Festival Shows Colorful Side of the Gray Whale

“These guys, they are not dainty feeders, you would not want to be seen in an elegant restaurant with them,” said Mike Bursk, showing slides of gray whales during his Saturday lecture at Dana Point’s Festival of the Whales.

“They can suck in a couple hundred pounds of water in one swallow” before using their tongues as “pistons” to push out mud and water and trap their food--crustaceans, fish or squid--on their teethlike baleen, Bursk said.

A field technician for the National Marine Fisheries Service, Bursk, who lives in San Clemente, has studied whales since 1978. Less than two weeks before his lecture he returned from a whale-studying trip off the Monterey Peninsula and through the Channel Islands.

Whales ‘No Dummies’

The average adult gray whale measures 45 feet in length, Bursk said. They spend summers in the Arctic before journeying south. “Gray whales are no dummies,” Bursk said. “They probably don’t migrate by choice (but) because they have to get out of there. . .because it’s too cold. They come down, with the rest of the world, to Southern California.” Around October many whales begin the 6,000-mile-long journey from the Arctic to the warm lagoons of Baja California, he said, passing Southern California beaches en route.

The 14th annual whale festival was planned to coincide with the “heart” of the local whale-watching season, according to Harry Helling, festival director and education director of the Orange County Marine Institute. The four-weekend event, organized by the institute, is sponsored by the Dana Point Harbor Assn.

Bad weather put a damper on opening-day festivities, with 16-foot waves canceling planned free rides on Navy patrol boats. However, most other educational events proceeded as scheduled.

Gray whales are bottom feeders, Bursk told his audience. “Picture a cow in a field. They literally have to get down there and graze,” he said. Whales are either left-sided or right-sided--just as people are left-handed or right-handed--and “you can tell which by the side the barnacles are on,” Bursk said. The favored side will be cleaner because that skin is perpetually scraped against the ocean floor when the whale feeds, he added.

12-Foot Babies

Pregnant females are the first to leave the Arctic each fall, Bursk said, so they can give birth in the Baja California lagoons. Newborn gray whales may measure 12 feet and weigh 1,500 pounds, and by the time they’re 3 months old their gunmetal black skin has turned somewhat mottled, and barnacles have begun growing, he said.

Gray whales have good eyesight but underwater visibility is often poor, Bursk said. (Gray whales sometimes stick their heads straight up out of the water, to get a better look around.) Their hearing is acute. The sound of outboard motors often attracts them, and underwater tapings have indicated that “apparently, some have tried to mimic outboard motor” noise when approaching a boat, Bursk said. Twice, on past expeditions, whales have come up behind skiffs and closed their mouths over outboard motors, hanging there and “rolling their eyes and quivering,” Bursk said.

“As you study them (whales), they decide to study you,” Bursk said. “Friendly whales have opened a whole new avenue for us into hands-on research.” In 1979, he said, the first tagging experiments were begun with whales, when “satellite transceivers about the size and weight of a car battery” were hung on a few whales. Those often fell off, he said.

Today, when gray whales are tagged, an arrow with “a radio tag the size of an AA battery” is shot into blubber just below the whale’s two blowholes, Bursk said.

“We don’t think they really feel pain in that blubber area,” Bursk added. The whales flinch slightly when the arrow hits but immediately resume their swimming pattern, he said, and the arrow is made of a “highly corrosible” metal that disintegrates and falls off within a few weeks.

“I justify it to myself as being like a tetanus shot, sometimes that might sting for a moment but ultimately might do the animal a greater good” through helping people understand and appreciate whales, Bursk said.

On the Channel Islands whale-studying excursion, Bursk said, marine scientists tagged 10 whales and discovered that they didn’t linger near the islands, as local rangers had suspected. The scientists also learned that the tagged whales’ night swimming speed is the same as their daytime speed of 4 or 5 m.p.h. (This assumption had recently been questioned by conservationists who thought gray whale population estimates based on interpolation of daytime sightings were too high. About 20,000 gray whales are believed to exist today, based on 10,000 daytime sightings on a recent migration, according to Bursk.)

