News Releases

June 28, 2005

We watched Luna again today from the shoreline. He was foraging in the middle of the bay where he normally hangs out. It was typical behaviour with some interesting variations. Sometimes he wouldn’t exactly dive, he’d just submerge, his dorsal remaining in one place in the water. His back and fin would just slowly sink. Then he’d come up a few moments later facing exactly the opposite direction. Several times he did this kind of submerging but actually moved backward as he was going down, which for some reason looked odd. He’d soon come up again and go into a more normal – at least to these watchers – kind of porpoising dive. He also spent a fair amount of time tilted over on his side, showing lots of white, seeming to look upward. We speculated wildly about what he was looking at. The low stratus that was slowly burning off? The moon? An eagle? Or was he daydreaming about whales in flight?

It seems an indication of how air-centric humans are that we assume when he rolls over like that he’s looking upward. It’s probably more likely that he does it to look directly downward into the part of the world that is far more his domain than ours. The trouble is, once you start thinking about that, and about the fact that he can be looking both up and down at once and making sense of it all, plus simultaneously plumbing the depths with sound, the differences between the way he perceives our shared planet and the way we do again seem vast, and our own awareness starts to seem a bit limited in comparison.

At about mid-morning a sportfishing boat came by, and the people in it noticed Luna, who was lying on his back at the time, waving his pec fins in the air. They stopped and went over to a hundred or so meters from him. There were some thumps from their direction; perhaps they were banging on the boat to attract him. He zipped over there. We could see his fin right beside their boat, and the boat moved sideways a little. The people in the boat looked at him and seemed to take photographs, but as far as we could see they didn’t touch. After about five minutes of this, they roared away. Within a few moments, Luna was back foraging again.

As the day wore on and the typical afternoon wind came up, we lost track of Luna in the whitecaps and didn’t see him again.

Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit