Hooked on Whales
by Fred Strebeigh, originally published in Smithsonian, June 1992
By midsummer along the Newfoundland shore, at the easternmost reach of North America, it's whale season. Wherever you fish, in Bay Bulls or Chance Cove or Joe Batt's Arm, you catch whales. Whatever you're after, cod or salmon or capelin, you catch whales. That's life: You want fish? You get whale.
The Folletts got their whale a year ago. It snagged in the big net that Fred and Ambrosene Follett anchor by the shore to catch codfish, not far from their house in the fishing town of Grand Bank. Both felt pity. Fred thought, "He's a harmless creature, ain't he?" They knew that the whale, left alone, would probably die, thrash their net to shreds, or both. So they did what you do when you catch a whale: you call the Memorial University of Newfoundland and ask for Prof. Jon Lien.
Five hours later, Jon Lien and his assistant Wayne Barney and I are bobbing in a rubber inflatable, two feet above the head of a midsize humpback. In length, it overwhelms us: lay the three of us head to foot, then add our boat, and the whale's 35 feet outstretches us all. In weight, three men and a boat, we could counterbalance perhaps one-fortieth of this whale; we hover over it like flies.
From above, the humpback's white flanks, seen through the clear Newfoundland water, look like the walls of an aquamarine swimming pool. Its black back looks like oil-slicked tarmac. Its humped black dorsal fin, the fin that gives the humpback its name, has been scraped in the Folletts' net to the color of cut salmon.
To my right, Wayne Barney, a full-time fisherman until he reached age 20 and now a student at Memorial, is holding the whale team's basic tools: a razor-edged knife and a sawed-off hockey stick with a hook where its blade used to be. Directly in front of me, cantilevering outward over the gunwales, wearing diving goggles and snorkel, is Jon Lien. I am holding his ankles.
Jon is face-to-face, underwater, with the whale. It looks tense, wild-eyed. Jon looks for an easy solution: the right place to cut net, if necessary, or the right route to urge the whale toward freedom. With a calmer humpback, Jon might touch it, shove at it, use the boat's rubber gunwale to poke it along-the way a cattleman might prod a cow through a gate. But this whale, eyeing Jon's begoggled face, seems to send a message: "Do not touch." Seeing these wild eyes, Jon keeps our distance-about 12 inches.
Jon emerges from the water smiling (in his goggles looking a bit like a nearsighted walrus) and gives his diagnosis: netting has caught on whale chin, whale beard and whale barnacles-chronic hitchhikers on humpbacks and a major reason why humpbacks snag on nets. He asks Wayne for the hockey stick.
As Jon redescends, his ankles rise. I pin them again. Jon works hard and breathes hard. When he needs air, he first clears his snorkel's blowpipe. Spray drifts over us. When the whale needs air, it clears its own blowpipe-sometimes whinnying like a horse, sometimes snorting like a bull. Spray pours onto us.
As Jon tugs at the netting on the whale's chin, the work finds its rhythm. Jon blows; whale blows; Jon blows; whale blows. This could go on for hours.
I hang onto Jon's ankles and on his every word--yelled at Wayne and me through his snorkel. When the snorkel blurts "Ol' on," I hold harder onto Jon's ankles. When it blurts "Uck"-and at the same moment I see the whale cock its tail, giving us what amounts to a fly's-eye view of a flyswatter-I duck, getting my head below the gunwales. (Earlier, Jon assured me that only one time in ten will a whale actually "strike"-but then its tail comes as fast as a horse's kick.) When the snorkel blurts, "Eez, 'e's comin'," I'm stumped.
I yell at Wayne, "What's he say?"
"He says," Wayne explains, deadpan, "he sees his cousin."
Naturally Wayne is calmer than I. This is my first trapped whale; Wayne's been aboard for two others. Fortunately for all of us, the man whose ankles I've been clinging to has saved more whales than anyone else in the world-hundreds of them.
When I arrived at Jon Lien's laboratory in the wooded hills above the provincial capital, St. John's, on the day before the Folletts got their whale, he made me feel welcome in true Newfoundland fashion: he told me not to waste money on hotels. I should stay at his guest cabin as long as I wanted, just uphill from his house and past the barn where he and his wife, Judy, keep their goats and turkeys.
As we sat at a picnic table that he called his "office," I noticed that Jon, now in his early 50s, looked like the territory he lived in. His hard-worn running shoes were the color of Newfoundland granite. Lapping over them were denim jeans the hue of blue ocean. Above the blue, he wore an evergreen-color pullover. His beard was a grizzled gray-blond, like lichen, and his blond hair was flyaway, like the wispy needles of tamarack. just one item looked odd: a black beeper, hung on his jeans, set to wail whenever a fisherman snagged a humpback and phoned for help.
At the same time Jon made me feel welcome in Newfoundland, he also made me feel awful. He predicted a "great" whale season-which to him meant almost no whales at all.
Jon Lien didn't come to Newfoundland to save whales or even to study them. He came in 1968 from the United States, where he had grown up on farms in South Dakota and earned his doctorate at Washington State University, to teach animal behavior. His specialty was a palm-size seabird, the storm petrel.
Then in 1978 a fisherman called Memorial University to ask for help. He had already asked everyone he could think of, including the government fisheries office. He had a problem no one knew how to solve. A humpback whale had snagged in his gill nets. It could not rip loose. It would not die. Its bones were becoming visible under its skin. It had been snared for three months.
Jon Lien took the call and found a way to free the whale. Soon, fishermen swamped him with similar tales of woe: trapped whales, lost fish, dead whales, ruined gear. He was able to estimate that about half of all trapped whales eventually died-occasionally at the hands of fishermen who had no one to help them.
He talked the government into modest funding ($15,000 per year, recently raised to $50,000) for a university research project and started saving whales. In the next dozen or so years, he and his assistants took part in the release of more than 600 humpbacks.
