Big Baby Has Whale of Time Finding Mom

A silver-spotted, infant California gray whale was trapped in the San Gabriel River for more than 12 hours Thursday, luring whale experts into the water--and hundreds of delighted and concerned spectators to the banks--before swimming back to sea and its mother.

“It’s out and it’s mother was waiting. They swam away and lived happily ever after,” said state Department of Fish and Game spokesman Curt Taucher, obviously relieved after a tense day of failed rescue attempts.

From shortly after its discovery at 6 a.m., would-be rescuers in boats and on surf boards and jet skis tried to coax the 20-foot-long baby out of the river channel, which divides Long Beach and Seal Beach, to continue its migration north to Alaskan waters.

By early evening, however, state and federal marine agencies abandoned their strategies, and whale experts were saying that they feared for the life of the thin and disoriented marine mammal they had already nicknamed “Gabriel, or Gabriella.”

Unlike Humphrey, the mature humpback whale whose 1985 odyssey up the Sacramento River sparked national attention, this whale needed its mother’s milk every hour or so, said Dennis L. Kelly, a whale expert called in by state officials.

But then, at about 5:45 p.m., the whale, probably born no more than two months ago off Mexico, darted under a bridge, past the Alamitos Bay jetties and out to the open sea.

“I think part of it was just being left alone,” Kelly said. “And there is a good possibility that it heard its mother. Females and calves make sounds--grunts and groans--back and forth all the time. So there’s a good chance they finally did communicate.”

Two other young whales had swum up the same channel each of the last two years, only to return on their own to the ocean, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. Tom Lewis, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Cetacean Society, said that he had never seen a whale so far up the river--nearly three miles.

The arrival of Gabriel was as much a spectacle as anything. Helicopters hovered above the 50-foot-wide channel and television news crews were on its banks. One shirtless young man jumped into the water and nearly touched the whale.

And for many children it was their first whale watch.