War of the Whales (38 page)

Balcomb respected Ben’s all-in commitment and his willingness to get arrested for what he believed. But civil disobedience and dressing up in costumes weren’t Balcomb’s style. Neither were press conferences. He was determined to keep up the pressure on the Navy and Fisheries to investigate what had happened in the canyon. But he wasn’t ready to carve “whistle-blower” across his forehead. He’ d worked hard to earn the respect of his peers for his surveys on orcas and beaked whales. He worried that if he stepped onto a podium with Reynolds and Rose, he’ d put his credibility as a researcher—and the orcas—at risk.

Despite having spent decades under the spell of whales and working to protect the orcas of Puget Sound, he’ d always been wary of the Save the Whales movement—or, for that matter, save-the-anything movements. Animals, he revered. It was the humans who rushed to their rescue with their political agendas that Balcomb often had trouble with. In his experience, the animal rights crowd tended to look down on the “humane” community as mainstream sellouts who cared only about cat-and-dog rescue. Meanwhile, the humane players called the conservation groups “species-ists” because they were enthralled by charismatic megafauna such as elephants and pandas that looked good on refrigerator magnets. And the animal liberationists thought that anyone who wasn’t ready to break and enter to liberate a captive animal was a hypocrite.

Balcomb only met John Lilly once, at a 1977 marine mammal conference where Lilly was shunned by his colleagues. But he was well acquainted with several other Navy-funded researchers who had crossed over to become public advocates for whales. He always found it ironic that the Save the Whales movement was jump-started by a SOSUS acoustician like himself. Frank Watlington was a legendary figure in the secret world of SOSUS and something of a mentor to the acoustic analysts of Balcomb’s generation. Since 1950, he’ d run the first proof-of-concept sonar station constructed offshore from Bermuda. Like Balcomb and every other SOSUS operator listening for Soviet submarines, Watlington heard lots of whales calling to each other. Over the years, he became an aficionado of the eerie vocalizations of the Atlantic humpbacks that wintered in the Bermuda waters, compiling their distinctive calls on hundreds of hours of audiotape. As whaling continued to deplete the North Atlantic humpback population throughout the fifties and sixties, Watlington worried that his personal archive of recordings would soon be the only surviving record of this dwindling species and their unique calls. When he met a bioacoustics researcher named Roger Payne in 1967, Watlington decided to draw back the curtain of SOSUS just enough to show the world what it risked losing forever.

Payne had studied bat biosonar under Donald Griffin at Harvard, earned a PhD in biology at Cornell, and conducted ONR-funded research into whether or not owls echolocated during their nocturnal hunts. He determined that owls used acute night vision rather than hearing for hunting and navigating in the dark.

In 1966 Payne read an article in
Scientific American
that reversed the direction of his research. “The Last of the Great Whales,” written by one of Lilly’s bioacoustics disciples, Scott McVay, was a cri de coeur against the lethal toll of international whaling on endangered species of cetaceans, including the Atlantic humpback population, which had dwindled to barely 5,000. When Payne learned that the closest resident humpbacks were based in Bermuda, he persuaded the New York Zoological Society to sponsor a study.

Soon after arriving in Bermuda, Payne and his wife and research partner, Katy, were introduced to Watlington by a mutual friend. Watlington played them the tapes he’ d been recording for the past decade from the SOSUS hydrophone array mounted on the ocean floor 30 miles off the coast. Roger Payne was taken immediately with what he described as the humpbacks’ “exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound.” Watlington lent him a copy of a tape to analyze.

Payne brought the tape to Scott McVay at Princeton University, where the biology lab was using sonographs to analyze bird songs—the same type of sonographs that Balcomb had used at his SOSUS stations to diagram the sound signatures of submarines. McVay graphed the humpback whale calls, and he and his mathematician wife, Hella, and Roger and Katy Payne assembled to analyze them. They reached a startling conclusion: the whale calls featured discrete phrases that were repeated regularly, revealing an underlying musical syntax and composition. Payne concluded that the humpback’s chorus of baleful moans were songs, perhaps some sort of mating aria performed exclusively by male humpbacks. Later, when he studied humpback populations in the South Atlantic and the Pacific, he discovered that the songs differed from one whale community to another.

