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| Humpback Pair Moves Toward Ocean | |
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| Topic Started: May 22 2007, 12:37 AM (61 Views) | |
| Deleted User | May 22 2007, 12:37 AM Post #1 |
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Wayward Humpback Pair Moves Toward Ocean By CAROLYN MARSHALL Published: May 21, 2007 WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 20 — The pilgrimage, for some, begins at dawn. They travel by foot, bicycle, scooter and even wheelchair to camp along a dusty riverbank facing a homely industrial port. The travelers wait quietly, hands held high as they steady binoculars, cameras and even cellphones equipped with a lens. Suddenly, their oohs, ahhs, squeals and shrieks pierce the silence, as a humpback whale breaks the glassy surface of the Sacramento River. At least 15,000 people have trekked to the river’s edge to catch a glimpse of two injured and wayward humpbacks, a mother and calf, first spotted May 13 in a shipping channel in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, about 90 miles off course from their seasonal migration route in the Pacific Ocean between Alaska and Baja California. But on Sunday, the whales appeared to be heading in the right direction, moving down the shipping channel toward the Pacific Ocean, marine officials said. By late afternoon, they were about eight miles outside the Port of Sacramento and being escorted by 8 to 10 Coast Guard vessels and other boats, said Bernadette Fees, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Fish and Game, adding, “It’s hard to say what prompted them.” At a late-day news briefing on Sunday, marine officials said the whales had suddenly headed down river as two tugboats left the port to meet a cargo vessel carrying fertilizer. The officials were initially worried that the whales would encounter dangers in busier stretches of water, but were following them at a distance in boats and declared their journey safe so far. “At first we were worried,” as the whales approached the cargo vessel, said Brian Gorman, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries service. But they appeared to pass safely and officials estimated that if the whales kept up their pace, they might reach the ocean within a day, said Ms. Fees. “We don’t know why they came up the river, or why they are moving down,” Ms. Fees said. She later added, “As you can see, they are making their own decisions, and we are just trying to keep up with them.” Marine biologists said their challenge now is to help the whales avoid obstacles and wrong turns once they enter the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. At least 15,000 people have trekked to the river’s edge to see the mother and calf, first spotted May 13 in the channel about 90 miles off course from their seasonal migration route between Alaska and Baja California. The whales appeared to be healthy, despite wounds that include a two-foot-long, deep gash on the mother, probably inflicted by the propeller of a shipping vessel or recreational boat, the rescuers said. But the mother soon will need to feed. Meanwhile, pleas from the authorities to stay home have not stopped the flow of the curious and the concerned. Instead, a spectacular array of people — children and the elderly and people speaking Chinese, German, Russian and Spanish — have come to the river to wait and watch. By early afternoon Sunday, as many as 7,000 people had arrived, said an officer with the West Sacramento Police Department. But the police were cracking down on opportunistic vendors, who on Saturday had been selling bottled water and souvenirs, including a $10 T-shirt with the logo “Whale Watch 2007,” distinguishing the current event from the 1985 visit of Humphrey, another humpback who lost his way and wandered the delta for nearly a month. “I read the children’s book on Humphrey to my daughters,” said Joanne Moylan, a teacher in nearby Davis, Calif., who plans to bring her now-adult children to see Delta and Dawn, as the pair has been named by the state authorities. Zachary Williams, 9, a visitor on Sunday who claimed his father has been “obsessed” with the whales, seemed unimpressed. “I could be watching this on TV right now,” he said. Courtney Williams, 11, Zachary’s sister, conceded that she might have made other plans for the day: “I could be shopping at the mall and getting my nails done.” But their father, Greg Williams, 43, said, “They don’t know yet how cool this is. I told them it may seem boring now, but 20 years down the road, they’ll be able to say, ‘I saw the whales.’ ” Meanwhile, the scientists involved in the rescue efforts have been giddy over the prospect of solving an unusual research challenge. “We are in new territory; we have never been in a situation where we had a cow-calf pair,” this far upriver, said Peiter Folkens, a biologist and one of the rescuers with the Alaska Whale Foundation, during one of the daily news briefings. “This is, essentially, an experiment.” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/us/21whales-web.html |
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| Deleted User | May 22 2007, 01:41 AM Post #2 |
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:kitti: :kitti: Thanks jezzie..........nice story to begin a new week with. :love: I am so pleased to see y'all back today....... :fireworks.gif: |
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| Deleted User | May 25 2007, 10:34 PM Post #3 |
