Today we practiced sailing on Jason’s little dingy the Cyprid, as well as testing out how to use the hydrophones and underwater speaker. There was a seagull listening near by, and when he heard the S1 call from the speaker on deck I heard him start to cawk at it- Seabird and Orca communication!
It was so much fun! It really is the best way to sail- and Dominique and I were able to successfully tack on our voyage- which faced perils such as the massive ferry heading full speed towards us (from 1/2 mile away)- but thanks to our tacking techniques we were able to dodge just in the nick of time!
Lindsay and I also poked an anemone off the side of the dock- it sucked our finger and we got Ryan to touch it too! What a wonderful way to end the week!Â
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Well, Friday Harbor is gorgeous-similar to Bar Harbor, though, as many people have eluded to, the mountains here are truly impressive and rather dwarf the entire northeast. Being so close to the water here on campus is also a huge perk-certainly one that I could never take for granted. The campus is apparently home to lots of different creatures which unabashedly wander past Laura, Lindsay, and my duplex-like river otters! Despite their local reputation, I find them adorable.
The program itself has proven to be well worth the loans and the scrambling for extra money so far. First of all because we saw orcas from J-pod on the second day here!!! That event pretty much cleared up any qualms I may have had-ever. Second, the opportunity to examine orcas from a new perspective-acoustics-is very exciting. Thus far I have observed whales and their behaviors at the surface, and as exciting as that has been, I’ve only been privy to an extremely small percent of their lives; a weighty “but what happens now” questioning has always persisted in the back of my mind as the whales dove out of sight. This experience allows for the opportunity to scratch the surface of that question via acoustics…which are more complicated than I had hoped by the way. My complete lack of prior experience in this area of marine science has left me slightly intimidated to be perfectly honest, but also excited to gain a new perspective and hopefully acquire new as well as improved skills.
The next step is to establish my research question. While I have many, feasibility has become quite the issue. I am most motivated to examine a topic whose results can have management implications, as southern residents are endangered, or at least serve as a starting point for others more invested in killer whale conservation. Essentially…I want to shed some light on an aspect of killer whale life history which can be used, ideally to establish management regulations somewhere in the near future. While this may be naive and too far-reaching for a 10-week study by a beginner acoustician, I can’t see my motivations straying much.
Finally, I’m excited for this program as it has great potential to answer many “life questions”, you know, provide some of that clarity stuff-if anything prove where my expertise lie, or not as the case may be, as well as let me check off a bunch of things on my list of “things to do before I die.”
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I have finally made it to the third corner of the country, to another island. I have bounced from Mount Desert Island to Lido Key and now to San Juan Island, so I now consider myself an official island hopper. I like it.
It’s been only a week since I’ve been here, but I already love it. I can’t wait to explore more of the island and what the lab has to offer- rocky coasts are for me. It’s also quite odd how this place reminds me so much of Maine yets fascinates me with its new things at the very same time. The town is laid back, friendly, and kept unlocked just like bar harbor, there are small mountain “hills”, farms, and the lighthouse, and the labs are very much like the COA campus, from the dining hall, the trails, the dock, the library porch, the rope swing and hidden benches, the random labs you can get lost in looking at all the cool things, to the overall “camp” like feeling – and everyone seems to love being here.
But I even love the differences more- the Olympic mountains off in the horizon, the giant bull kelp along shore, the row boats (I LOVE the roat boats), the blooming cherry trees, the river otters and blacked tailed deer roaming all over the lab campus, and the fact that everyone runs to the west side when they hear the orca calls on the radio- something I already got to experience. I also know this is a place I’ll love when I see all the marine biology dorks get together and get excited about seaweed and marine slugs – I want to know all the species of everything on this island!!
It’s also refreshing to get back into class mode since last fall- even though I am scratching my head over all the math and physics of acoustics – I feel I really am going to learn something out of all this, and be able to use it in the future- at the moment now it comes down to deciding on what question to research for my project- I’ve got it narrowed down pretty well at the moment, but more reading to do first.
And thinking that it would be at least a month until I saw orcas, lo and behold we saw J pod on April Fool’s day! (no joke). We just happened to check out the streamlining hydrophones on the website due to Dominique’s insistence 🙂 and after hearing them we went as quick as we could to the West side and Lime Kiln- Val told me, why don’t you check out by that boat in your binoculars- and sure enough I spotted my first Orca! we saw a good number of J pod individuals about 1/2 a mile away- this is only the beginning too!
here’s a picture of our first sighting- kind of far away but I was just excited!! and we could listen to them too while we heard them
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Up to this point we have learned about acoustics and non-salmon fish. Val helped me install a program on my computer to practice orca calls so I can distinguish them. We saw orcas on only the second day here, but there are a lot of other animals too.
I rowed into town today to get groceries. They had some post cards, but I’m holding out for another card store I saw downtown. Dominique and Laura and I are all improving on rowing, and Laura is the best so far. Actually, I guess Ryan and Juan are better but I wasn’t counting them because they took bikes instead today. The food is really good in the cafeteria and they have a lot of variety. I have already met other people from UW that are doing studies of the nervous systems of sea slugs and some other stuff, but ours is the best. Of course I knew that, but when we say we’re from Beam Reach, it is re-inforced because they all say “OH Man! Yours is the best!” Then they say “Aren’t you supposed to be on a boat?, Where’s your boat?” so we explain about that and it’s a good conversation starter.
I picked my topic today. It’s “Jumping for Joy”: Studying the Meaning Behind Breaching and other Percussives (tail slapping, splashing) In San Juan Island Southern Resident Orcas .
I want to do some PR for the program, so I will say that I have already learned a lot more than in a typical classroom. Val and Jason let us use some musical instruments so we could understand some of the acoustic equipment and we did an experiment with clapping outside to measure the speed of sound.
