Winter Whales of Springdale

Compassion

The following piece is a record of one of the most compassionate events in Springdale history.

As several defenseless whales find themselves trapped within the waters of Halls Bay in the winter of 1978, citizens of Springdale selflessly run to their aid, not only against the incoming pack ice that would restrict them from life giving oxygen, but from countless scientists that would like nothing more then to "experiment" with the animals. This is a story of world renown proportions: how Newfoundland hospitality and determination kept her respect for nature alive and well.

This piece is an excerpt from the April 1979 issue of Readers Digest, written just one year after the incident.

The Winter Whales of Springdale
as written by John Dyson

For months, Mary Pelley had looked out her kitchen window each morning to check on the five humpback whales spouting in the bay below the north-eastern Newfoundland town of Springdale. They had lingered on since autumn and had become so much a part of Springdale that she felt no day started until she gave them a cheery "Good morning." But on this first day of February 1978, she saw nothing but ice. "Cyril, the whales are in trouble!" she called to her husband. "The bay is frozen over!" Cyril Pelley, a war-time navy pilot and now a businessman, fired up his Piper Super Cub and flew out to find the whales.

He could see clearly what had happened. Springdale, strung out along Halls Bay, is 20 kilometers from the open sea. A mush of broken sea ice had blown in across the mouth of the bay, blocking the whales' retreat. The bay itself was glazed with hard, clear ice, except for one small patch of open water. There the whales were trapped.

Pelley returned in his plane, then quickly cast off in his fishing schooner, The Willing Lass Smashing through the ice, he broke into the whales' patch. "You've never seen such a welcome," said Pelley. "They practically stood on their tails and screamed." They were stout and massive, and looked about 25 to 40 tons apiece. Their shiny backs were scarred with pink wounds where ice had gashed the skin.

Each day for two weeks the schooner made breathing channels for the whales. Pelley and his crew looked every morning to see where the ice had closed in, and when a spurt of steam located the whales, the schooner headed there to enlarge the open area. Then, one morning after a warm spell, with the bay relatively free of ice, the five creatures followed the schooner close to the dock near Springdale. In this logging and commercial center of 4000, many a window faces the sea, and just about everybody had a ringside seat for the whale show that lasted the rest of the winter.

When Mike Kozicki, a biologist of the Canadian Fisheries and Marine Service, arrived from Montreal to fire numbered tags into the whales so their movements could be tracked, Grade 11 students went out to help. "With a big ocean aquarium on our doorstep, we were the envy of every school in Newfoundland," said biology teacher Don Huxter.

"How Are the Whales?" During the tagging, another whale was spotted, not a monster 13 to 15 meters long like the humpbacks, but a timid little fellow only about two meters, with a tusk like a unicorn. This sixth creature was a young narwhal that must have strayed some 1900 kilometers from its natural range north of the Arctic Circle. Only once before had a narwhal been recorded in Newfoundland, dead on a beach in 1969.

Several weeks later, when cold weather closed up the ice again, four of the humpbacks and the narwhal were trapped about two kilometers from shore, at the seaward end of town. At night the ice crept ever closer until their pool was so small they had to take turns coming up to breathe. The fifth humpback disappeared, but another turned up in a smaller bay south of Springdale. There it found five small potholes of open water, the largest only ten by five meters. In the out ports of Port Anson and Miles Cove, people heard the trapped whale rising to breathe every ten minutes. Fisherman Eli Rice thought it sighed "like a lonely lion." Carpenter Don Spencer likened it to "a child sobbing at three in the morning."

"How are the whales today?" became the greeting used most often in Springdale. Many townspeople walked daily to a lookout where they could see the whales. On weekends, dozens trudged across the ice or drove out by snowmobile. "Standing alongside a 40-tonne animal is pretty eerie," said Francis Hull, editor of the Green Bay News. "You would sense when one was on the way up. Suddenly the ice lifted under your feet. There was a big spray of steam and then this big black thing was right beside you, its blowhole roaring like a geyser, whining noises coming from its head, and a bow wave washing over the ice. Everyone moved back from the edge. Then, with a great sigh, the whale arched its back and disappeared, and another came up, then another...."