A few decades ago, there may have been fewer than 6,000 humpbacks left in the world. Humpbacks may be the most gregarious of all large whales, often gathering near shore and, for that matter, "singing" to each other in a complex concert that, since it was first studied in the 1960s, has entranced human listeners-many of whom first heard humpbacks singing as an accompaniment to Judy Collins in the haunting whalers' song "Farewell to Tarwathie."
The humpback is surely the most acrobatic of large whales, often making itself conspicuous by leaping from the water in dramatic breaches, by lunging up out of the sea to feed on baitfish, and by slapping its flukes or its winglike pectoral fins against the surface with a wallop that can resound for miles. Its conspicuous behavior, combined with its relatively slow swimming speed, made the humpback easy prey for whalers. Its numbers fell from a total of perhaps 150,000 worldwide to the verge of extinction when commercial whaling of humpbacks finally ended in the 1950s and '60s.
When the whales head north to feed
Since then humpbacks have rebounded slightly. They may number some 12,000 individuals divided into mostly small populations throughout their ancient range. Groups of a few hundred feed in summer at five separate locations around Antarctica, for example; perhaps 350 feed near Greenland, at least 400 near the Gulf of Alaska, and another 400 or so off Maine.
In all the world, however, the humpback population that seems to be most solidly rebounding is the one scientists call the "feeding substock of Newfoundland-Labrador." That substock now numbers 3,000 or more, and when it heads north to feed at midsummer along the Newfoundland shore, it's whale season.
Each year for the past half-dozen (and generally since records began to be kept at the end of the 1970s), more and more humpbacks have been hitting the nets of small-boat, low-income, inshore, family fishermen like Fred and Ambrosene Follett: 34 caught in 1986; 66 in '88; 75 in '90-an all-time record. (These numbers dwarf statistics elsewhere: off the entire Northeastern United States in the decade ending in 1985, an average of fewer than two humpbacks per year were reported tangled in fishing gear.) In addition to Newfoundland's rebounding whale population, the causes may include an increase in fishing gear near shore and a decrease in baitfish offshore, possibly as a result of large-scale fishing.
But 1991, Jon Lien told me happily, would break the trend. This season, he predicted, fishermen would not suffer a plague of whales. Instead, this summer, the coldest in memory, would be remembered as iceberg season. Even after midsummer, icebergs were jamming harbor mouths and grinding along headlands.
The ice-cold water, Jon predicted, would keep away the capelin that are the primary baitfish for both cod and humpback. And although Jon worried for the fishermen, he seemed to exult for himself. Just this summer, instead of freeing whales, he would "un-entrap" himself. He would do what a university professor should do: write articles and supervise graduate students.
Early the next morning in Bay Bulls, an hour south of Jon's lab, half a dozen sleepy-eyed graduate students clustered around him to discuss their research project, the impact of Newfoundland's fledgling tour-boat industry on the island's full-fledged seabird colonies-myriad pullulating puffins, kittiwakes, murres, gannets and razorbills.
Then the beeper unleashed its whale wail. A fisherman named Follett had called from Grand Bank.
"We've got some whales," Jon announced. His eyes took fire. His students seemed to melt away. He phoned Fred Follett in Grand Bank: keep boats away from the whale. He phoned Wayne Barney at the lab: prepare the inflatable whale boat. We jumped in Jon's little blue Mazda, the whale truck.
As Jon drove he talked-but not, to my surprise, about saving whales. "I'm working for this fisherman," he began, and at speed he sketched the life of Fred Follett, a man he had met before only briefly. "I pretty well know the situation: nothing's happened, he's had a rotten year, got no money.
"Capelin have just come in," Jon continued, meaning cod would follow-bringing the Folletts one chance to make good money. "And here he's got a whale. This guy is facing the wolf at the door. Maybe he's got a week left to make his living."
In a typical year around Grand Bank, a fishing family like the Folletts earns only about $8,000. Of that amount, half might come from cod. A season with no cod catch and the loss to a frenzied whale of their one cod trap-a vast boxlike enclosure that requires months to build and contains some $5,000 worth of netting-could leave a family with no money whatsoever.
At the wharf in Grand Bank, the Folletts stood in their foul-weather gear-Ambrosene with a wide freckled face, and Fred with a meticulously trim auburn beard. They looked worried but calm, like family farmers with a sick milk cow, relieved to see the vet.
As Fred skippered us out toward the whale, Jon knew what to expect-a young male humpback, 1 to 3 years old. He was right. To Fred he said, it's "always small guys who make mistakes."
Young humpback males, Jon often says, are like "teenage drivers," with one possible exception-they're too smart to crack up twice. Net entrapments leave whales with distinctive scars, and Jon almost never sees a trapped whale carrying old net scars.
As it happened, the Folletts were lucky with this reckless young whale. In less than an hour, mostly spent staying away from the tall (it never struck), Jon worked the net almost free. Suddenly, with a tug, the whale was loose. It whipped across the bay, gulping air, and then plunged for the depths. The uprush of water from its flukes created a flat "footprint" on the surface, vast as an Amazonian water lily.
"Nothing I could do to hold him," Jon told the Folletts, as if apologizing. Their net damage, he told them, looked slight-maybe a day of patching. Jon offered to start the patching right then; firmly but gratefully, they refused. Next, however, he made an offer they did not reject: he would equip the battered net with his new "whale alarms"-noisemakers, designed to warn whales away from nets, that draw on a dozen years of Jon's trials and errors.
Earlier efforts had their flaws. Old fishing lore, for example, said whales wouldn't swim near whale blood: wrong, Jon learned. Old antisubmarine tactics suggested whales wouldn't swim toward depth charges: right, Jon learned-but encouraging fishermen to toss submersible firecrackers between whales and nets was potentially dangerous to both man and beast.
Jon refined the most promising tactic: place noise-making "alarms" to warn the whales away. The prototype looked like a gleaming aluminum volleyball and held a mechanical clanger that switched on automatically when the alarm hit salt water. Alas, half a dozen, enough to protect one trap, cost more than $1,000. But these prototypes weren't for sale; they were free, on loan as part of an experiment. Once word spread around the docks that the new alarms worked, fishermen began lobbying for them.
