Sounds Wild and Broken, page 31
The Paynes, working with mathematician and scientist Hella and Scott McVay, fed the magnetic tapes into a sonograph printer, a Second World War technology that turns sound recordings into inked glyphs on long scrolls of paper. On each scroll, time passes lengthwise and the sound’s frequencies are represented by up-and-down lines and smudges across the short dimension of the paper. The whale’s cries look like the scratch marks of a clawed paw, parallel striations showing the many layers of harmonics. Where the cries resolve into drones or whistles, only a single line is visible, one frequency. Thumps are bold vertical stripes of charcoal. Clicks are light touches of pen. Like a musical score, the scrolls reveal to the eye both the form of each sound and the relationships among the sequences of cries, whistles, bangs, and rattles.
On scraps of paper, the internal structure of the whales’ sounds became apparent. Long sequences of sound are repeated every few minutes. The Paynes and McVays discerned five different levels at which sounds were grouped and repeated: single pulses or tones, more complex cries or whistles, phrase-like clusters of these shorter elements, strings of phrases, and finally long unbroken sessions. The shortest elements lasted a few seconds. Some sessions lasted many hours. Because the sounds contained repeated structure, like human and bird sounds, they called the sounds song.
Roger Payne gathered some of the best recordings and, in 1970, put out the Songs of the Humpback Whale album that now spins on my turntable. These whale sounds are likely the most widely heard sounds of any individual nonhuman animal. The album sold more than a million copies. An excerpt, a flexible plastic disk included in a 1979 National Geographic magazine, reached ten million more, the largest print order in the history of the recording industry. Today digital downloads, CDs, and pirated copies continue to carry these whales’ songs to millions of human ears.
In the 1970s, the recordings made the pages of the journal Science and were mixed into Judy Collins’s song “Farewell to Tarwathie,” inspired music by composer Alan Hovhaness performed by the New York Philharmonic, and were etched onto NASA’s gold-plated copper album of Earth sounds on the Voyager satellites. The last was packaged with a cartridge and a needle, in case the turntable and vinyl revival have yet to reach beyond our solar system. They were also played from Greenpeace’s boats as they harassed whaling vessels, and in the US Congress as testimony in debates about whale conservation. The songs of whales became both a rallying cry for the growing environmental movement and a bridge for human imagination into both the mysteries of the sea and the personhood of whales.
Watlington’s ancestors hunted whales, then sent the animals’ abundant oil to the cities of Europe and North America. There, whale meat and oil fed, lit, and lubricated the bodies and industrial apparatus of growing human populations. We often think of whaling through the lens of Herman Melville’s accounts of sailing ships and hand-powered chases. But the kill of nearly three hundred thousand sperm whales from 1900 to 1960 equaled the entire haul of the previous two centuries. In the 1960s, another three hundred thousand sperm whales were killed. Twentieth-century industrialization—fast ships, exploding harpoon guns, and floating and onshore factories—turned whaling into an activity more like war than fishing. In the first decade of the twentieth century, whalers killed fifty-two thousand animals. In the 1960s, the decadal kill had increased to more than seven hundred thousand. In all, whalers killed about three million animals in the twentieth century. Some whale populations, such as the Antarctic blue whales, were reduced to one-thousandth of their former abundance (now edged up to about one hundredth). Most others by 90 percent or more. The voices of hundreds of thousands of singing beings were erased from the oceans.
By the 1970s, crashing whale populations and the rise of plastics, industrial animal farming, and synthetic lubricants made whale bone, meat, and oil mostly obsolete. Our physical hungers sated from other sources, we no longer needed the material substance of whales. Watlington became a different kind of whaler, capturing and storing not whale bodies, but sounds, and his haul arrived in the same markets that his forebears supplied. Watlington’s and the Payne’s recordings fed, lit, and lubricated pathos, curiosity, and a slow transformation of morality. After providing bodily sustenance for many human generations, in the 1970s whales turned, especially in industrialized English-speaking cultures, into ethical goad, muse, and metaphor.
