Thursday, May 15, 2008
After fighting to protect whales for 30 years, the biologist who discovered that humpbacks sing still feels nothing but awe for the huge "impossible animals."
Oct 30, 2001 | In 1971, biologist Roger Payne and his family embarked on what would be the first of many trips to Argentina. Sleeping in tents and eating at a wooden picnic table, the six Paynes spent three months living high above the Patagonia coast. Roger, his then wife, Katy, and their four children spent their days in the ocean, paddling the waves in kayaks, or above it at camp, peering out through binoculars. And at night, sleeping in army tents pitched a few yards from the cliff, the Payne family could hear the leviathan snore of southern right whales who had migrated there to mate.
It was on one of these trips that Payne, swimming in the shallows beneath the family's lookout, came across a female right whale and moved in closer. "She was asleep," he recalled recently in a phone conversation from his home in Vermont, "but after a while she opened her eye and looked me all over. You could see her eyeball rolling in her head -- the eyes move very well -- and then she closed her eye again. Basically, the whale was just saying, 'Well, if you've seen one of these, you've seen them all.' And I thought, Oh, that's the greatest compliment I've ever been paid by a whale."
Payne, tall, toothy, rumpled, windblown, is the kind of environmentalist for whom indifference can be flattering. Born in 1935 in New York, he's been studying whales, all kinds of whales, their migrations, sounds, behavior and mating patterns, for 34 years. And through it all, what's kept him ocean-bound is the thrill of being overwhelmed and humbled. Payne has built his career on science and activism, but ask him what it's like to swim with a whale and what you hear in his voice is awe.
"It's like nothing you've ever done. You're absolutely out of your element and the whale is absolutely in its. And this huge blubbery animal -- when you swim with them, you discover that they are the absolute ultimate in grace. And they can turn and maneuver and so forth in ways that leave you stunned. I mean you can't imagine that an animal that big could be so graceful."
Payne decided to study whales without ever having seen one. With degrees from Harvard and Cornell, he had spent much of his career studying the acoustics of bats, owls and then moths, all of which use echolocation to chart their way through the dark. But the work, Payne felt, was starting to feel too academic.
"[I wasn't] doing anything that was directly related to problems that I, as a biologist, am deeply and bitterly aware of," he recalls, "which have to do with the destruction of the wild world by people. So I thought, If all you've had in training is the chance to work on the acoustic worlds of animals, what animal could you work on that needs help, for which the acoustics are important?"
Payne chose whales. He was becoming an environmentalist at a time when there wasn't much of an environmental movement to join in the United States. Greenpeace was just getting started in Britain and Canada, and the commercial whaling industry was still very much alive. The popular image of whales was the one Melville had left us with: "portentous and mysterious monsters," "undeliverable, nameless perils" every bit as ominous and unknowable as the ocean itself. Whales were menacing leviathans to be conquered and harvested, for food, oil and ambergris, an ingredient in perfume.
Payne's first trip to Argentina, and the ones that followed, would prove to be just as effective as publicity stunts as they were as research trips.
"During that first season, we discovered extraordinary evidence of right whales' restraint towards humans," Payne wrote in National Geographic in October 1972. "We had become convinced that the true disposition of the right whale is at variance with its centuries-old reputation for smashing boats and men." The whales Payne introduced the world to were playful and nurturing. They spoke to each other with a broad range of sounds, what Payne described as "grunting, mooing, moaning and sighing." And even if whales were big and strong enough to kill a person, chances are they were too mild-mannered to bother.
"One of the standard things that they do is take a swat at you with their tail," Payne explained to me. "Which, if it connected with you, would break you in half. And they've probably done that to, oh guessing wildly, 10,000 to 15,000 people and nobody's ever been hit with it. And it never misses by more than a few inches. So it's a threat; they're just telling you who's boss. But they know exactly where their tail is and where you are, even if they've swum past you and their eye is not on the mark, they know where everything is."
Get Salon in your mailbox!