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Scientists will try spraying water near wayward whales The team working to rescue the mother and calf says it will cease herding efforts during the long Memorial Day weekend. By Eric Bailey, Times Staff Writer, May 25, 2007 SACRAMENTO — Scientists attempting to return two humpback whales to the ocean said they would try a new technique today: using a fireboat to spray water near the pair. If the water attracts or repels the whales, they will use that in their efforts to move the animals back into salt water. The team working to rescue the whales had said Thursday that it would give the animals a break for the long Memorial Day weekend — while continuing to enforce a 500-yard no-boating zone around the mother and calf, which in recent days have holed up on a stretch of the Sacramento River north of Rio Vista. But the team is concerned about the cetaceans' health. Scientists from state and federal wildlife agencies hit the water Thursday morning to get a closer look at the whales, which are suffering the effects of nearly two weeks away from their saltwater environment as well as wounds probably caused by a ship's propeller. Rescuers have tried an array of tactics to herd the humpbacks back to the saltier waters, where their wounds might better heal. None of the pipe-banging or playing of recorded whale sounds has pushed the pair past the Rio Vista Bridge, a bustling delta auto artery that has become a formidable obstacle to their return to the sea. Biologists said they had ceased the herding efforts for the time being, partly out of concern that the whales might become too accustomed to the recorded noises. "We don't want to habituate them to these different techniques; we don't want them to get used to it like background noise," said Trevor Spradlin, a wildlife biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. Thursday morning, just four boats hit the water, allowing biologists a chance to give the whales a closer once-over, including snapping photos of the wounds that will be compared with pictures taken when the whales were first spotted in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta on May 13. The Sacramento River's waters carry a host of pathogens — viruses, fungi and bacteria — that the whales' systems were not designed to ward off, Spradlin said, opening a door to potential infections that could further complicate rescue efforts. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/c...s-pe-california |
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| Deleted User | May 28 2007, 05:31 AM Post #4 |
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Wayward whales get antibiotics EXPERTS TO RESUME RESCUE EFFORT TUESDAY By Katherine Tam, MediaNews Marine specialists successfully administered antibiotics to the two humpback whales in the Delta on Saturday after hours of trying. The mother whale received her third and final dose around 5 p.m. and the calf whale received one dose in the morning, said Bernadette Fees, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Fish and Game. The antibiotics, which are intended to help the whales heal from injuries possibly due to a run-in with a boat, were administered using a propulsion device that, similar to shooting a dart, projects a syringe with a foot-long needle into the whales' muscle tissue. Marine biologists have been trying to lure the mother and calf - dubbed "Delta" and "Dawn" - back into the deep-water channel leading to San Francisco Bay. They have tried broadcasting whale sounds underwater and banging on pipes. A fireboat that sprayed jets of water to persuade the whales to leave the Delta on Friday had some success, and officials say they plan to resume Tuesday with more fireboats. In the meantime, officials will continue monitoring the whales today and Monday. They'll also try to collect blubber, tissue and skin samples to evaluate the mammals' health and to study lesions that they discovered on the mother and calf, Fees said. At least three vessels followed the whales in the Delta Saturday to monitor their health and keep other boaters at least 500 yards away. Violating that perimeter breaks two federal laws and is punishable by fines of up to $70,000 and a year in jail, said Jetta Disco, spokeswoman for the U.S. Coast Guard. There were no problems with anyone breaking those rules Saturday, Fees said. It's also illegal for residents to try to lure the whales down river using their own tactics, such as dropping speakers into the water to project whale noises, Fees said. "We are heartened that so many people are committed to caring about wildlife," she said. "But we ask that the public leave it to us." http://www.mercurynews.com/localnewsheadlines/ci_6000204 |
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| Deleted User | May 28 2007, 10:55 PM Post #5 |
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Whales move toward ocean as skin tested By MARCUS WOHLSEN Associated Press Writer © 2007 The Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — Two whales lost on the Sacramento River swam 14 miles toward the ocean on Sunday after lingering for a week near a bridge about 70 miles from the sea, officials coordinating the rescue said. The mother humpback and her calf passed under the Rio Vista Bridge and were spotted near the city of Pittsburg, near a confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, said Greg Hurner, a senior adviser with the California Department of Fish and Game. As efforts to coax the mother and calf back to the Pacific Ocean dragged into a third week, veterinarians earlier Sunday swabbed samples from bumps resembling blisters or lesions on the whales' skin. The humpbacks' long exposure to fresh water has led to serious skin damage, biologists said, making them vulnerable to germs they would not face in their saltwater habitat. "We really need to try to get them back into a more appropriate environment so they can start healing," said Trevor Spradlin, a marine mammal biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/science/4840711.html |