The humpback’s songs fell on ears ready for an emotionally charged expression of both despair at destruction and hope for the future. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency and Earth Day were both founded in the same year as the album’s release, the result of years of activism. At the same time, the United Nations was planning its first environmental conference. It helped that humpback whales sound mournful to human ears. Moan, wail, cry. A lamentation and dirge from below the waves. As Pete Seeger sang, “the passionate wail / That came from the heart / Of the world’s last whale.” Had Payne put out an album of other whale sounds, the project might have flopped, disks remaining unsold in a warehouse. Sperm whales use streams and clusters of clicks both to communicate with one another and to explore their world through echolocation. They creak like old door hinges, clack like metronomes, and, when gathered in groups, hammer and peck like dozens of frenzied woodpeckers. Played at the right volume, they could also blow out your ears, the loudest animal sound known. Minke whales boing, pulse, thump, and twang, their calls rubbery and percussive. Fin whales oop and grunt mostly too low for human ears to hear. The North Atlantic right whales’ groans sound as though they’ve arrived through a long resonant drain- pipe. They also “gunshot,” like a large-caliber rifle. The gray whales’ wavering complaints are croaks and bellows like those of distressed bulls or fierce growling cats. Most of these sounds miss the sweet spot for human sonic perception and emotional reaction. Their complexities come in forms alien to our ears and neural processing. The sperm whales’ clicks, for example, are richly endowed with meaning, conveying individuality, clan, and familial identity, and, it seems, continually changing social and behavioral intentions. But we humans hear them as mechanical clacking. The tempo, frequencies, cadences, and timbres of the humpback whales’ sounds overlap enough with those of human speech and music that their sounds evoke empathy.
Our senses bias us toward feelings of kinship with species whose communicative sounds most closely resemble ours. Because concern follows closely on the heels of empathic connection, our senses shape our ethics. Without sensory connection, we fail to enter into the embodied relationships that are the foundation of ethical deliberation and right action. But these senses can also bias and prune our regard for others, elevating some species and obscuring the rest.
Now that human action is the dominant force shaping the future of the planet, our sensory biases and bodily hungers remake the form of the world, preserving the parts that grab our senses and, often, discarding or abusing the rest.
Our senses, and thus our ethics, now face two challenges in relation to the seas. The first is that the ocean lives almost entirely outside of the reach of our senses. A visit to the ocean shore reveals little of what lives below. This is the barrier that early recordings of whale sound partly breached. The second challenge is that the few sensory connections we have to the undersea world do not faithfully represent the present state of the ocean.
The recordings of whales from the 1950s and 1960s come to us from another world, a time when suboceanic noise had only just begun. Contemporary “whale sound” albums and nature documentaries deliver soundtracks carefully recorded and edited to avoid and remove the clamor. A search for “whale sounds” in online music stores yields hundreds of albums that promise relaxation, sleep, meditative calm, and help with tinnitus, stress, and “holistic” healing. Unsurprisingly, humpback whales are the stars—few people de-stress by having their bodies zapped and muscles paralyzed by blasts of sperm whale echolocation pulses. The “authentic nature sounds” delivered by these albums omit the blare and cacophony of the lived experience of real whales. When the 9/11 attacks reduced large- vessel traffic in the Bay of Fundy, the levels of stress hormones in North Atlantic right whales dropped. These hormone samples were extracted from whale poop found by trained sniffer dogs leaning over the prow of small boats, their noses guiding human scientists to the floating records of whale stress. To be authentic, a whale soundtrack ought to suffuse our blood with alarm chemicals and steep our mind in anxiety and dread, distress rooted in the infernal noise that we pump into the whales’ world. Instead, we feed ourselves the aural equivalent of synthetic tranquilizers, manufactured anodynes for the senses and soporifics for ethical discernment and action.