Migration Hugs Coast

“From what we saw there, the animals didn’t hang around,” Bursk said. “They go right down through the Channel Islands and out the other end.”

The gray whales are “the only whales whose migration habitually hugs the coast,” said Peter Ott, a Laguna Beach-based naturalist and marine life painter who lectured earlier in the day. Ott showed slides from expeditions to the Baja lagoons--Scammon’s, San Ignacio and Magdalena--where many gray whales winter.

He makes 6 to 12 trips to the Baja peninsula each year, Ott said, sometimes going alone and sometimes leading whale-watching tour groups. (Not all gray whales make the pilgrimage from the Arctic to the peninsula lagoons, he said in a phone interview after his talk; some stop in whale “hotbeds” such as the Vancouver Island area, and others go all the way around the Baja tip and up into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). Not all gray whales summer in the Arctic, either, he added.)

Contrary to a popular misconception, “whales do not spout water,” Ott told the crowd of about 200 people who had gathered for his lecture. Whale spouts are made of “heated air,” he said. “Old whalers used to know what kind of whale they were hunting just by the height of the spout, the angle of the spout and by whether it was a single spout or a double spout,” Ott added.

Smart Whale Tactics

On the average, gray whales inhale and expel enough air to “fill a compact car in about two and one-half seconds. . . . Sometimes they’ll blow underwater. The old whalers knew that a smart whale does not blow above the surface” because that would give away its location, Ott said. “Some whalers thought the gray whale was the smartest whale” because grays often blew underwater, Ott said.

The gray whales “don’t have any fear of us now,” particularly in the legally protected lagoons, he said. “They seem to be very gentle creatures. . . . Some of these whales have become so confident with these skiffs (in the lagoons) that they actually come up to the boats and roll on their backs so their throats can be scratched. And we oblige them.”

Ott spoke in a Marine Institute room dominated by the skeleton of a juvenile gray whale suspended overhead. Ott’s paintings of marine life covered walls and easels, while a permanent mural by Orange County artist Robert Wyland and a large whale-shaped weaving also contributed to the festival theme.

Many of those who visited the festival Saturday (Helling estimated that more than 2,000 people stopped at the institute, at a restaurant where a continuous whale film festival was shown and at a wharf from which commercial whale-watching boats went out) wandered outside from time to time to stare at the ocean, as though hoping to see some actual whales. What they mostly saw, however, were big waves crashing toward shore.

Cleaning a Dolphin

One sea mammal was available for inspection, however. On a walkway near the institute, director Stan Cummings supervised the cleaning of a dolphin skeleton with the help of Orange Coast College student Keith Kudell and Jason Vaught and Eric Peterson, two seventh-grade students from a private San Clemente school.

After most of the flesh was stripped from the dolphin, the bones were boiled in a large trash can to remove more meat. Later, carnivorous beetles would be set loose on them to peel away even more flesh. The bones would eventually be used as an institute exhibit or teaching tool, Cummings said. The dolphin, he added, had been accidentally caught in a fisherman’s net and was donated to the institute.

Festival planners originally intended to send boats out each festival Saturday to seek contact with the whales. Participants would have banged on boat sides and listened for the whales’ responses through underwater microphones, but Helling said the idea was dropped because such activity might constitute “borderline harassment” of the whales.

Instead, recorded humpback whale sounds played indoors as what Helling called “mood music.” At noon, the recording was piped into the harbor area from various public address systems.

The humpback recordings are quite musical, but gray whale sounds are not as ear-pleasing, Helling said. “The gray whales sound more like you’re tapping a piece of metal, sort of a chang-chang-chang or a thump-thump-thump. It’s nothing like the melodic sound of a humpback,” he said.

The festival--which will feature whale-watching expeditions in better weather, children’s programs on the third weekend (March 1 and 2), lectures, guided tide-pool walks and “scuba experiences”--continues through March 9. A free “open house” with lectures, demonstrations and hands-on activities takes place from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. today at the Marine Institute, 35502 Del Obispo St., Dana Point.