As Jon strung alarms along the Folletts' net, they began to clank-making an industrious clatter, the sound of elves hammering horseshoes. To a whale, he told Fred, "that sounds like a wall of sound."
Back at the dock in Grand Bank, Fred said thanks for getting the whale loose. "You've caught your quota," Jon told him. Wayne added: "Catch any more, and we fine ya." The whale truck was off.
As Jon drove, the passing scenery jogged his memory. Each inlet and outport had witnessed its whale crisis. The map of Newfoundland seemed as dotted with trapped whales as the wreck charts of Cape Horn are with smashed ships.
Just west of Grand Bank, there was the stranded pygmy sperm whale on the island of Miquelon. just south, there was the pilot whale stranding at Point au Gaul. "We don't do heroic measures when they strand," he said, lest I confuse his rescue efforts with the media-enhanced drama that occasionally ensues when whales hit beaches elsewhere.
When a lone whale strands, the cause is often illness, he observed, so "putting it back in the water probably is just a good way of spreading disease." Furthermore, "strandings are a natural phenomenon," one that whale populations have adjusted to "over the centuries." His goal is to stop "new mortality"-such as snagging in nylon nets.
Other parts of the coast had other whales. Near Gaskiers, a violent humpback had to be pulled into the shallows with a long rope tied to a backhoe. Once the backhoe had hauled the whale in, Jon cut the net in minutes and then chased the creature back to sea.
In Conception Bay a sperm whale was reported "behaving strangely." But when Jon tried to help it, it dashed away.
Off St. Vincent's a massive right whale-weighing perhaps 70 tons-snagged in a cod trap and, when Jon arrived, turned violent, striking wildly. Jon got a fisherman with a 55-foot boat to winch its tail out of the water so Jon could cut the net. The whale lifted the boat so high that Jon, on the water in his inflatable, saw daylight beneath its keel. The boat owner cut the winch line. The whale departed with the trap.
Back at the lab the next day, whale dramas seemed only memories. All was calm. There was pea soup in the Crock Pot. There was Taster's Choice in the Coffee Magic. There was Jon and Judy Lien's farm-fresh goat's milk in Mason jars in the fridge, beside-also in Mason jars and saved for a graduate researcher-whale eyes the size of large onions.
Predictions resumed for a great, whale-free season. The next day also began calm. Then the phone rang.
Whale season had apparently reached Trinity Bay, not far north of St. John's. From its low-humped hills, themselves the shape of swimming whales, families could look down on chill mornings across a sea made spouty by the warm breath of whales-fins, minkes, humpbacks. Trinity Bay was looking as thermal as a geyser basin in Yellowstone.
When Rex, Orlando and Howard Roberts in Whiteway, at the south end of Trinity Bay, heard they'd caught a whale, they weren't surprised. They didn't even go to look at theirs. First, Rex Roberts called Jon Lien. Then Rex and his brothers, a fishing team for a dozen years, sat down on the docks to wait. They looked like a line of forwards on a local hockey team: Rex the solid center, his brothers the lean wings. just now, though, they looked benched.
Sometime before the whale truck arrived, a "Big Red" all-terrain tricycle pulled onto the docks. Its rider called out at Orlando Roberts, "Ya got whale, eh?" The voice was taunting, the accent thick. "I 'ope 'e's dead-get a meal, anyways."
The voice belonged to Scott Jackson, 23, broad-shouldered, well-tattooed. "I knowed somebody was gonna catch one," Jackson continued, maybe for my benefit (I had driven early to Whiteway). If he ever caught a whale in one of his nets, he announced, "I'd like ta kill it." He actually licked his chops and then added: "Ar'tic steak-better 'n cow."
I didn't know what to make of Jackson, but Jon Lien had warned me I would meet his type: the voice of the devil, or at least the devil's advocate, vowing the best whale is a dead whale. In Whiteway, however, devil's vows had no audience. As Jackson talked, other fishermen drifted away. Perhaps they knew what he would do next: brag about shooting a whale.
It had happened in 1978, just a few months before ion Lien saved his first whale. In late June that year, a humpback snagged in Hayward Legge's net at Shag Rocks, a craggy outcrop visible from the Whiteway wharf. Legge didn't know what to do. There was no one to phone for help. Old fishermen told him that a whale, left to die slowly, would tear his net to bits.
Legge and most of the fishermen of Whiteway went out in four or five boats to Shag Rocks, carrying rifles and 12-gauge shotguns. They couldn't free the whale, so they decided to kill it quickly.
A bit after hearing Scott Jackson's boasting, I went to look for Hayward Legge at his house, just uphill from the Whiteway docks. When he answered the door, he looked at me as if I were a federal marshal. His eyes, deep blue under brows as craggy as Shag Rocks, seemed to say, "I knew you'd come for me someday."
He talked sadly about his whale. "Old fellers," he recalled, "said, 'Mind, go kill 'im roit quick,' so he wuddn't tear up much gear." The old fishermen also told him to "foir down 'e's blowhole." Legge winced as he talked about it. He would fire; the whale would descend; the whale would rise to breathe; he would fire again. Blood filled the water. The whale wouldn't die.
Hayward Legge is a skilled hunter. Like most Newfoundlanders, he hunts for the pot: moose, caribou, partridge and other game to keep his family fed. And like most hunters, he is someone who cares about clean kills. The largest room in his house is decorated with paintings and drawings of animals in the wild-auks, puffins, deer-many done by his nephew. It also contains meticulously stuffed examples of owl, murre, puffin, seal and moose, most of them prepared by Legge himself. The stuffed creatures show damage to neither fur nor feather.
The whale, he said, was the worst hunting of his life. "Oy'd say it was prob'ly two hours" of shooting, he recalled, looking disgusted. "Hard animal to kill."
Would he ever kill a whale again?