In the 1970s and 1980s, activists succeeded in preventing the total extermination of the whales. Numbers of some species have grown back. A few populations, gray and humpback whales in the North Pacific, for example, may have now recovered to prehunting levels or even higher. But most whale populations are still far lower than prehunting numbers. These are metrics of whole populations. For some of these populations, the prognosis for survival has bettered. For others, the apocalypse is still imminent. For individual whales, though, the present world is severely degraded. Many are trapped or wounded by plastic, including entanglement in discarded rope. They can no longer sleep or cruise the surface without injury because ship strikes are a major source of mortality. And even at the height of the whale hunt, the sounds of the ocean were largely as the whales’ ancestors had experienced for millions of years. That world is now gone.
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Ah, the aromas of the sea. Sulfurous seaweeds. Ammoniac stench of gull roost. Lung-constricting acidity of diesel fumes. Bilge water’s oily sheen, high in the nasal passages. A fresh nip of forest scent blows in from the Douglas-fir trees that throng low, rocky hills behind the marina, a dark breath of moss and wet ferns.
All aboard! We clatter along the metal gangway, banging backpacks, coolers, and cameras against its railings. Our tourist cruise is scheduled for six hours, but we’ve brought enough freight for days. No problem with ballast. I wedge onto a plastic bench, facing the port railing. The two dozen other passengers array themselves along the benches or prop against the small wheelhouse. As we cast off, bags of potato chips crackle and a vinegary aroma mixes with the engine exhaust.
Vibrations from the boat engine thrum in our chests, a sound so deep that most of it escapes our ears, perceived instead through nerves in muscles and organs. The drone is calming at first, perhaps a bodily memory of the hum of blood and heartbeat in the womb. As the day passes, calm will turn to exhaustion from relentless inner shaking.
As we get underway, I feel a surge of delight to be on the water, away from conference rooms and computers. The low hummocks of the San Juan Islands slide past as we thread the waterways. The bow cleaves a gray-blue sea, stirring rafts of common murres and pigeon guillemots into skittering flight. Knots of floating giant kelp and eelgrass drift past, some with crabs atop the dislodged tangles. Waifs of sea fog linger in the island coves. The boat’s speed delivers a rush of tangy sea aroma: algal iodine and briny mud.
We’re whaling with cameras, joining a flotilla of a dozen other boats from harbors all around the Salish Sea. The fuzz and beep of ship radios stitch a net over the water, a blurry facsimile of the wide-ranging sonic connections of the whales themselves. Every skipper hears the voices of the others, relayed by electromagnetic waves. The quarry cannot escape. WHALES GUARANTEED shout the billboards on shore.
We motor on, cutting a sinuous path as we weave around island headlands. A sighting . . . close . . . off the southwest shore of San Juan Island. Through binoculars: a dorsal fin scythes the water, then dips. Another, with a punch of mist as the animal exhales. Then, no sign. But the whales’ location is easy to spot. A dozen boats cluster, most slowly motoring west, away from the shore. We power closer, slowing the engine until we travel without raising a wake and take our place on the outer edge of the gaggle of yachts and cruisers.
A sheet of marble skates just under the water surface. Oily smooth. A spill of black ink sheeting under the hazed bottle glass of the water’s surface. Only when the notch between the animal’s flukes guns past and disappears does my conscious mind catch on. The whale’s approach was a gesture made entirely of muscle. Power like a liquefied kick from a draft horse. Frictionless motion, a river-smoothed stone flung across ice. Praaf! Surfacing fifteen meters ahead of the boat, the exhalation is plosive and rough.
The pod of about ten animals comes to the surface. Part of the L pod of orcas, our captain says, one of three pods that form the “southern residents” in the waters of the Salish Sea between Seattle and Vancouver, often seen hunting salmon around the San Juan Islands. Others—“transients” that ply coastal waters and “offshores” that feed mostly in the Pacific—also visit regularly. The L pod continues west, heading toward the Haro Strait. They move like waves: head up, blow a puff of breath, back and dorsal fin arch up, head plunges down, tail rises then slaps at the water. The undulation seems leisurely, easy, but the whales’ purchase on the water is evident in their speed. No human kayaker could keep up this pace. Our engines purr as the U-shaped arc of boats tracks the pod, leaving open water ahead of the whales.