The curious flocked in from all over Newfoundland. RCMP Sgt. Allen Kirbyson at times roped the whale pool off. "With 200 people and several snowmobiles on the ice at one time, you could see the whole thing dipping like a saucer," said Kirbyson. But when the ice was not crowded, the whales very often would lay quietly on the surface and let people scratch their backs with an oar.

"Come Up, B'y." Whale Day at the high school attracted 200 townsfolk: the auditorium became an "aquarium" with life-sized paper models of the whales and recordings of whale songs. Displays explained that humpbacks are protected throughout the world. An estimated 2000 migrate 3000 sea miles each year, from calving grounds in the Caribbean to the waters of Newfoundland. They corral herring and capelin with their long, white-fronted flippers, then scoop them up in their huge mouths. Like bowhead and blue whales, humpbacks pump water through the bony "baleen" plates in their mouths to filter out the fish they swallow. But in Newfoundland's in-shore waters, humpbacks are also troublemakers, following prey into fishermen's nets, becoming entangled and causing costly damage.

George Rowsell, far from trying to get rid of the whale, tied a herring to the end of a pole and tried to feed it. When a diver wanted to go down through one of the breathing holes to make photographs, Rowsell went out with a chain saw and enlarged the opening. Other people scattered salt around the edges of the holes to keep them from freezing over. Said John Drover: "I think feelings were high because they were trapped creatures, not because they were whales." Springdale decided the whales would not be killed; but the last thing anybody anticipated was having to defend them against scientists.

For Dr. Jon Lien, an animal behaviorist at Memorial University in St. John's, it was a fascinating opportunity to record whale sounds, and he spent two weeks on the ice, camped in a tent pitched in a boat. At Miles Cove one morning, after a hard-freezing night, he and his assistants found the lone whale's breathing holes empty. Some distance away was a big upwelling of ice, as if she had tried to break through. Eli Rice found her dead a few days later on the shore at Port Anson.

To help the recording of behavior patterns, Lien and his assistants gave the remaining whales names. The largest was Captain Hook, for his distinctive dorsal fin; Greeny had a green fisheries tag in her flank; Spotty had a white mark on her tail; The Fella had a yellow tag; Springy was the little narwhal.

Among the scientists who converged on Springdale was Dr. Jay Hyman, an authority in marine mammal medicine, who flew in from New York. There were herring under the ice, but there was no way of knowing whether the whales were feeding successfully because they could not forage far from their breathing hole. Hyman bought herring and tied them in strings of 10 or 12. He and Dr. Murray Newman, director of the Vancouver Public Aquarium, ventured into the whale pool in a dinghy, then lowered the herring over the side. Spotty came up alongside to blow, then sank, and Hyman felt a tug on the line - gentle but sufficient to tow the boat through the water before the line broke. "I think I was the only fisherman ever to have had a 20-tonne 'fish' on the end of a little test line!" said Hyman.

Scientists believed the humpbacks could survive a long time without food, but Dr. Hyman felt Springy was suffering from malnutrition. Newman proposed netting the little narwhal - "a difficult operation at best," he conceded - and flying him out to where he'd stand a better chance of survival.

News of the impending "rescue" spread through Springdale. The biology class, knowing that no narwhal had ever survived in captivity, voted against letting anyone net Springy. The Women's Institute, annoyed because "outsiders were doing their own thing with our whales," voted unanimously against a rescue attempt: "We feel the whale should be given its chance in its natural environment." The Town Council backed the Women's Institute. Said the mayor, Dr. Wilfred Evans: "We made it clear, as a community, that they couldn't bloody well have the whale."

Still the visitors came, whale buffs and journalists from as far away as Hawaii and France, but by late March the problem was beginning to solve itself: the ice was nearing breakup. On April 10, at Springdale's request, the Coast Guard sent the icebreaker Labrador into Halls Bay to open a channel to the Springdale wharf. She carefully came to within 100 meters of the main breathing hole, then headed to sea - and on April 14, Springdale awakened to find the whale pools empty. All the creatures were gone. A few days later seal hunters reported sighting Springy, and a fisherman described how a humpback came alongside his boat, "almost as if it was accustomed to saying hello."

Whether it ended happily for Captain Hook, Greeny, Spotty, The Fella, and Springy will never be known - already they may have shed the tags fired into their skins. But when all the excitement was over, 73-year-old Marion Abbot, secretary of the Women's Institute, summed up how Springdale will remember 1978: "It was one whale of a winter."