Last night I heard a whale breathe. I was not on a boat.
Not on the beach. Not even on the harbour wall. I was lying on my sofa in my sitting room in False Bay when I heard it. When I think about that, it makes me laugh with delight. That I can lie here late at night and hear the life-breath come out of one of these massive creatures that live thousands of miles away in the icy waters of the Antarctic, and that swim across the vast Southern Ocean in winter to calve along our coast. It wasn’t always like this, of course. The Southern Right Whales were once facing extinction because of commercial whaling that begun around 1780. The University of Pretoria’s Whale Unit says whaling reduced the global population of Southern Rights from between 70 000 or 80 000 individuals to just 60 when commercial was banned in 1935. The good news is that the Whale Unit says the three breeding populations of Southern Rights in coastal waters off South Africa, Australia and Argentina are increasing by 6.5% a year. There are now about 6 000 off the southern African coast and just under 15 000 globally. From just 60! Ever wondered why Southern Rights got that name? It was from the old whalers who regarded them as the “right” whale to hunt: they were slow swimming, predictable in distribution, and floated when they were killed. There are so many bad news stories about environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, desertification, pollution, global climate change, soil impoverishment and species extinction. The recovery of the Southern Right whales is one of the few good news stories. But you know what makes hearing that whale extra special? The fact that it must have been fairly close inshore for the sound to have carried up to me, which means it would have been within just a few hundred metres of the old whaling stations at Kalk Bay and St James where whalers brought dead whales ashore to be butchered and their blubber boiled in huge cauldrons. And now this one could loll about in the sea with no hunters waiting for it as they did for its ancestors. I worked with an old man who used to eat whale meat as a child. He said his mother made it into a stew and it was very good. “She used to give me sixpence and say: ‘Go buy sixpence whale meat.’” Now whales of all kinds are worth more alive than dead. A 2009 study commissioned by IFAW found that 13 million people had gone on whale tours the previous year, generating $2.1 billion. Oh – and did you know that sperm whales make clicking noises to communicate? They can reach an astonishing 236 decibels, the loudest creature on earth. Google James Nestor and watch them on YouTube.
