Surprise Arrivals and Departures

December 4, 1986:

This entry is another chapter from my year on Cape Cod. I posted several when I first started this substack publication. The photograph is from Tennessee but seemed appropriate to the title.

I was serving my weekly rotation as the breakfast cook when a small boy in the dining room said he saw a whale spout out beyond the beach. It was quite a distance through the dining room window, across the dune and shore, and then out to the channel, but he was sure.

When I looked again, I was convinced that he was right. By now, breakfast was finished, and I decided that clearing the tables could wait while we took advantage of the teachable moment. We all rose and walked to the beach, where we found a small cliff below the high tide line. A recent storm had removed most of the sand and left a scarp there.

Across the water, we saw the “hot air balloon” shape of the humpback whales’ spout. At least four spouted at once, heading south for the winter. None breached and dove. I hoped that one would spy-hop, that unique action that whales exhibit by sticking their heads out of the water to look around and see what is on the surface.

Most of the twenty children on the beach with me had lived for years on Cape Cod, yet some had never seen a whale before. The excitement flew like sparks. The day began with the excitement of life and ended, for me at least, with the sad knowledge of its transience.

As the humpback whales moved east and south along the Atlantic shore of the cape, a pod of pilot whales swam south in Cape Cod Bay. Like all dolphins, Pilot whales are a small species of toothed whales. They are also known as pothead whales because of the protruding bulge on their foreheads. The forehead bulge, sometimes called the melon, also occurs in other dolphins.  It is a sound receptor used for echolocation as the whales search for fish in a way similar to bats hunting for insects.

I use the terms dolphin and whale interchangeably here because dolphins comprise one group of toothed whales. Pilot whales are the second largest dolphins after killer whales, and both are related to bottle-nosed dolphins and all the other porpoises and dolphins.

The humpbacks we had seen earlier in the day, baleen whales so close to shore on the Atlantic side, were in no danger. The water drops off sharply and steeply on the ocean side. Not so for the pilot whales on the bay side. The full moon had created an exceptionally high tide and allowed the pilot whales to enter the gradually sloping shallows north and east of the cape’s elbow. The receding water of the outgoing tide left them stranded.

We took the bus for another teachable moment and drove to the Salt Pond Visitor Center. Several marine scientists in wet suits supported two whale calves, six and eight feet in length. Adult pothead whales reach twelve to eighteen feet in length. The scientists were attempting to keep these two calves wet and breathing. The two whale calves had been airlifted across the cape from the bay to rest and recover in the salt pond’s calm water. The goal was to release them into the wild.

The crowd at the Salt Pond Visitor Center was reminiscent of carnival crowds. License plates indicated local people and those who drove far to see the spectacle. One scientist asked anyone among the bystanders to allow his colleagues to warm up in a car with a heater. I don’t recall anyone volunteering.

I later learned that one of the two whale calves died that night while the other was taken to the New England Aquarium in Boston to regain strength and later released with a free-swimming pod of pilot whales off Nantucket. This knowledge was not shared with the children.

The 50% survival rate of the two whale calves was much higher than the survival rate of the adult whales at Eastham. Attempts to tow them out to sea were unsuccessful because they immediately returned, possibly in answer to the distress calls of the other pod members. One pregnant whale delivered a stillborn calf during the stranding. No one knows why whales behave in this way. Rescue efforts are rarely successful.

A walk on Eastham Beach on my next day off told me the scope of the tragedy. A beach strewn with the bodies of dead whales cannot be described, imagined, or even photographed in a way that tells the full impact of the tale. It can only be appreciated by direct observation.

This is also true of the political fight over who pays for the disposal of the carcasses. Fortunately for the children, their knowledge was limited to seeing the beauty of these sleek black mammals and the heroic efforts of a few members of our species.

A week later, I walked the beach and saw one of the whales had been pulled up into the salt marsh. The jaws were cut away by a trophy hunter or perhaps by authorities wanting to keep the teeth off the black market in wildlife parts, but that is another story. Live whales have little aroma, but the dead ones leave an unforgettable impression.