Heads Up Sacramento River : Wrong-Way Whale May Have Made a Fatal Error

For at least four days now, he has dodged oil barges and motorboats, rolled off a sand bar after getting sunburned, coasted quietly past gaping schoolchildren and beer-drinking ranch hands, moving majestically under a half-dozen bridges to swim at least 50 miles up the twisting, placid Sacramento River--toward death.

A male humpback whale, 40 feet long and weighing 40 tons, has bestirred the Coast Guard and half a dozen Bay Area whale experts and caught the fancy of Northern Californians, who were at first agog, then aghast, as the huge mammal progressed upstream in the busy, freshwater shipping way, farther and farther from his oceangoing fellows.

His chances of survival are “not very good,” whale expert Mark Ferrari of the California Marine Mammal Center said Tuesday. Ferrari spent hours in a boat trailing the whale, hoping he would turn around. “He’s going the wrong way. He showed no signs of being debilitated, but he’s going the wrong way.”

No more than 1,200 humpback whales--the only seagoing mammals to make a hit record, with their crooning “Songs of the Humpback Whale”--still exist.

At this time of year, the whales usually turn right at San Francisco in their annual migration from Alaska to Hawaii; this one turned left.

The biologists casually named the splendid creature “ET,” after the squat, ugly movie creature who kept trying to get home.

From the time he was first spotted Friday night, moving up the Oakland shipping channel where container cargo ships ply, the whale has been monitored with growing dismay by Ferrari, his wife, Debbie, fellow whale experts and marine veterinarians from the California Marine Mammal Center in Marin County. On Monday and Tuesday, they worked out of a Coast Guard vessel, drawing close alongside the whale, trying to herd him back downstream.

But by late Tuesday, after neither underwater recordings of friendly fellow humpback whales nor the cries of the dangerous killer whale turned him back downstream, the biologists came ashore near the Rio Vista Coast Guard Station and went home, saying the whale would have to do it on its own.

Swimming in Confusion

“There’s just not much we can do,” said Ferrari. “We’re seeing an animal that’s apparently confused and swimming along. He looks very healthy, but he’s confused. People can keep their fingers crossed and send prayers. He’s the one who’s got to save himself.”

Late Tuesday, the Coast Guard also called off its watch on the whale and will rely on reports from private boaters to keep track of the whale’s whereabouts until he reaches the river’s end, turns back to open sea or dies.

Although the animal is intelligent and, at 40 tons, far from fragile, he has still bucked substantial odds in getting this far.

Accustomed to feeding on salt-water fish and “krill,” the whale would find freshwater feeding in the river not bad, but with all the stress, probably has no appetite, Ferrari says. Anything more than two weeks in freshwater could damage the whale’s sensitive vision. Whether a parasite common to whales has infested it and disrupted its sense of direction, Ferrari cannot tell.

No Traffic Problem

Accustomed to ocean depths, the whale, in a riverbed that varies up to 30 feet deep, has “done very well not to get himself hung up so far” in the shallows or in boating traffic in one of the state’s most heavily traveled waterways. Indeed, says Ferrari, it has shown “no problem adjusting to boats,” which is fortunate: “a slight miscalculation on the animal’s part could disembowel any of the boats out there.”

On Tuesday, he beached himself in about four feet of water on a sand bar. Sightseers swarmed around in several dozen small boats and a commercial tugboat recruited by the Coast Guard contemplated throwing wet sheets or even a line over him in an effort to gently haul him off the sand bar and as far downriver as they could.

But he managed to free himself--a good thing, says Bengta Baker of the Marine Mammal Center, because on land, his own weight could crush his lungs. He slipped off the sand bar with just a sunburn; Ferrari and fellow biologists could see from their boat that the skin was pink and peeling.

Late Tuesday, he continued his inland swim, to the consternation of sightseers.

As he passed upstream north of the Rio Vista Bridge, from the industrial docks into the placid agricultural valley, cars, pickup trucks and semi rigs lined the levee roads, and people with binoculars watched quietly from the roads by the flanking fields.

Hundreds Line Shore

Hundreds of spectators came Tuesday, snarling traffic into river towns like Rio Vista, where the single drawbridge is under repair, and backing up traffic even on major highways like California 160 and California 12.

Tom Costello, a boat salesman from Antioch, took the day off to get a glimpse. “Whales never come up here in the river. I just came up to check it out and see what it looks like. I’ve never heard of one this far up the river.”

Harold Smith, in charge of the Rio Vista Coast Guard Station, said forlornly, “Theoretically he could go all the way up to Sacramento. The further up he goes, the less chance of saving him.”

Richard C. Paddock reported from Rio Vista and Patt Morrison from Los Angeles.