no idea what a Pacific white-sided dolphin "community" is, but this activity seems a part of the glue.

By mid-January the dolphins vanished again, keeping unknown appointments in unknown places. And I had gained a tiny bit more knowledge about their existence.

**********************************

It seems there is something going on with the bears on this coast. Over Christmas, neighbours of mine living on the mainland had a young grizzly bear actually move onto their homestead. The bear lolled about in a dreamy state on their porch, batted at the children's swing and refused to leave. There is no salmon river in their area and they had never had a problem with bears previously. In December grizzly bears in this part of the world should be hibernating. The family was reluctant to shoot him, but tried sling shots and noise makers. The bear was so dopey he actually collapsed unharmed after being hit with a stick, resting awhile then moving closer a few minutes later. He was thin, starving and looking for the calories required to survive the winter. Thankfully this bear eventually ambled off.

On another occasion a bear jumped out of the brush and knocked down a fellow living in remote Wakeman Sound. The Wakeman River is a major salmon river in this area and like so many rivers last year it had very few fish return. The bear placed one enormous clawed paw on the man's chest and was likely preparing to feed on him when his dogs distracted it enough to allow the man to escape. To get rid of the wild bear, the man tied some meat to the back of a pick up and dragged it far back into the valley. The bear followed and vanished.

A couple of weeks ago a black bear charged down a ramp, across a float and onto a tug boat in Seymour Inlet, chasing a little fox terrier named May. May escaped, but a woman on the float was not so lucky. The bear grabbed her as a friend looked on. The man had great difficulty making sure he only shot the bear. The woman was medivacted out, suffering six puncture wounds. She had been saved by the thick padding of a survival suit which bunched up in the bear's jaws and prevented him from taking out a piece of her flesh. The bear weighed only 75 pounds. It awoke from hibernation dying of starvation and was desperate for a meal.

At the end of January I learned that 16 bears (grizzly and black) had to be shot just north of here in the Oweekeno Village in Rivers Inlet. Those bears were also starving and so hungry they had to raid the village in a manner never seen before.

The demise of the BC coastal food chain is no longer hypothetical. It is happening, and unless we halt all activity detrimental to salmon-the keystone species upon which so many other species depend-the biological dominos will fall. We'd be fooling ourselves to think this doesn't include us.

As always, I urge each of you to do whatever you can, wherever you can, to allow the natural Earth systems to regain balance: from eating chemical free-food, not pouring toxic chemicals down the sink or onto your lawn, to making it clear to politicians that we need life on earth. We may not all be mother bears emerging from dens with hungry cubs, but if we lose all our natural food sources, such as salmon, we put our species in a vulnerable position. Corporate food-production is yet an evolving experiment in the bending of natural laws. We still don't know where the breaking point is. For the bears of this coast we are apparently at that point. What we don't know is how far behind them humanity lies.

**********************************

Despite the odds, little Echo Bay is thriving. Miraculously the tiny school is now on the Internet. The children are involved, as well, in measuring the health of the stream nearby. They assess pH, temperature, invertebrates and spawning gravel. It is wonderful watching them look for bugs in eyedroppers of water drawn from a bucket of stream water. There are shrieks of delight as each microscopic life form is spotted and they look at every eyedropper-full with a new understanding of its potential for life. We are planning a new community hall for our movie nights, school plays, summer concerts and other events. I recently made it onto the Internet, myself, making this remote place ideal for anyone looking to raise healthy children while still being in touch with the world.

The eagle pair who 'own' the territory on which my house sits, have come back from wherever they go, and they are keeping a sharp eye out for the herring which should be coming up the pass any day to begin the cycle of life here once more.

The wild places today depend on the love of humans. So as you paddle this coast let yourself fall irrevocably in love. There were no winter paddler sightings, but I know your migration will begin soon after the herring, which is just starting to run. As I scan the horizon I'll spot the rhythmic flash of your paddles, wondering for a second if you are a whale. Until then keep well.

Alexandra Morton is a marine mammal researcher in BC's Broughton Archipelago, and a regular WaveLength columnist