In 1971 Payne and McVay published their findings as the cover article of the journal
Science
. The article stirred considerable academic debate and interest. But Payne wasn’t content to make waves merely in academic circles. He wanted to rescue humpback whales from extinction. So he did something rare, and professionally risky, for an academic researcher. Like Lilly before him, Payne decided to promote the whales’ talents directly to the public.

Instead of writing a book, Payne produced an album of their music. While the
Science
article was crawling through the peer review process, he convinced a small California record company to release Watlington’s recordings as an LP entitled
Songs of the Humpback Whale
. It was an immediate sensation, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and joining the Beatles’
Let It Be
and the Grateful Dead’s
American Beauty
as iconic albums of 1970. Near the end of the decade, in the largest album pressing ever,
National Geographic
inserted ten million flexible vinyl sound sheets in its magazine. Payne proved a tireless evangelist for the wonder of whale songs. He traveled the talk-show circuit, from
The Tonight Show
to
The David Frost Show
, while McVay delivered the message of singing humpbacks to the whaling industry’s ports of call in Japan.

Rock, pop, and jazz critics debated the musical merits of the humpback songs, whose ethereal melodies resonated with the New Age genre of electronic music. Kids who had grown up on the theme song from
Flipper
could now clamp on their Koss headphones and tune in to the vibes of a 40-ton contralto. The album’s cover featured a humpback breaching against an all-white background, and the liner notes included an antiwhaling manifesto calling on listeners to help save the humpbacks.

Whale scientists, for their part, were divided on whether or not humpbacks were actually singing, and if so, what about and to whom. But there was no disputing the influence of humpback whale sounds on the listening public and on the burgeoning movement to save the whales. The album was released two years before passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, when whale oil was still a heavily promoted ingredient in many American consumer products, from motor oil, to cosmetics, to soaps. Sperm whale oil, the highest-viscosity substance on the planet, was used as a lubricant in US nuclear-powered submarines. The breakout success of
Songs of the Humpback Whale
went a long way toward stigmatizing whale oil in consumer products—and elevating whales from by-the-barrel commodities to rock star celebrities.

In 1977, when Voyager I was launched into space to probe the outer solar system for intelligent life-forms, its cargo included a gold-plated audio disc engraved with greetings from the secretary-general of the United Nations and the president of the United States, as well as a medley of musical works by Beethoven, Chuck Berry, and—courtesy of Frank Watlington and the Navy’s SOSUS hydrophones—the songs of the humpback whales. John Lilly, no doubt, was smiling up at Voyager I from his hot tub atop the cliffs of Big Sur.

•  •  •

If Payne used whale melodies to win the hearts and minds of the public, it was another bioacoustics researcher—a colleague of Balcomb’s in the Pacific Northwest—who aroused more militant opposition to whaling.

Paul Spong, a neuroscientist from UCLA’s Brain Research Institute, was hired by Dr. Newman of the Vancouver Aquarium to study two wild-captured orcas it had acquired in the late 1960s. Spong quickly grew fascinated by their vocalizations and their responsiveness to sound and music. Just as quickly, he lost interest in trying to evoke conditioned responses with dead-herring rewards. Like so many whale and dolphin researchers, the intense personal bond Spong formed with his study subjects eventually turned him against research on captive animals. During a 1968 lecture at the University of British Columbia, Spong declared his research subjects “intelligent and articulate communicators unfit for captivity.” When he recommended relocating them to a semiwild penned environment in Vancouver Sound, he was fired.

Spong later moved to nearby Hanson Island and launched the nonprofit OrcaLab devoted to the observational study of orcas in the wild. Spong’s ethos of “research without interference” was modeled after the noninvasive, long-term studies of gorillas and chimpanzees in the wild conducted by Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall. It was a novel approach to whale research in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, whale researchers at international meetings were debating both the scientific and ethical merits of studying whales and dolphins in captive settings versus wild environments.

For Spong, it was a natural progression from opposing captive research to confronting the whaling industry. Greenpeace began its first oceangoing protests in 1971, when a handful of young activists in the Pacific Northwest plotted to disrupt nuclear bomb tests on the Alaskan island of Amchitka and subsequent bomb tests in the South Pacific. A few years later, Spong convinced Greenpeace to redirect its oceangoing protests at the Russian and Japanese whaling fleets.

