Luna nootka sound5/8/2023 ![]() But in Nootka Sound, Luna had no pod, so he made one out of people. They are extraordinarily social the southern residents stay together in their pods all their lives, which can be as long as humans’. Orcas, or killer whales, are actually members of the dolphin family. And though he was the equivalent of a human toddler in orca years, he’d figured out how to eat enough salmon to keep himself alive. Although his family, known as Lpod, had not been documented in Nootka Sound-200 sea miles north of their summer territory-Luna had somehow found his way here. They identified Luna by matching his patch with early photographs. Scientists identify killer whales by the individual shape of a splash of gray behind their dorsal fin, called a saddle patch, and the fin itself. ![]() “Sometimes he’d go right down the side of the boat, flapping his flipper at us.” “He breached, did tail flips, blew raspberries and squirted water at us,” Donna Schneider, the ship’s cook, remembered. The little whale came out of nowhere one day to cavort in the ship’s wake, and over the next weeks, as the Uchuck went back and forth on its regular journeys, he became bolder and bolder. Among the first to see him was the crew of a spruced-up former minesweeper called the Uchuck III, which carries spools of cable to logging camps, beer to fishing lodges and tourists into ancient wilderness. Luna showed up in Nootka Sound in July 2001. This was where Luna had come back from the dead. We rented an apartment in GoldRiver, a mill town of about 1,500 near the sound, which has lost its mill and is trying hard not to go ghostly. In April of this year my wife, Suzanne, and I drove to a remote and spectacular fiord called Nootka Sound halfway up the west side of Vancouver Island. Baby orcas almost never make it on their own, so scientists assumed Luna was dead. But a whale census taken in June 2001 did not find little Luna. He had been born in September 1999 into a group of about 80 orcas called “southern residents.” The group, named because it spends summers near the southern part of Vancouver Island, is listed as endangered by Canada and by WashingtonState, so the whale, nicknamed Luna in a contest held by a Seattle newspaper, was vital to its future. The story began in June 2001 when a baby male orca went missing from the waters near the San Juan Islands, between WashingtonState and Canada’s Vancouver Island. ![]() It was just a story about a lonely whale, at first. It was a story about an animal, and then it wasn’t.
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