News Releases

Copyright 2006 by Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm

Luna is still spending most of his time in very familiar territory. This seems, from our conversations with people who have observed him over the years, to be consistent with past winters. As we’ve been reporting for some weeks now, he seems reluctant to leave an area of about four square kilometres. He follows boats that he knows well, but doesn’t go as far with them as he does in other seasons. He just chugs along for a kilometre or so, then drops off and returns to his fishing. I have charted some of the places I have seen him, and all the points are clustered close together.

He’s still active in seeking interaction, however. The last time I saw him, a couple of days ago, he eagerly followed a tug through the area, and when he left he came charging over to my boat using the technique we call Stealth Whale. He disappeared far away, then, while I scanned the horizon with binoculars, came up right by the boat. I was quite near the shore, where I had thought he wouldn’t approach.

When he came over he rubbed the bottom of the boat, making it squeak. I thought the sound meant that he was rubbing the side of his body on the fibreglass, but when I looked, that wasn’t it. His head was so deep beneath the boat I could hardly see it in the murky water. His tail was up, and he was rubbing the sharp edge of his flukes against the sharp edge of the hull, hard enough to make a squeak.

To disengage him I motored over to the shore. Usually he leaves immediately, as soon as I am within 30 or 40 meters of the shore, but on these occasions I had to get within less than 15 meters before he took off. It was low tide, and I was close enough to hear the little waves rustling among barnacles on the rocks. I don’t know if he stayed with me so close to shore because he was more eager for attention than usual or just that the water was particularly deep there.

I took a good look at him while I was getting away from him. He does not appear much the worse for wear these days. He has a relatively new scar from a scratch or a cut on the white of his lower body a few feet aft of his dorsal, but nothing that seems in any way dangerous. The X-shaped scar on his upper back, forward of his dorsal, which we worried might have been put there by an angry human last summer, has pretty much faded now.

A few days ago Suzanne and I had a loss that has made us think a lot about our relationship to Luna. Our dog Maple came in from a happy run, lay down in front of the fire, and died. We’re finding it difficult not having her around.

Our relationship to Luna is completely different from what we had with Maple, except for one critical part.

It is different for many reasons. First, we have no illusions that Luna has any relationship with us. We try to stay away from him, and when he has come near us we have not sought to encourage his attentions. We do not think he is in any way aware that we’ve been watching him for almost two years now. Second, our wishes for him are that he finds the full richness of his own life, not that he provide us with any of the reciprocal affection we were so fortunate to receive from Maple. Third, it is his wildness that we cherish and wish to protect, not his closeness to us or other humans.

Yet there is one similarity. What we remember most about Maple, and what we fundamentally miss, is who she was: her character.

It was the way she ran, always limber, as if she flowed; it was the way she stood, her front feet farther apart than normal, as if expressing her staunchness with her stance; it was the way she pounced on a ball when it was thrown far and the way she jumped to catch it when thrown short; it was the way she let our male dog fetch a stick that was too far out in the water for her taste, then took it away from him as he neared shore; it was the way she gave what sounded like a growl but was more of a purr when you scratched her chest; it was the way she came silently to my side when I was working at the computer and touched my elbow gently with her nose to get a moment of my time.

These were the idiosyncrasies of character that we find it hard to be without; just as right now I wish to feel the touch of that nose, and long for one more of those moments. It was not just her dogness we loved. It was not what she was. It was who.

So it is with Luna. We admire and respect orcas, and have affection for the species, but we love Luna for who he is as well as what. We love whatever it is about him – Determination? Courage? Stubbornness? Creativity? – that drove him to survive in a solitude that has killed many other young whales. We love what seems to be his intent playfulness – chasing a loose fire hose (as reported here a few months ago), pulling a log underwater and letting it go so it leaped to the surface like a launched missile; pulling a loose white fender on a rope held in his mouth so just the fender was above the surface, so that all we saw through the binoculars was the fender zipping through the water like a duck on steroids.

We love his odd territoriality, that he seems to maintain with zeal at times like these, then completely abandons to move to another zone. We love the way he seems to greet ships he knows, either by calling when he first hears their props (which we and Lisa Larsson have both detected through hydrophones) or breaching or slapping the water with a pec fin when they approach. We love how he always slaps the water once or twice with his tail when he is about to leave a boat he has been following; that has become so consistent that we can predict it. We love how he seems to recognize individual humans on some of the big work boats he has befriended. And we love how, even in his great solitude, he still makes his calls, day after day, month after month, year after year, an expression of what we can only think of as hope.

We know that some of what we perceive as individual is probably just hard-wired into the brains of all his species, or is anthropomorphic interpretations we put on behaviours we don’t understand. And yet -- and yet! There is something going on here. Maple was unique or we would not so grieve. We know, with the same heart that breaks for Maple, that Luna is also his own special life, forging a singular existence that will not come again.