One of the most wonderful things about Friday Harbor is that they seem to love the orcas as much as we do. On the first day they were spotted it seemed like the whole town dropped what they were doing to see them.
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I had a fine time transporting the five intrepid Beam Reach students up to the San Juans yesterday. Tracy and I agreed that it is a real treat to get out of Seattle to visit the beautiful archipelago and the peaceful pines of the Friday Harbor Labs campus. It’s exciting to get the first spring program started!
We spent the first morning of class together. We started with an orientation at the Friday Harbor Labs. Then we grabbed some box lunches kindly assembled by the FHL dining hall staff and headed west. We got a nice overview of Haro Strait all the way to Victoria and the snowy Olympic Mountains at Sharon Grace’s observation deck. Then we headed up the coast to Lime Kiln to generate 21 burning questions and discuss a few of them. It was chilly, but intermittent sun and scintillating ideas kept us reasonably comfortable. Next time I’ll turn that heater on while the questions are getting thought up!
After lunch in the light house, Tracy and I ran for the ferry and the students returned to the Labs with Jason and Val to go over the syllabus and get further oriented to the labs. We enjoyed seeing some harbor porpoises, a bald eagle, and a river otter, but were all a little disappointed that J pod didn’t show up.
The disappointment dissipated rapidly today when I heard (through Susan, JB, and some combination of Sandy Buckley, Jeanne Hyde, and Ivan) that J pod was in Haro Strait! Thanks to further guidance from Jeanne, the class made it over to Landbank in time to observe the J16s. As the afternoon progressed, there were some great calls heard, first at Lime Kiln, then at OrcaSound.
The coup was that those of us in Seattle got to participate virtually in an enhanced way. The Center for Whale Research had *just* gotten a new web camera installed and streaming. With a little practice, it proved wonderful fun to watch the whales and boats go by while listening to the OrcaSound hydrophone located a few hundred meters to the north. If you’d like to try it, here are the relevant links:
http://www.whaleresearch.com/thecenter/orcacam01.html
http://orcasound.net/os/
The camera has a 25x optical zoom, as well as pan/tilt controls. It even lets you snap stills like this one…
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Last Monday, Val and I, plus guests Bob and Kathy Francis, were graciously treated to dinner with Beam Reach students and instructors cooking at S1 at the Friday Harbor Labs. I’d been requested to bring a salad to complement the delicious veggie lasagna, garlic and cheese bread, and apple crisp. No problem – I’ve been living on salads for years. I love the fresh ingredients and creativity options a salad provides. Salads can often be low-calorie, too, which is great for one who has had to diet for years. Val says that I’m a recipient of the “thrifty gene†which supposedly was devised for early (wo)man to eat when food was plentiful and store extra food as fat reserves to be used when times became lean. Unfortunately, most of us no longer live in lean food times, but we thrifty-geners still have to carefully monitor what foods we eat and how much of it we consume. So salads have become my potluck saving grace…….
At dinner that night I had an interesting conversation with a Beam Reach student named Emily. She’s from Philadelphia, and comes from an area familiar to me because of some of my relatives hailing from the same region. Emily and I became engaged in a sustainability conversation, with the basic question being “How can we live more sustainably on a daily basis?†Our talk centered on transportation, fossil fuels, hybrid automobiles, flex cars, and even becoming “carless†(a move our daughter Laura has recently made) instead of “careless†with our precious energy options. I left the dinner that night convinced that I needed to do more than things like driving my Prius, urging guests to conserve water when they visit, buying organic foods and using eco-cleaning products.
That night, after my low-water bath, I picked up the Sept./Oct. issue of “Sierraâ€, a publication of the Sierra Club. An article by Seth Zuckerman titled “My Low-Carbon Diet†caught my eye because it related directly to my discussion with Emily on the issues of living in a sustainable way. With the subtitle of “From gas gluttony to fuel fitness in three weeksâ€, I read quickly to see how Seth had learned how to decrease the amount of carbon dioxide he contributed to the earth’s atmosphere.
With the help of a California-based climatologist and energy expert, Seth sampled three carbon dioxide “dietsâ€, and aimed at: the daily average of 122 pounds/American carbon dioxide emissions; the 24 pounds of the average worldwide carbon dioxide emissions; and the 9 pounds that would not raise carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere. Doing things like driving a gas-guzzling <span class=”caps”>SUV </span>for a week and giving up on riding his bike or taking the bus didn’t even get the energy-conscious Seth near the American excess average. It’s well worth reading the article to see how he amusingly tried a high-carbon diet. During the second week, Seth tried to get his carbon dioxide emissions to the average of the world. He changed his lightbulbs from incandescent to compact fluorescents, among other things, and he came out well below the worldwide average. Finally, he visited a friend who managed to live off the grid with the help of solar photovoltaic cells and hydroelectric help. Unfortunately his friend Michael couldn’t get his carbon emissions down to what the earth can absorb, regardless of his simple lifestyle.
I, like Michael, am trying to stay on a sensible low-carbon diet, one planned step at a time. Those apples in the tasty dessert Monday night were hand-picked by Jason’s wife Wendy at a Beaverton Valley farm. Using local produce is a small step, but such steps minimize dependence on fossil fuels and help in living a bit more sustainably. It’s a diet worth trying!
*Note: interested in trying this new diet? Check out sierraclub.org/sierra/diet.
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Scott’s second baby of the month is born and thriving. Cora was born on August 10th and is such a sweet little baby! And now, Beam Reach is one week old and seems also to be vital and thriving. Congratulations, Scott.
And congratulations to Jason and Donna for such elegant and successful directing of this first week of Beam Reach.
Beam Reachers! I sense your energy and drive — it just exudes. You are launched into a unique intellectual and experiential adventure.
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