Oh no, he said. Two years later, in 1980, he caught another whale near Shag Rocks. That was different. He didn't get his gun. He got his phone and called Jon Lien. That whale got saved.
When Jon Lien reached the docks at Whiteway to help the Roberts brothers with their whale, Scott Jackson seemed to fade away. "If I can't get a decent meal off 'im, I'm not gonna watch," he spluttered. When he left, the Roberts brothers looked relieved.
As Rex Roberts skippered us out toward their trap, he told me they had "never tangled with whales before." Nor would they tangle with one this time.
"It's just wavin' us goodbye!"
When we had motored to within a few hundred yards of the trap, we suddenly saw a whale. It was dashing away from us, traveling as only a humpback can. Its tail was waving so high out of the sea that the whale seemed to be standing on its head, held aloft by wings--the humpback's enormous pectoral fins. Out in the middle of the bay, its upraised flukes swayed like a lone palm tree in a hurricane.
We found the trap empty. The Roberts brothers' big one had got away. They smiled ear to ear.
"See 'im go?" asked Jon. "Fast enough for ya?"
"That's good service," said Rex, turning to yell at the fleeing whale. "Good luck!"
"It's just wavin' us goodbye!" he added, laughing, and then began to check for net damage. The whale had destroyed only 60 feet of trap-just $100 lost and a day of patching.
Not every Trinity Bay whale got away that day. John Ralph caught one late at night near Bellevue. By dawn it had died.
With Ralph's help, we towed the whale to an island of rock and guano, populated only by thousands of black-backed gulls. Out there, Jon Lien decided, he could partly dissect the whale to help a team of researchers who needed measurements of whale hearts. Also, lashed to this remote island, the whale would pose no risk to human health or passing ships.
The scene of a young animal, alive until it blundered into his nets and now spread for gulls to peck at, seemed to offend John Ralph more than anyone else present. "We're just feedin' the gulls is all we're doin'," he said. "It's a total waste." He shifted to talk about other waste: capelin he catches and has to discard because Japanese shishamo cooks want only females full of eggs; herring he catches in springtime that can't be sold if the market gluts.
"Hundreds and t'ousands in the world starvin' to death all day long," he said, looking back at the whale. "If they had that whale many places in the world roit now, they'd make soup of the bones, that's fur sure."
John Ralph's whole heritage was fishing-checking gear with his father in the mornings before going to school, building his own fishing boats as his father and grandfather had, setting nets along a coast that steadily since the early 1500s has supplied fish to markets as remote as Europe. Such waste seemed to strike at lifetimes of catching fish and feeding a hungry world.
A few days later, driving in the whale truck, Jon Lien got talking about whales, and waste, and the work of inshore fishermen like John Ralph. "I sort of get nervous when we're catching whales," he said. His great fear is that an environmental group might start a campaign against Newfoundland fisherfolk. "These guys are vulnerable as hell," he said. "You know a humpback is better loved than they are."
But from an environmental vantage, he argued emphatically, "these are the guys we need to encourage and protect." Compared with offshore fishing fleets, inshore fishermen don't waste gas, and they don't waste fish. While the offshore fleet may burn fuel as extravagantly as one pound of fuel for each pound of fish it lands, he pointed out, "these guys get along on a can of gas for a week."
"There are 360 million fishermen worldwide," he continued, "and almost all of them are these guys that putt out in the morning, putt home at night." Viewed economically, their work looks rotten, "but the environmental aspects of their fishery look great."
Lien's goal now is to increase support for small-scale fishermen, at least by perfecting alarms that will allow whale and man to coexist on the Newfoundland shore. Such support can be scarce. When the government refused to help him build alarms, for example, he turned to a private company and, as he told a gathering of Bellevue fishermen, "those guys like bucks." Still, he hopes mass-production can bring the price of a half-dozen alarms down to below $200.
For Lien, an effort that began with saving an endangered species seems to have expanded to preserving an endangered way of life. During my last week in Newfoundland, both needed help.
All around us, whale season was coming in. Whales crashed into gill nets at Red Harbour and Hermitage. Whales hit a salmon net at Brigus South and broke through a cod trap at Pouch Cove. Whales ran off with gill nets from Fortune and, two days in a row, from Grand Bank.
That same week, the whale truck hit the road almost every day. Albert Rome and his son caught a whale in Chance Cove. Then Baxter senior caught one off Red Harbour. Then John Ralph caught one at Bellevue, his second whale of the season. (After Jon and Wayne got this one out alive, John Ralph was gracious: "Come back someday for a barbecue," he said, "but not for a whale.") Then the Barrett family caught one off Fermeuse. Then somebody got one at Red Island. Then the Sullivan brothers had one near Calvert.
At each outport, fishermen asked Jon Lien about whale alarms. With each whale, fishing families lost hundreds or thousands of dollars. With each day, Jon and Wayne looked a bit weaker-like a wrestling team on a bad road trip.
My last day in Newfoundland, whales seemed stacked in a holding pattern: one waiting for Jon and Wayne at Point La Haye, another at Bell Island, and more coming. My last rescue was the Sullivan brothers' whale at Calvert, and on the boat ride out we were joined for a brief visit by a documentary film crew.
The filmmakers were all glamorous Britons, but their on-camera star was an owlish-looking American. He wasn't there for looks. He was Roger Payne, probably the best-known whale researcher in the world (and the man who, long ago, recorded the whale songs that accompanied Judy Collins).
As we putted past icebergs and pulled on foul-weather gear, Payne talked about Lien: "There are dozens of conservation organizations claiming to save whales, but except for a few, Jon Lien has saved more than any of them."
Not long after our conversation, the Sullivans' whale was swimming free, and my plane was flying home. Later in the summer I phoned Jon's lab a few times, but he was always off on a whale.
Just after New Year's, he sent me a note. Humpbacks had hit like never before. Jon estimated the total number of whale collisions with gear at 1,280, with a cost to fishermen of close to a million dollars. All told, 137 humpbacks were reported trapped in gear-up from the previous year's record of 75. Fifteen died, but 122 survived. The year's last humpback banged into a squid trap in Whiteway in late October. It was the biggest whale season ever.
