The rescuers — a motley crew of marine mammal experts, drone technicians, veterinarians, environmental consultants and First Nations people — are scrambling to reunite the young killer whale with her extended family, which includes a grandmother and an aunt and is suspected to be somewhere in the northeastern Pacific Ocean.
As food sources for the orca dwindle in the lagoon, rescuers know they must hurry.
“Time is not on our side,” Paul Cottrell, a marine mammal coordinator at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, a federal government department, told reporters Thursday.
The orca calf, given a name that means “Brave Little Hunter” by the local First Nations people, arrived at the lagoon sometime last month with her pregnant mother, probably to chase seals that had fled to the isolated body of water near the tiny village of Zeballos, British Columbia.
But soon after, her mother got stranded on a gravel bed in the lagoon, where she was discovered, helpless, by a passing road maintenance crew on March 23. The mother orca and the calf she was carrying died less than two hours, despite efforts to save her.
Since then, Cottrell and Ehattesaht First Nation Chief Simon John have been leading efforts to keep the orphaned calf healthy — and to lure her back to the Pacific, which is connected to the lagoon via a narrow entrance. To do so, rescuers have used acoustics that sound out vocalizations of transient killer whales. They have also tried enticing her to follow a group of canoes as people beat Indigenous drums — a method John says has worked in the past.
The calf, however, appears unable to escape because of declining tides that make the water level at the lagoon’s narrow entrance too shallow. She also appears to be reluctant to swim over a sandbar at the lagoon’s entryway, rescuers have said. There are only 15 to 20 minutes each day when the tide is high enough to allow her to swim over it, according to Cottrell.
All the while, Brave Little Hunter has been energetically vocalizing, calling out for her extended family — which can’t hear her due to the lagoon’s isolated location.
As repeated efforts to nudge her back to the ocean have failed, rescuers have felt “pretty let down,” John said in a statement last week. “She doesn’t know we’re trying to help,” he said.
Rescuers are exploring the option of moving the calf onto a sling and then a frame that will hold her as she is moved to the coast by truck, before she is put into a netted pen in coastal waters. The calf can then be released into the ocean once her pod travels nearby, John said Thursday at the news conference.
Airlifting the calf out of the water with a helicopter also has not been ruled out, although that plan is no longer the primary option, Cottrell said.
Putting together a plan of this magnitude is “a lot of work,” Cottrell told reporters Thursday. Rescuers are hoping to implement the plan within the next week, he added. Fisheries and Oceans Canada has described such trap-and-transport methods as a last option because they pose potential risks to the calf and rescuers.
There is some good news: Brave Little Hunter appears to be hunting birds, meaning she has been able to feed herself. She also seems healthy, according to data from drones monitoring the calf’s health. Rescuers have also reported that a group of killer whales that could include her relatives has been swimming near Vancouver Island.
Brave Little Hunter “is still very young and would not survive without support from relatives,” Volker Deecke, a professor of wildlife conservation at the University of Cumbria in England, who knows some of the people involved in the rescue, said in an email.
“It is really important to remember that we are connected to these animals,” John said March 26 in a statement. “In our stories the killer whale came onto land and transformed into the wolf and then the wolf transformed into man.”
“These are events that reawaken our people and our connection to the land, the water and the animals. … Sometimes in the sad events we gather strength. I think that is important,” John said.
