Into Great Silence (eBook)

Eva Saulitis (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
272 Seiten
Beacon Press (Verlag)
978-0-8070-1436-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Science entwines with matters of the human heart as a whale researcher chronicles the lives of an endangered family of orcas

Ever since Eva Saulitis began her whale research in Alaska in the 1980s, she has been drawn deeply into the lives of a single extended family of endangered orcas struggling to survive in Prince William Sound. Over the course of a decades-long career spent observing and studying these whales, and eventually coming to know them as individuals, she has, sadly, witnessed the devastation wrought by the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989--after which not a single calf has been born to the group. With the intellectual rigor of a scientist and the heart of a poet, Saulitis gives voice to these vital yet vanishing survivors and the place they are so loyal to. Both an elegy for one orca family and a celebration of the entire species, Into Great Silence is a moving portrait of the interconnectedness of humans with animals and place--and of the responsibility we have to protect them.

From the Hardcover edition.

Textauszug

From the PrologueLike the others the last one fell into its shadow.
It fell into its shadow on the water.
They took it away its shadow stayed on the water.

--W.S. Merwin, from 'The Last One'


Before I knew there was such thing as a species, much less one that was endangered, I understood extinction. When I was nine years old, I understood extinction not with my mind, but with my heart. Aptly, I received this instruction not at school, but after, on an ABC After School Special called The Last of the Curlews, based on a novel by Fred Bodsworth. I don't remember the film's plot. Only that at some point, there was one pair of curlews left. I vaguely remember a father and son who debated whether or not to shoot a curlew. I recall with clarity the last one, the last Eskimo curlew on earth, circling and calling above the tundra. In the bird's own memory, I imagined a sky darkened and drummed to life by bodies, wings and the tr tr tr-ing of flight-song, an era when it migrated between the Canadian Arctic and Patagonia with millions of other Eskimo curlews. I can still summon my ache for that last curlew, almost 40 years later, it throbs in my chest.

When I was 23, I saw my first orca, a lone female. That day, I had no inkling that I would study her kin for my entire adult life, that she was already one of the last ones. Fresh out of college, I'd taken a job at a fish hatchery in Prince William Sound, Alaska. One blustery winter day, out for a skiff ride, I spotted a black fin amid gray waves. A few minutes later, a whoosh near the skiff startled me. I turned to see a wind-flattened blow, the fin rising, the arch of a flank emerging and sliding back under the water. Then she disappeared, as if the rough sea had swallowed her. I looked everywhere, but she was gone.

Twenty-five years later, I'm still searching for that whale, for what's left of her family. For me, watching the Last of the Curlews was what Susan Cerulean calls an 'origin moment.' That day, when I realized human beings could eliminate a kind of bird from the earth, my assumptions about the world overturned.

A lifetime of origin moments leads to this one. It's September, 2011. I sit on our research boat, Natoa, scanning a familiar shoreline for orca blows. The tide is low. A raft of sea otters rests near Squire Point. For many seasons, I followed small groups of orcas called Chugach transients past this point as they hunted for harbor seals. Sometimes, harbor seals hauled out on Squire Point to rest, or hunkered in the shallows alongside the rock to hide from passing orcas. Though I see no seals sprawled on the rock today, I know orcas might appear at any moment. They are like that, unpredictable in their appearances and disappearances.

And so are stories we tell about them. Take today. As we idle along the point, Craig, my partner in research and in life, recalls that 35 years ago, with a cadre of volunteer observers on the bluff top on Squire Island, he watched Chugach transients swim along this shoreline. A young field assistant, eye pressed to the lens of a spotting scope, shouted: 'Look, the orcas are playing with a porpoise!' That evening, after hiking back down from the bluff to their tents on a beach we still call Whale Camp, they found the severed lungs, heart and head of a porpoise calf washed up on shore. 'I tried to preserve the skull, but the porpoise was so young, the bones just fell apart,' Craig says. With Craig, I've studied orcas for 25 years, nearly half my life, and I've never heard that story before. What I know, after all this time, about the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.1.2013
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Natur / Ökologie
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Naturführer
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Ökologie / Naturschutz
• Themenwelt: Technik
• ISBN-10: 0-8070-1436-2 / 0807014362
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8070-1436-3 / 9780807014363