The Folletts got their whale a year ago. It snagged in the big net that Fred and Ambrosene Follett anchor by the shore to catch codfish, not far from their house in the fishing town of Grand Bank. Both felt pity. Fred thought, "He's a harmless creature, ain't he?" They knew that the whale, left alone, would probably die, thrash their net to shreds, or both. So they did what you do when you catch a whale: you call the Memorial University of Newfoundland and ask for Prof. Jon Lien.
Five hours later, Jon Lien and his assistant Wayne Barney and I are bobbing in a rubber inflatable, two feet above the head of a midsize humpback. In length, it overwhelms us: lay the three of us head to foot, then add our boat, and the whale's 35 feet outstretches us all. In weight, three men and a boat, we could counterbalance perhaps one-fortieth of this whale; we hover over it like flies.
From above, the humpback's white flanks, seen through the clear Newfoundland water, look like the walls of an aquamarine swimming pool. Its black back looks like oil-slicked tarmac. Its humped black dorsal fin, the fin that gives the humpback its name, has been scraped in the Folletts' net to the color of cut salmon.
To my right, Wayne Barney, a full-time fisherman until he reached age 20 and now a student at Memorial, is holding the whale team's basic tools: a razor-edged knife and a sawed-off hockey stick with a hook where its blade used to be. Directly in front of me, cantilevering outward over the gunwales, wearing diving goggles and snorkel, is Jon Lien. I am holding his ankles.
Jon is face-to-face, underwater, with the whale. It looks tense, wild-eyed. Jon looks for an easy solution: the right place to cut net, if necessary, or the right route to urge the whale toward freedom. With a calmer humpback, Jon might touch it, shove at it, use the boat's rubber gunwale to poke it along-the way a cattleman might prod a cow through a gate. But this whale, eyeing Jon's begoggled face, seems to send a message: "Do not touch." Seeing these wild eyes, Jon keeps our distance-about 12 inches.
Jon emerges from the water smiling (in his goggles looking a bit like a nearsighted walrus) and gives his diagnosis: netting has caught on whale chin, whale beard and whale barnacles-chronic hitchhikers on humpbacks and a major reason why humpbacks snag on nets. He asks Wayne for the hockey stick.
As Jon redescends, his ankles rise. I pin them again. Jon works hard and breathes hard. When he needs air, he first clears his snorkel's blowpipe. Spray drifts over us. When the whale needs air, it clears its own blowpipe-sometimes whinnying like a horse, sometimes snorting like a bull. Spray pours onto us.
As Jon tugs at the netting on the whale's chin, the work finds its rhythm. Jon blows; whale blows; Jon blows; whale blows. This could go on for hours.
I hang onto Jon's ankles and on his every word--yelled at Wayne and me through his snorkel. When the snorkel blurts "Ol' on," I hold harder onto Jon's ankles. When it blurts "Uck"-and at the same moment I see the whale cock its tail, giving us what amounts to a fly's-eye view of a flyswatter-I duck, getting my head below the gunwales. (Earlier, Jon assured me that only one time in ten will a whale actually "strike"-but then its tail comes as fast as a horse's kick.) When the snorkel blurts, "Eez, 'e's comin'," I'm stumped.
I yell at Wayne, "What's he say?"
"He says," Wayne explains, deadpan, "he sees his cousin."
Naturally Wayne is calmer than I. This is my first trapped whale; Wayne's been aboard for two others. Fortunately for all of us, the man whose ankles I've been clinging to has saved more whales than anyone else in the world-hundreds of them.
When I arrived at Jon Lien's laboratory in the wooded hills above the provincial capital, St. John's, on the day before the Folletts got their whale, he made me feel welcome in true Newfoundland fashion: he told me not to waste money on hotels. I should stay at his guest cabin as long as I wanted, just uphill from his house and past the barn where he and his wife, Judy, keep their goats and turkeys.
As we sat at a picnic table that he called his "office," I noticed that Jon, now in his early 50s, looked like the territory he lived in. His hard-worn running shoes were the color of Newfoundland granite. Lapping over them were denim jeans the hue of blue ocean. Above the blue, he wore an evergreen-color pullover. His beard was a grizzled gray-blond, like lichen, and his blond hair was flyaway, like the wispy needles of tamarack. just one item looked odd: a black beeper, hung on his jeans, set to wail whenever a fisherman snagged a humpback and phoned for help.
At the same time Jon made me feel welcome in Newfoundland, he also made me feel awful. He predicted a "great" whale season-which to him meant almost no whales at all.
Jon Lien didn't come to Newfoundland to save whales or even to study them. He came in 1968 from the United States, where he had grown up on farms in South Dakota and earned his doctorate at Washington State University, to teach animal behavior. His specialty was a palm-size seabird, the storm petrel.
Then in 1978 a fisherman called Memorial University to ask for help. He had already asked everyone he could think of, including the government fisheries office. He had a problem no one knew how to solve. A humpback whale had snagged in his gill nets. It could not rip loose. It would not die. Its bones were becoming visible under its skin. It had been snared for three months.
Jon Lien took the call and found a way to free the whale. Soon, fishermen swamped him with similar tales of woe: trapped whales, lost fish, dead whales, ruined gear. He was able to estimate that about half of all trapped whales eventually died-occasionally at the hands of fishermen who had no one to help them.
He talked the government into modest funding ($15,000 per year, recently raised to $50,000) for a university research project and started saving whales. In the next dozen or so years, he and his assistants took part in the release of more than 600 humpbacks.
A few decades ago, there may have been fewer than 6,000 humpbacks left in the world. Humpbacks may be the most gregarious of all large whales, often gathering near shore and, for that matter, "singing" to each other in a complex concert that, since it was first studied in the 1960s, has entranced human listeners-many of whom first heard humpbacks singing as an accompaniment to Judy Collins in the haunting whalers' song "Farewell to Tarwathie."