In April 1975, with a rousing send-off by 30,000 supporters gathered at the Vancouver docks, Spong and a small Greenpeace crew launched Project Ahab aboard a vessel Spong had equipped with hydrophones and underwater speakers so he could soothe the whales with his flute playing. A month out, they intercepted a Soviet ship chasing a pod of whales. Armed with bullhorns and video cameras, they boarded inflatable Zodiac rafts and inserted themselves between the whalers and the whales. In the midst of the hunt, they captured dramatic and gory footage of a sperm whale being harpooned.

Two weeks later, a somber Walter Cronkite broadcast the video clip on the
CBS Evening News
, detonating what Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter called a “mind bomb” in the American psyche. Overnight, Greenpeace became a media darling. “For the first time in the history of whaling,” spouted the
New York Times
, “human beings had put their lives on the line for whales.” When the next Spong-directed Greenpeace expedition sailed from Hawaii, it was trailed by a crew from ABC’s
Wide World of Sports
.

Greenpeace’s direct-action antiwhaling campaigns would remain a staple of network news for the ensuing decade, until the International Whaling Commission announced its worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986.

Balcomb was awakened early the next morning by the sound of a chain saw. He didn’t have to guess whose it was. Whenever Ben White came to visit, he carried a chain saw in the back of his Natural Guard pickup, just in case Balcomb had some trees that needed pruning.

When he crawled out of bed and went outside to look, Balcomb could see White hanging from a safety line strung between two 80-foot firs behind his house. The trees were full of dead branches, and White was perched atop the tallest one, cutting away the bad wood. He worked his way down the topmost layer of the first tree, and then fastened the chain saw to his belt and swung across to the other.

Balcomb guessed that White was showing off his blue-collar cred, perhaps to establish parity with Balcomb, who could dismantle and rebuild any kind of car, truck, or boat engine ever made. For the next hour, Balcomb tried to focus on pasting photos into his J Pod catalogue and ignore the chain-saw racket and the acrobatic figure outside his window working his way back and forth between the two trees. An hour later, White had reached the ground and reduced the dead timber to a neat stack of firewood.

When the chain saw went quiet, Balcomb hoped that White would leave him in peace. But a few minutes later, he found White in his kitchen, rummaging through the refrigerator.

“You really ought to stop eating animals, man,” White said, holding up a dried-out handful of sliced salami. He stuck his head back inside the refrigerator and pulled out a sorry-looking apple. “How can you be so in love with orcas and still eat pigs?”

“Come on in, make yourself at home.”

“So, did you hear about the press conference in DC? You coming?”

“You know Jasny already invited me,” said Balcomb. “You could have just called me and saved yourself all the hard work,” he said, gesturing to the wood piled outside. Balcomb put some day-old coffee on the stove to warm.

“You’ve got to be there, man,” said White. “Without you, all we have are talking heads. But you”—he pointed at Balcomb and grinned through his full beard—“you’ve got video! That’s all the networks care about.”

“So that’s why
60 Minutes
has been calling me,” said Balcomb. “I thought they cared deeply about beaked whales.”

“I heard through the grapevine that you’re stiff-arming that
60 Minutes
producer. I hope I heard wrong. You know how many eyeballs tune in to that show?” He bit into something nasty inside the apple and spit it out in to the sink. “Remind me to bring my own food next time I visit. You live like a frat boy.”

“Only when I have a few days to myself.”

And so it went for the next half hour. White pushing, Balcomb trying to deflect him. It was like wrestling a bear. White agreed with Balcomb that if he attended the press conference, Fisheries and the Navy would probably never do business with him again, and that he’ d likely be smeared by the academic crowd, who were all in the pay of the Navy anyway. It was a sure bet that some admiral would call him a pawn of the environmental lobby. But so what? Why had he been self-funding his orca and beaked whale surveys for 25 years? To make pretty posters and calendars to sell to the tourists? So he could present his data sets at a science conference and bask in polite applause? If he really gave a damn about the whales, White insisted he had to step up and bear witness to what happened in the Bahamas.