By Mike Parfit Copyright 2005 by Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm

Report from Nootka Sound, November 21, 2005

Luna has been hanging around his most familiar territory almost exclusively lately. He hasn't been to the Gold River docks - as far as we know - for weeks. There has been a lot of action to occupy him. He's been dividing his time between logging camps and fish farms.

I was out near his area all weekend, sleeping and writing in the cuddy cabin of the old fiberglass boat we're now using. It was a busy few days.

On Friday afternoon I saw Luna foraging out in the middle of the bay, but by later in the evening, long after dark, he had hooked up with a large workboat that travels up and down the Sound frequently. The boat was parked and working at one of the fish farms, and he spent a couple of hours there. Then a huge barge came in to pick up logs from the dry land sort at the edge of the bay, and he went over there. The barge worked loading logs from around midnight to about six in the morning. It was attended by at least one boom boat and a tug - and Luna.

I watched from a couple of hundred meters away, and didn't see him in the harsh light of the barge's overhead floodlights. I talked to people in the tug, however, who told me he was there. But after a couple of hours - at about 2:30 a.m. - he popped up beside me, which meant that I had to leave. I guess that after I left, he must have gone back to work in the big, noisy turbulence of log loading that he seems to like so much.

At about 6 a.m. the log barge left, towed by a tug, and I talked to someone on the tug by radio. He said that Luna followed him a short way out of his familiar territory before dropping off to forage.

Later that day - Saturday - Luna made his way back over to one of the fish farms, where the same workboat was tied up. He then followed it from that farm to a second one, where he played some more with the bow thrusters and water outflows. However, at about noon, even though there was a lot of water pouring from the ship, he must have decided that all this activity finally needed some sustenance to support it, so he went out in the middle of the bay and foraged. I was too far away and too low to the water to see him, but a crewmember was high up in the pilothouse and he gave me a report. I thanked him and told him that it isn't our policy to give out either the names of boats or the specific locations of Luna in our reports. He was fine with that, but said that if I did refer to his ship he did want me to point out that it has a crackerjack crew.

So, the crackerjack crew helped me to keep tabs on Luna for a bit longer that day, and also the next. But what also helped was a hydrophone I had on board, which recorded a number of calls that evening. A couple of days later I talked with Keith Wood - the president of Act Now for Ocean Natives (ANON) and the leading genius behind the Luna Live operation. He and I tried to figure out what might have led to what turned out to be an unusually large number of calls through the weekend. Nothing I saw indicated any particular change in Luna's activities or circumstances. Maybe the nighttime activity of the log barge, which doesn't come by often, had something to do with it. But who knows? It may also have had something to do with how quiet the bay was on Saturday night.

Saturday night may have been hopping somewhere, but it sure wasn't where Luna and I were. I was tied to an old anchored boom stick about 10 meters from the shore, and Luna was somewhere out there in the calm and foggy night, and he called and called.

At 8 a.m. on Sunday morning the big workboat was back at the fish farm, and I again called the crackerjack crew on the radio. Sure enough, Luna was over there again, no doubt hoping for a little bow thruster action. When the big ship headed to another farm Luna went over there too, and played for a while with an aluminum skiff in which two people were working on one of the pens. But by 11:00 a.m. he was back out in the middle of the bay, foraging again.

At 11:39, from the boom stick where I was tied, I heard a particularly loud call. It was immediately followed by a new sound in the water, the whish-whish-whish of a slow prop. One of Luna's old friends was coming, a small tug. Several observers have noted, over the years, that Luna tends to call when one of his favorite boats comes into acoustic range, so this wasn't a surprise. It was just a reminder of the complexity of Luna's awareness.

Sure enough, when the little tug came past, Luna jumped into its bow wave and surfed along. The tug went around the corner of the bay and picked up a loaded barge, then headed back to the west. Luna stayed with the tug while I followed at a discreet distance - about 500 meters back. They went about four and a half nautical miles, into another inlet, and Luna finally dropped off. At that point he seemed to spend a lot of time foraging very near the surface, somehow creating an area of considerable foam around him. He wasn't thrashing around or tail slapping or anything, but from where I stood on top of the boat's cuddy I could see that the foam was extensive. He must have done it by blowing bubbles.