The humpback is surely the most acrobatic of large whales, often making itself conspicuous by leaping from the water in dramatic breaches, by lunging up out of the sea to feed on baitfish, and by slapping its flukes or its winglike pectoral fins against the surface with a wallop that can resound for miles. Its conspicuous behavior, combined with its relatively slow swimming speed, made the humpback easy prey for whalers. Its numbers fell from a total of perhaps 150,000 worldwide to the verge of extinction when commercial whaling of humpbacks finally ended in the 1950s and '60s.
When the whales head north to feed
Since then humpbacks have rebounded slightly. They may number some 12,000 individuals divided into mostly small populations throughout their ancient range. Groups of a few hundred feed in summer at five separate locations around Antarctica, for example; perhaps 350 feed near Greenland, at least 400 near the Gulf of Alaska, and another 400 or so off Maine.
In all the world, however, the humpback population that seems to be most solidly rebounding is the one scientists call the "feeding substock of Newfoundland-Labrador." That substock now numbers 3,000 or more, and when it heads north to feed at midsummer along the Newfoundland shore, it's whale season.
Each year for the past half-dozen (and generally since records began to be kept at the end of the 1970s), more and more humpbacks have been hitting the nets of small-boat, low-income, inshore, family fishermen like Fred and Ambrosene Follett: 34 caught in 1986; 66 in '88; 75 in '90-an all-time record. (These numbers dwarf statistics elsewhere: off the entire Northeastern United States in the decade ending in 1985, an average of fewer than two humpbacks per year were reported tangled in fishing gear.) In addition to Newfoundland's rebounding whale population, the causes may include an increase in fishing gear near shore and a decrease in baitfish offshore, possibly as a result of large-scale fishing.
But 1991, Jon Lien told me happily, would break the trend. This season, he predicted, fishermen would not suffer a plague of whales. Instead, this summer, the coldest in memory, would be remembered as iceberg season. Even after midsummer, icebergs were jamming harbor mouths and grinding along headlands.
The ice-cold water, Jon predicted, would keep away the capelin that are the primary baitfish for both cod and humpback. And although Jon worried for the fishermen, he seemed to exult for himself. Just this summer, instead of freeing whales, he would "un-entrap" himself. He would do what a university professor should do: write articles and supervise graduate students.
Early the next morning in Bay Bulls, an hour south of Jon's lab, half a dozen sleepy-eyed graduate students clustered around him to discuss their research project, the impact of Newfoundland's fledgling tour-boat industry on the island's full-fledged seabird colonies-myriad pullulating puffins, kittiwakes, murres, gannets and razorbills.
Then the beeper unleashed its whale wail. A fisherman named Follett had called from Grand Bank.
"We've got some whales," Jon announced. His eyes took fire. His students seemed to melt away. He phoned Fred Follett in Grand Bank: keep boats away from the whale. He phoned Wayne Barney at the lab: prepare the inflatable whale boat. We jumped in Jon's little blue Mazda, the whale truck.
As Jon drove he talked-but not, to my surprise, about saving whales. "I'm working for this fisherman," he began, and at speed he sketched the life of Fred Follett, a man he had met before only briefly. "I pretty well know the situation: nothing's happened, he's had a rotten year, got no money.
"Capelin have just come in," Jon continued, meaning cod would follow-bringing the Folletts one chance to make good money. "And here he's got a whale. This guy is facing the wolf at the door. Maybe he's got a week left to make his living."
In a typical year around Grand Bank, a fishing family like the Folletts earns only about $8,000. Of that amount, half might come from cod. A season with no cod catch and the loss to a frenzied whale of their one cod trap-a vast boxlike enclosure that requires months to build and contains some $5,000 worth of netting-could leave a family with no money whatsoever.
At the wharf in Grand Bank, the Folletts stood in their foul-weather gear-Ambrosene with a wide freckled face, and Fred with a meticulously trim auburn beard. They looked worried but calm, like family farmers with a sick milk cow, relieved to see the vet.
As Fred skippered us out toward the whale, Jon knew what to expect-a young male humpback, 1 to 3 years old. He was right. To Fred he said, it's "always small guys who make mistakes."
Young humpback males, Jon often says, are like "teenage drivers," with one possible exception-they're too smart to crack up twice. Net entrapments leave whales with distinctive scars, and Jon almost never sees a trapped whale carrying old net scars.
As it happened, the Folletts were lucky with this reckless young whale. In less than an hour, mostly spent staying away from the tall (it never struck), Jon worked the net almost free. Suddenly, with a tug, the whale was loose. It whipped across the bay, gulping air, and then plunged for the depths. The uprush of water from its flukes created a flat "footprint" on the surface, vast as an Amazonian water lily.
"Nothing I could do to hold him," Jon told the Folletts, as if apologizing. Their net damage, he told them, looked slight-maybe a day of patching. Jon offered to start the patching right then; firmly but gratefully, they refused. Next, however, he made an offer they did not reject: he would equip the battered net with his new "whale alarms"-noisemakers, designed to warn whales away from nets, that draw on a dozen years of Jon's trials and errors.
Earlier efforts had their flaws. Old fishing lore, for example, said whales wouldn't swim near whale blood: wrong, Jon learned. Old antisubmarine tactics suggested whales wouldn't swim toward depth charges: right, Jon learned-but encouraging fishermen to toss submersible firecrackers between whales and nets was potentially dangerous to both man and beast.
Jon refined the most promising tactic: place noise-making "alarms" to warn the whales away. The prototype looked like a gleaming aluminum volleyball and held a mechanical clanger that switched on automatically when the alarm hit salt water. Alas, half a dozen, enough to protect one trap, cost more than $1,000. But these prototypes weren't for sale; they were free, on loan as part of an experiment. Once word spread around the docks that the new alarms worked, fishermen began lobbying for them.
