News Releases

Copyright 2006 by Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm

Luna is still spending much of his time in his familiar territory some miles from the Gold River Docks. I’ve been out there often lately, and have watched him spend much of his time foraging. There has been a lot of nasty weather out there, and a lot of storm warnings in the forecasts, but in between there have been some calm hours, and at those times I’ve been able to hear him clearly on a hydrophone, and have heard both an abundance of echolocation and a few calls.

The calls have all been the short call that seems to be his entire repertoire these days – at least during the times I’ve been listening. Because I often spend the night anchored in the area, I have heard him on occasion during the night as well as in daytime, but to be honest I haven’t listened much in the earliest hours of the morning. Those times tended to be very active periods during the Luna Live monitoring, so I may be missing something.

The pattern over the past couple of weeks has been that Luna has spent large chunks of time in one pursuit or another. In other words, when he forages he seems to be very focused and does not follow some of his favourite boats. But when he’s in the interaction mood he will spend hours with one boat or in a familiar location like a fish farm.

As Lisa Larsson, who listened to Luna during long periods in 2004 and 2005, points out, when you hear listen to Luna you get to feeling a very powerful sense of intimacy with him. Listening to him is not at all like having him come up beside your boat, first because when he comes up next to you, you immediately feel the necessity to leave, and, second, because there is no two-way connection involved. Luna has no idea that you’re listening. So it’s kind of voyeuristic; you are peeking through a very small window directly into his life, and he has no clue you’re watching.

But since it doesn’t feel at all illicit, it’s something that one can do for long periods of time without getting concerned about interfering with Luna. The echolocation travels well, and the hydrophone picks it up cleanly when the waters are relatively calm, so often I can’t even see him when I am listening to him. But to hear him busily looking around out there somewhere with his magical sonar is wonderful.

Luna’s interaction during my most recent visit was with a tug and barge that came in from the outside to deliver equipment to one of the work sites in the area. Luna hooked up with the tug as it came slowly into the area and followed it to its docking point. Then, since the tug had to stay there overnight for a morning loading process, Luna remained with the tug for several hours.

I talked to the crew about this later. They were two men who, like so many of the people who work in Nootka Sound, are very fond of Luna. While they were working, they said, Luna joined the tug as it pushed a few logs around to get the barge properly stationed. I asked if Luna had helped or hindered their operation and they said he always pushed the logs in the directions that they had wanted them to go. But when they tied up for the night and tried to sleep, he kept them awake for quite a while by rubbing on the bottom of the boat, which made squeaking and clanking sounds.

I was anchored about half a mile away at the time and didn’t hear any calls or echolocation that night.

Luna’s interaction patterns remain hard to predict. Often I see one of his favourite ships coming through the area and I’ll expect him to jump on a bow wave and ride along for a while, but then he doesn’t, even when he is foraging quite nearby. Other times he seems to travel a fair distance, at least a few hundred meters, to join the same boat.

I can never predict what’s going to capture his attention. I usually seem entirely out of the range of his interest when I drift along relatively close to the shore with the hydrophone out, and particularly when I anchor – because water shallow enough to anchor in is usually only a few meters from the shore. Also, with the motor shut off I don’t think I present a very active or interesting target, so he tends to ignore me wherever I am. However, a few days ago when I anchored right next to the rocks, several hundred meters from where he was foraging, shut down the motor and put out the hydrophone, he eventually drifted on over to my anchor site, cruised around the boat a couple of times as if just checking in, and then, before I could get the anchor up to move away, he left.

This happened two more times during the course of a morning in which he spent virtually all the rest of the time foraging. Who knows what he was up to? Was he hoping my boat would get interesting and was coming by to see if that would happen? Or was he just making sure he got the coordinates of the thing that had come into the territory?

One of those times happened while I was typing away on my laptop in the shelter of the canvas and tarp enclosure I have adapted to make a place on the boat that stays relatively dry. I suddenly heard a breath on the starboard side of the boat and glanced out. It was a sea lion, who stuck his head high out of the water and looked at me with some kind of urgency in his eye. At almost the same moment, whoosh! There was Luna’s breath on the other side of the boat. The sea lion dived, Luna went back down, and both of them took off. I looked around to see if they were still there, but there was no sign. In a few seconds Luna popped up once again out in the channel, apparently headed back to his foraging grounds.

When you sit out there and watch like that, these things are just anecdote, and all the anecdotes just add to one’s wonder at all the great mystery in the world. We don’t even know what specifically is happening in an event like that, much less what it means. It’s just a privilege to have seen it.

Michael Parfit
Gold River