From the Archipelago: Whales in My Dreams

August-September 2002

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

The following is an excerpt from the Introduction to Alexandra Morton's new book, Listening to Whales, reprinted with her permission.

Some nights I hear whales in my dreams. They start off distant like the sound of wind in the trees but gradually pick up to the point where they're all I can hear. Most times I can make out which pod is calling - the sisters, transients, G clan, or any of a dozen other orcas I've spent nearly a quarter of a century listening to. On a good night it's the exquisite dialect specific to the family of the fifty-four-year-old matriarch Tsitika, a series of rippling harmonics so perfect it imparts a deep sense of peace in me, like a shuddering sigh.

Some nights I wake up from one of these dreams and find it hasn't been a dream at all. I trundle downstairs in stocking feet, put my ear to the hydrophone speaker, and hear Tsitika calling to her children. I press the record button on my tape machine and note the time and date in the sound log. And so begins another day of work.

In the kelp bed floating outside my window, a hydrophone dangles down 15 feet into the water of Cramer Passage. A black cable snakes through the kelp, up the rocky beach, through the salal brush, around my kale garden, past the greenhouse and chicken coop, and up through the floorboards into my house, which is perched on a low bluff on the western coast of Canada.

I begin my mornings with a strong cup of coffee at my desk, writing, entering data, or sorting through black-and-white photos of dorsal fins. If there are no whales that day, the first sound I hear is often the crackle of shrimp coming alive with the lightening of the sky. Sometimes I hear otters chirping or dolphins letting loose those high-pitched twitters that make them sound like monkeys on helium. The hydrophone doesn't discriminate. More often that not, I hear the scream of outboard motors. The community in which I live, Echo Bay, has no roads. Everyone gets around by boat.

To study a wild animal, you must adapt your life to its rhythm. It's the only way you'll increase your chances of encountering your subject, and perhaps more important, it's the only way you'll begin to understand how your subject encounters the world. We landlocked humans experience our surroundings primarily through our eyes: land and vision. A killer whale's aquatic world comes to it almost exclusively through its sense of hearing: water and sound. Living in Echo Bay has put me in a world as close as I can come to the killer whale's without actually living underwater.

I'm constantly listening and looking for whales. As I wake my six-year-old daughter, cook breakfast, brush my teeth, talk on the phone, my ear remains cocked to the speakers. My eyes constantly scan the water for the misty plume of a whale blow. I press my eyes against a pair of high-powered astronomical field glasses seventy times a day, panning slowly back and forth over the water, always hoping for the rise and fall of an orca's black fin. I've spotted whales while I've been gardening,baking bread, writing papers, braiding my daughter's hair. I've spotted orcas while I've been taking a shower. And when I spot one, I'm gone. Into my boat - Blackfish Sound, a 22-foot dory - and out on the water, following the whales wherever they take me. I note their breathing intervals, record the sounds they make, watch them interact with the world around them. I am their shadow.