As Jon strung alarms along the Folletts' net, they began to clank-making an industrious clatter, the sound of elves hammering horseshoes. To a whale, he told Fred, "that sounds like a wall of sound."
Back at the dock in Grand Bank, Fred said thanks for getting the whale loose. "You've caught your quota," Jon told him. Wayne added: "Catch any more, and we fine ya." The whale truck was off.
As Jon drove, the passing scenery jogged his memory. Each inlet and outport had witnessed its whale crisis. The map of Newfoundland seemed as dotted with trapped whales as the wreck charts of Cape Horn are with smashed ships.
Just west of Grand Bank, there was the stranded pygmy sperm whale on the island of Miquelon. just south, there was the pilot whale stranding at Point au Gaul. "We don't do heroic measures when they strand," he said, lest I confuse his rescue efforts with the media-enhanced drama that occasionally ensues when whales hit beaches elsewhere.
When a lone whale strands, the cause is often illness, he observed, so "putting it back in the water probably is just a good way of spreading disease." Furthermore, "strandings are a natural phenomenon," one that whale populations have adjusted to "over the centuries." His goal is to stop "new mortality"-such as snagging in nylon nets.
Other parts of the coast had other whales. Near Gaskiers, a violent humpback had to be pulled into the shallows with a long rope tied to a backhoe. Once the backhoe had hauled the whale in, Jon cut the net in minutes and then chased the creature back to sea.
In Conception Bay a sperm whale was reported "behaving strangely." But when Jon tried to help it, it dashed away.
Off St. Vincent's a massive right whale-weighing perhaps 70 tons-snagged in a cod trap and, when Jon arrived, turned violent, striking wildly. Jon got a fisherman with a 55-foot boat to winch its tail out of the water so Jon could cut the net. The whale lifted the boat so high that Jon, on the water in his inflatable, saw daylight beneath its keel. The boat owner cut the winch line. The whale departed with the trap.
Back at the lab the next day, whale dramas seemed only memories. All was calm. There was pea soup in the Crock Pot. There was Taster's Choice in the Coffee Magic. There was Jon and Judy Lien's farm-fresh goat's milk in Mason jars in the fridge, beside-also in Mason jars and saved for a graduate researcher-whale eyes the size of large onions.
Predictions resumed for a great, whale-free season. The next day also began calm. Then the phone rang.
Whale season had apparently reached Trinity Bay, not far north of St. John's. From its low-humped hills, themselves the shape of swimming whales, families could look down on chill mornings across a sea made spouty by the warm breath of whales-fins, minkes, humpbacks. Trinity Bay was looking as thermal as a geyser basin in Yellowstone.
When Rex, Orlando and Howard Roberts in Whiteway, at the south end of Trinity Bay, heard they'd caught a whale, they weren't surprised. They didn't even go to look at theirs. First, Rex Roberts called Jon Lien. Then Rex and his brothers, a fishing team for a dozen years, sat down on the docks to wait. They looked like a line of forwards on a local hockey team: Rex the solid center, his brothers the lean wings. just now, though, they looked benched.
Sometime before the whale truck arrived, a "Big Red" all-terrain tricycle pulled onto the docks. Its rider called out at Orlando Roberts, "Ya got whale, eh?" The voice was taunting, the accent thick. "I 'ope 'e's dead-get a meal, anyways."
The voice belonged to Scott Jackson, 23, broad-shouldered, well-tattooed. "I knowed somebody was gonna catch one," Jackson continued, maybe for my benefit (I had driven early to Whiteway). If he ever caught a whale in one of his nets, he announced, "I'd like ta kill it." He actually licked his chops and then added: "Ar'tic steak-better 'n cow."
I didn't know what to make of Jackson, but Jon Lien had warned me I would meet his type: the voice of the devil, or at least the devil's advocate, vowing the best whale is a dead whale. In Whiteway, however, devil's vows had no audience. As Jackson talked, other fishermen drifted away. Perhaps they knew what he would do next: brag about shooting a whale.
It had happened in 1978, just a few months before ion Lien saved his first whale. In late June that year, a humpback snagged in Hayward Legge's net at Shag Rocks, a craggy outcrop visible from the Whiteway wharf. Legge didn't know what to do. There was no one to phone for help. Old fishermen told him that a whale, left to die slowly, would tear his net to bits.
Legge and most of the fishermen of Whiteway went out in four or five boats to Shag Rocks, carrying rifles and 12-gauge shotguns. They couldn't free the whale, so they decided to kill it quickly.
A bit after hearing Scott Jackson's boasting, I went to look for Hayward Legge at his house, just uphill from the Whiteway docks. When he answered the door, he looked at me as if I were a federal marshal. His eyes, deep blue under brows as craggy as Shag Rocks, seemed to say, "I knew you'd come for me someday."
He talked sadly about his whale. "Old fellers," he recalled, "said, 'Mind, go kill 'im roit quick,' so he wuddn't tear up much gear." The old fishermen also told him to "foir down 'e's blowhole." Legge winced as he talked about it. He would fire; the whale would descend; the whale would rise to breathe; he would fire again. Blood filled the water. The whale wouldn't die.
Hayward Legge is a skilled hunter. Like most Newfoundlanders, he hunts for the pot: moose, caribou, partridge and other game to keep his family fed. And like most hunters, he is someone who cares about clean kills. The largest room in his house is decorated with paintings and drawings of animals in the wild-auks, puffins, deer-many done by his nephew. It also contains meticulously stuffed examples of owl, murre, puffin, seal and moose, most of them prepared by Legge himself. The stuffed creatures show damage to neither fur nor feather.
The whale, he said, was the worst hunting of his life. "Oy'd say it was prob'ly two hours" of shooting, he recalled, looking disgusted. "Hard animal to kill."
Would he ever kill a whale again?
Oh no, he said. Two years later, in 1980, he caught another whale near Shag Rocks. That was different. He didn't get his gun. He got his phone and called Jon Lien. That whale got saved.