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| Deleted User | May 29 2007, 03:42 AM Post #6 |
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:kitti: :kitti: Goodness jezzie..........I hope there's a happy ending for these two whales. :heart: |
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| Deleted User | May 31 2007, 02:21 AM Post #7 |
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Wayward Whales Closing in on Golden Gate By MARCUS WOHLSEN, The Associated Press BERKELEY, Calif. -- After a two-week sojourn through a Northern California river delta, two lost whales were moving closer to an ocean homecoming. The mother humpback and her calf made considerable progress Tuesday and were last seen less than 10 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. "They're heading very much in the right direction," said Rod McInnis, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7053000217.html |
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| Deleted User | May 31 2007, 02:22 AM Post #8 |
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I'm probably going to have an ulcer by the time they get there. It's the first thing I do every morning. Turn the computer on and then look for an article on their progress. |
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| Deleted User | May 31 2007, 10:59 PM Post #9 |
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Calif. whales leave behind information By MARCUS WOHLSEN Associated Press Writer © 2007 The Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — Scientists observing the wayward wanderings of two humpback whales in a California river have more to celebrate than their return to the Pacific Ocean — the duo provided an unexpected opportunity to study the endangered species. The information scientists gathered includes sound recordings, logs of their behavior and tissue samples from both the mother and calf, which will be analyzed to determine whether they come from a pod of whales that travel between Mexico and California. "All those things are very hard to get. So what we are doing is filling up the knowledge bank on humpback whales in the wild," said Jim Oswald, a spokesman for the nonprofit Marine Mammal Center, a private scientific and rescue organization. The experience also could prove helpful in approaching other stranded whales, he said. After spending more than two weeks trying to coax the whales back to sea with mixed results, officials were ready Wednesday to declare Operation Humpback a success. Since the previously conspicuous whales had not been seen for a full day, officials assumed the duo found their way home, undoing a wrong turn that inspired a range of rescue attempts. The whales, believed to be a mother and calf, were last observed at sunset Tuesday swimming in San Francisco Bay about 10 miles north of the city. A convoy of boats that accompanied the whales across the bay to keep traffic at a distance stopped escorting them when it got dark. Officials think the whales slipped out of San Francisco Bay to the open sea late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, when no one was watching. To make sure the whales did not take another wrong turn, two government boats were launched Wednesday morning to look for them in the Pacific Ocean. Rescuers relied on reports from commercial vessels and Coast Guard patrols to determine if the humpbacks still were in the bay. Officials said they will never know why the humpbacks swam 90 miles inland. But their journey marks the first time the same humpbacks were studied in the wild for so long, according to Bernadette Fees, deputy director of the California Department of Fish and Game. It also was the first time that whales swimming free in the wild were successfully treated with antibiotics. The pair apparently were injured by a boat at some point, and officials said their wounds might have played a role in their becoming stranded in the fresh water of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Based on the way their skin deteriorated while they were in the delta, marine scientists now have a clearer idea of how long whales can survive in fresh water, Gulland said. After the whales were spotted near Sacramento on May 13, officials spent days trying to goad them back to the ocean, playing recordings of other whales, surrounding them with boats, blasting them with fire hoses and banging metal pipes dangling beneath the water. Those involved in the rescue effort said they did not know if the methods hastened the whales' exit or hindered it. They tried to strike a balance between getting the whales going and not making the problem worse. "What we ultimately came away with is that many of the techniques had some effect, but none of them could make a whale go in a direction it did not want to go," said John Calambokidis, a scientist with the nonprofit Cascadia Research Collective. Officials speculated Wednesday that antibiotics given to the whales on Saturday to try to heal their wounds may have been a factor in their departure. The pair began their hasty retreat from the delta after receiving them. Biologists said the saltier water where the mother humpback whale and her calf had been swimming since leaving the delta helped reverse some of the health problems caused by long exposure to fresh water. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/4849836.html |
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