What to call them? Killer whales? But every animal kills to live, save for the few—corals and the North American spotted salamander—that have invited photosynthetic algae under their skins. A humpback slaughters more animals in a single swallow of plankton than these whales manage in months of hunting fish or seals. Orca? From the Roman god Orcus, overlord of the underworld and of broken oaths. A name that carries within it a memory of a severed bond. Or qwe’lhol’mechen, the Lummi Nation name, “our relatives under the waves.” Each moniker holds a mirror, perhaps, to the culture that speaks it: killer, promise breaker, or cousin.
We drop a hydrophone over the boat’s gunwale, its cord feeding a small speaker in a plastic casing. Whale sounds! And engine noise, lots of engine noise.
Clicks, like taps on a metal can, come in squalls. These sounds are the whales’ echolocating search beams. Air from storage sacs under the blowhole punches across “phonic lips” that squeeze together and vibrate. The sound shoots forward through the head, where it passes through a fatty lens whose layers of different viscosities focus the sound waves before they stream out of the forehead. When these sonic bullets hit solid objects, they ricochet back at the whale. Fatty tissues and elongate bones in the lower jaw receive the sound and shunt it to the middle ear, acting like sponges and reflectors for sound waves. Every object reflects sound in a different way, and the whales use the echoes not only to see through the murky water but to understand how soft, taut, fast, or tremulous matter is around them, using sound as we use a sense of touch. Because sound waves in water pass readily into flesh, this tactile sense also penetrates other animals. X-ray touch, delivered by sound. This ability is shared by all seventy-two species of toothed whales—dolphins, porpoises, narwals, sperm whales, and beaked whales—but is absent in the fifteen species of baleen whales, such as humpbacks, blues, rights, and minkes, although these animals are also highly sensitive to sound, orienting in the tenebrous depths by listening to the three-dimensional structure of sound around them. Vocalization and hearing for whales are as if the human senses of touch, kinesthesia, sight, and hearing were united, drawing into our bodies the motions of trees around us, the inner forms of animal companions, and the textures of distant rocks and buildings.
Mixed with the staccato of the whales’ clicks are whistles and high squeaks, sounds that undulate, dart, inflect up, and spiral down. These whistles are the sounds of whale conviviality, given most often when the animals are socializing at close range. When the pod is more widely spaced during searches for food, the whales whistle less and communicate with bursts of shorter sound pulses. These sonic bonds not only connect the members of each pod, but distinguish the pod from others. Pods are matrilineal. Shared lingo—the distinctive tonal quality and patterns of whistles and pulses—marks affiliation with a group of mothers and grandmothers. All seventy individuals in “southern resident” pods share call types, including rich warbles and harsh honks, whereas pods of “northern residents” among the islands and inlets north of Vancouver Island are more screechy. The “transient” and “offshore” groups that also swim these waters have their own sonic cultures and mix only with whales of their own kind. These differences are conservative, lasting decades and perhaps longer, and mark firm boundaries among groups. “Our relatives under the waves” live in societies whose hierarchical structures are both mediated and preserved through sound.
Every group has a particular hunting behavior. “Southern residents” feed primarily on Chinook salmon, along with some other fish and squid. “Northern residents” are also fish specialists. “Transients” feed on marine mammals, with a particular fondness for seals and porpoises, and will also chomp at seabirds. Compared with “southern residents,” these mammal hunters are very quiet, especially as they stalk, listening without echolocating or chattering, although they erupt in sound after a kill. The “offshore” community hunts a wide range of fish, as well as blue and Pacific sleeper sharks. Our names for these cultures are misleading: “residents” also make long offshore journeys, to California for the southern group and Alaska for the northern whales. “Transients” are no more nomadic than the others. These animals all belong to the same species, but they live in communities mostly walled off from one another through cultures of sound and hunting styles. The same is true in other parts of the species’ nearly worldwide range. In Antarctica, five different communities live together but seldom mix, variously specializing in hunting different species of whales, seals, sea lions, penguins, or fish. These communities have diverged genetically from one another, especially in the far northern and southern edges of the species range.