When Jon Lien reached the docks at Whiteway to help the Roberts brothers with their whale, Scott Jackson seemed to fade away. "If I can't get a decent meal off 'im, I'm not gonna watch," he spluttered. When he left, the Roberts brothers looked relieved.
As Rex Roberts skippered us out toward their trap, he told me they had "never tangled with whales before." Nor would they tangle with one this time.
"It's just wavin' us goodbye!"
When we had motored to within a few hundred yards of the trap, we suddenly saw a whale. It was dashing away from us, traveling as only a humpback can. Its tail was waving so high out of the sea that the whale seemed to be standing on its head, held aloft by wings--the humpback's enormous pectoral fins. Out in the middle of the bay, its upraised flukes swayed like a lone palm tree in a hurricane.
We found the trap empty. The Roberts brothers' big one had got away. They smiled ear to ear.
"See 'im go?" asked Jon. "Fast enough for ya?"
"That's good service," said Rex, turning to yell at the fleeing whale. "Good luck!"
"It's just wavin' us goodbye!" he added, laughing, and then began to check for net damage. The whale had destroyed only 60 feet of trap-just $100 lost and a day of patching.
Not every Trinity Bay whale got away that day. John Ralph caught one late at night near Bellevue. By dawn it had died.
With Ralph's help, we towed the whale to an island of rock and guano, populated only by thousands of black-backed gulls. Out there, Jon Lien decided, he could partly dissect the whale to help a team of researchers who needed measurements of whale hearts. Also, lashed to this remote island, the whale would pose no risk to human health or passing ships.
The scene of a young animal, alive until it blundered into his nets and now spread for gulls to peck at, seemed to offend John Ralph more than anyone else present. "We're just feedin' the gulls is all we're doin'," he said. "It's a total waste." He shifted to talk about other waste: capelin he catches and has to discard because Japanese shishamo cooks want only females full of eggs; herring he catches in springtime that can't be sold if the market gluts.
"Hundreds and t'ousands in the world starvin' to death all day long," he said, looking back at the whale. "If they had that whale many places in the world roit now, they'd make soup of the bones, that's fur sure."
John Ralph's whole heritage was fishing-checking gear with his father in the mornings before going to school, building his own fishing boats as his father and grandfather had, setting nets along a coast that steadily since the early 1500s has supplied fish to markets as remote as Europe. Such waste seemed to strike at lifetimes of catching fish and feeding a hungry world.
A few days later, driving in the whale truck, Jon Lien got talking about whales, and waste, and the work of inshore fishermen like John Ralph. "I sort of get nervous when we're catching whales," he said. His great fear is that an environmental group might start a campaign against Newfoundland fisherfolk. "These guys are vulnerable as hell," he said. "You know a humpback is better loved than they are."
But from an environmental vantage, he argued emphatically, "these are the guys we need to encourage and protect." Compared with offshore fishing fleets, inshore fishermen don't waste gas, and they don't waste fish. While the offshore fleet may burn fuel as extravagantly as one pound of fuel for each pound of fish it lands, he pointed out, "these guys get along on a can of gas for a week."
"There are 360 million fishermen worldwide," he continued, "and almost all of them are these guys that putt out in the morning, putt home at night." Viewed economically, their work looks rotten, "but the environmental aspects of their fishery look great."
Lien's goal now is to increase support for small-scale fishermen, at least by perfecting alarms that will allow whale and man to coexist on the Newfoundland shore. Such support can be scarce. When the government refused to help him build alarms, for example, he turned to a private company and, as he told a gathering of Bellevue fishermen, "those guys like bucks." Still, he hopes mass-production can bring the price of a half-dozen alarms down to below $200.
For Lien, an effort that began with saving an endangered species seems to have expanded to preserving an endangered way of life. During my last week in Newfoundland, both needed help.
All around us, whale season was coming in. Whales crashed into gill nets at Red Harbour and Hermitage. Whales hit a salmon net at Brigus South and broke through a cod trap at Pouch Cove. Whales ran off with gill nets from Fortune and, two days in a row, from Grand Bank.
That same week, the whale truck hit the road almost every day. Albert Rome and his son caught a whale in Chance Cove. Then Baxter senior caught one off Red Harbour. Then John Ralph caught one at Bellevue, his second whale of the season. (After Jon and Wayne got this one out alive, John Ralph was gracious: "Come back someday for a barbecue," he said, "but not for a whale.") Then the Barrett family caught one off Fermeuse. Then somebody got one at Red Island. Then the Sullivan brothers had one near Calvert.
At each outport, fishermen asked Jon Lien about whale alarms. With each whale, fishing families lost hundreds or thousands of dollars. With each day, Jon and Wayne looked a bit weaker-like a wrestling team on a bad road trip.
My last day in Newfoundland, whales seemed stacked in a holding pattern: one waiting for Jon and Wayne at Point La Haye, another at Bell Island, and more coming. My last rescue was the Sullivan brothers' whale at Calvert, and on the boat ride out we were joined for a brief visit by a documentary film crew.
The filmmakers were all glamorous Britons, but their on-camera star was an owlish-looking American. He wasn't there for looks. He was Roger Payne, probably the best-known whale researcher in the world (and the man who, long ago, recorded the whale songs that accompanied Judy Collins).
As we putted past icebergs and pulled on foul-weather gear, Payne talked about Lien: "There are dozens of conservation organizations claiming to save whales, but except for a few, Jon Lien has saved more than any of them."
Not long after our conversation, the Sullivans' whale was swimming free, and my plane was flying home. Later in the summer I phoned Jon's lab a few times, but he was always off on a whale.
Just after New Year's, he sent me a note. Humpbacks had hit like never before. Jon estimated the total number of whale collisions with gear at 1,280, with a cost to fishermen of close to a million dollars. All told, 137 humpbacks were reported trapped in gear-up from the previous year's record of 75. Fifteen died, but 122 survived. The year's last humpback banged into a squid trap in Whiteway in late October. It was the biggest whale season ever.