He did that for over two hours. I had the hydrophone in the water and recorded a few more calls, including a loud one that coincided with the arrival around a distant point of the same crackerjack-crewed workboat. At the time the boat was about five nautical miles away, but I could hear its props clearly on the hydrophone and obviously Luna could too. He gave a call but made no effort to try to reach the boat.

A long time later Luna started to make his way back up the channel toward his familiar territory. He went very slowly and right at the surface, so he was probably catching up on some rest as he puttered along. It was so calm that afternoon that even at that slow speed he made a wake.

I had been drifting along all this time near a prominent landmark rock, and I didn't want to let him know where I was by cranking up the motor, so I continued to drift and let him get out of sight even through the binoculars before I followed. However, he played stealth whale and vanished. There was only about an hour and a half of daylight left, and in that time I didn't see him again. However, he was heard calling on the Luna Live hydrophone that night. Michael Parfit Gold River Famous whale's small talk is big news for researchers Toronto Globe & Mail http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051118/LUNA18/TPScience/ By MARK HUME Friday, November 18, 2005

VANCOUVER -- When Luna, the lonely orca who lives in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, began to exchange calls with a passing pod of killer whales, it was a conversation heard around the world.

It soon started a flurry of e-mails among killer-whale researchers who say the contact, and the nature of the calls, raises hope that Luna will one day reunite with the family group it lost contact with several years ago.

"It's very exciting . . . a very rare event," Allan Muir, a research volunteer, said in an overnight e-mail from Scotland, where he was the first to hear the whale-to-whale communication.

Mr. Muir is part of a worldwide web of researchers who, via the Internet, have been monitoring a hydrophone listening post on a 24/7 basis for the past year, as part of the LunaLive project.

Mr. Muir is a marine mammal medic with British Divers Marine Life Rescue, an organization that saves stranded cetaceans. It was 2:41 a.m. Wednesday in Nootka Sound when he heard Luna's distinctive voice on his computer.

Luna, who has lived apart from other whales in Nootka Sound for the past three years, has a high-pitched voice that rises and falls as it calls out.

Luna, who is known as L-98 to scientists and Tsu'xiit to B.C.'s Mowachaht and Muchalaht native population, belongs to the southern residents pod, an endangered group of killer whales usually found in Puget Sound in Washington State.

It isn't known how Luna came to be isolated in distant Nootka Sound, where the only other killer whales are usually passing transients, a different subpopulation from residents.

Luna jumped into international headlines a few years ago when it began bumping into boats and sea planes, and nudged around the dock at Gold River.

The orca's familiarity with humans, which at times became dangerous to boaters, brought the whale under intense scrutiny by scientists who at one point debated capturing and transporting it back to its home group.

Scientists have been watching Luna from shore-based observation sites, tracking it in boats and listening to its calls with a hydrophone that was placed in a bay it likes to visit.

Mr. Muir was at home preparing whale-stranding posters to put up along the coast of Scotland when he heard Luna over his network connection.

It was about 10:30 in the morning where he was, and whale researchers on Canada's West Coast were sound asleep.

"Some of the calls were unfamiliar to me, which had me wondering," Mr. Muir wrote. "Suddenly I realized the calls were overlapping and that there was more than one orca present. I could clearly hear Luna's 'rising call' and the other vocalizations intermingling . . . I had heard Luna vocalizing before, but this was different. . . . There being other orca in close proximity was very special."

He immediately sent an e-mail to whale researcher Keith Wood, who was on his boat in Tofino, B.C.

"[It] was a milestone event," said an enthused Mr. Wood, who heads an organization called Act Now for Ocean Natives. He was the one who placed the hydrophone in Nootka Sound.

"It's really exciting . . . transients and residents rarely exchange calls."

Dr. Paul Spong, director of OrcaLab, a B.C. whale-research station, said that in 30 years researchers have heard transient and resident whales vocalizing together only three times. "This is a very rare event," he said.

Resident killer whales are naturally vocal, calling to one another as they travel and search for their primary food source, salmon.

But transients, which feed on seals, sea lions and other whales, usually travel in silence.