The sun is back, and so are the whales. We celebrated a few weeks ago with a trip to San Juan Island for an event called Orca Sing.

Washington State is home to three resident pods of orcas (killer whales). They are an iconic species for the region—beloved, respected, and endangered. During the winter they are often found traversing the lower reaches of Puget Sound, in search of salmon. In the summer they take up residence around the lower half of Vancouver Island, including the San Juan Islands.

Orca Sing is the brainchild of Fred West, a local musician and choir director. About ten years ago he had the idea of bringing a choir to the islands to sing to the whales—an alternative to the harsh and abrasive noises we usually pump into their world.

So each year on the Saturday closest to the solstice, people come from all around to sit on the cliffs at Lime Kiln State Park. Environmental groups host the event, and set up information tables. We picnic, put on sunscreen, and run into old friends we didn’t know would be there. Kids wear orca hats and get too close to the water. Otters and seals poke their heads up in the kelp below. And everyone is waiting for the whales.  

Orcas have been part of this physical landscape for over two million years, and part of the psychic landscape for as long people have been here. They figure prominently in stories and myths up and down the Northwest coast. Skana. Makinulth. Kit—their ancient names.

They are important family crests. Killer whale designs are carved on totem poles and masks; stitched onto the red button blankets that the women wear when they dance. They are painted in murals on the sides of buildings all over town. On Western Avenue a single orca is breaching.  On 6^th Avenue they are resting in a pod. They are incorporated into logos for plumbers and barbers and banks; serve as mascots for sports teams and elementary schools. They inform our history, our heritage, our dreams.

Orca societies are matriarchal. They live in tightly bound family units called pods, organized around the mothers and grandmothers. Four generations of whales are swimming in these waters, in three different pods. If one member of a pod is identified, you can generally be sure the others are nearby.

Each pod has a distinct dialect. You can identify orcas by the sounds they make; by the shape and size of their dorsal fin; and by the saddle-patch—the white blotch behind the dorsal fin that is unique to each orca, like fingerprints are for humans.

Their life spans and maturation ages are very similar to humans. Females live to be between 50 and 80; males between 40 and 50. The oldest whale in the southern resident pods is Granny, a matriarch who is approximately 90. She is usually seen swimming near her son, J-1, who is in his 40s and has a 6-foot dorsal fin. Its distinctive wavy shape has earned him the nickname Ruffles.

Unlike most other marine mammals, orcas were never hunted by the native people in this area. They were considered relatives; revered as royalty or shaman—shapeshifters who could become human, or wolves, at will.

That changed in the last century, when orcas started to be perceived as threats to fisheries. Locals started shooting at them. The Canadian navy used them as target practice. Their total population numbers were wildly overestimated.

Most devastating of all was the capture era, which began when a local fisherman towed a male orca down the straits and into a pen on the Seattle waterfront. The whale turned out to be friendly, curious, teachable—and the display industry for orcas was born.

Over the next ten years, more than 60 whales were captured, or killed during the attempts. Whole pods were rounded up and sent to aquariums around the world, where most of them died within a few years. Orcas who swim 70 to 100 miles a day in the wild were put into tanks not much bigger than a backyard pool. People who witnessed the captures say the sound the whales made when their calves were being removed is the worst thing they’ve ever heard.

The captures came to an end when Washington State successfully sued NOAA to stop issuing permits to Sea World. Former Secretary of State Ralph Munro was outraged by the brutality of a capture he witnessed on Budd Inlet near Olympia, and led the effort to stop them.

By the time it was over, 63 whales had been removed from these waters—one-third of the entire population. Of those, only two are still alive in aquariums today.

The captures are over, but their legacy persists. An entire generation of whales is gone, and the pods that are left are in crisis. They are dying younger than they should, and at a rate faster than they are reproducing. The population reached a peak high in the late 90s, and has declined steadily since then. The threats they face include a diminishing food supply, contamination from PCBs and PBDEs, noise pollution and stress from private and commercial vessels, and Navy sonar exercises.

They are canaries in the coal mine for the health of Puget Sound. It is not too late for them to recover—we hope—but it will take all of us who live here to chart their fate. If we don’t change what we are doing to their food supply and their habitat, these whales could go extinct within the next 200 years.

The musicians set up and the choir began to sing. First, a Brazilian ode to the goddess of the ocean. Then an African folk song about the creatures of the sea. A youth chorus from Oregon showed up and asked to sing a song- they'd heard about the event and just wanted to be a part of it. A Tlingit drummer sang a potlatch entry song.

Through binoculars we saw a long series of blows to the south, at the line in the tide where two currents meet. Orcas! And a lot of them. Would they come this way? It was like waiting for Christmas. They hung on the horizon for what seemed like hours, fishing the rip.

The choir began the singalong part of the evening. The director asked us all to join in: “Peace I ask of thee, O river”. For a moment people were hesitant, shy, self-conscious, but a few bright voices helped embolden the others. Pretty soon it seemed like everyone was singing.

And that is when the whales started heading north. Closer and closer they came, breaching along the way, till they were passing right in front of us. A few of them spyhopped right in front of the park, as if trying to get a good look at the humans and what we were doing.

Keep it going Fred said.  And so we did, right into the Halleluiah chorus, singing at the top of our lungs. The whales kept coming, a slow parade against the still-high sun. By the time we got to Amazing Grace almost 60 whales had passed by, including Granny and Ruffles. Nearly everyone had left their blankets and chairs and was standing on the edge of the rocks, as close to the water as we could get. When the song ended we just listened to the sound of their blows, carrying for miles across the calm.

Then it was over, and they were gone. We folded up the tables, gathered the petitions, took down the displays. A few of us hung around and watched the sun set over the water that had just been full of whales, and now seemed so empty without them. We imagined them breaching in the bay around the corner, swimming in the dusk just beyond where we could see.

(Photos courtesy of Heather Detwiler)