Open the below pictures in a full-screen slideshow by Flickr
July 21st, 2009 – Barrow, Alaska
by Herb McCormick
(July 21): The year was 1977. Fearful that the very existence of the bowhead whales of the Western Arctic was in serious jeopardy, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) took forceful measures by issuing a moratorium on commercial and subsistence whaling. The Eskimos who for centuries had relied on the annual bowhead hunts for their very survival were up in arms.
Into this maelstrom stepped a young Wyoming mountaineer named Craig George, whose knowledge of both the whales he was tasked to study and the natives whose lives depended on them could be summed up, quite literally, in fifty words or less. He didn’t know it at the time, but he would soon meet a local whaler named Harry Brower, Jr., and the alliance they would forge, coupled with the ongoing fate of the bowheads, is a story worthy of a Hollywood screenplay, right down to the happy ending.
In the last installment of our crew logs, Part 1 of our two-part Arctic Tale, we profiled Harry Brower, Jr., whose grandfather, Charles D. Brower, was a legendary Yankee whaler who settled in Barrow and married an Eskimo woman named Asianggataq. Harry’s father – Harry Brower, Sr. – was an excellent carpenter who became the head of the carpentry shop at the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL). The father of nine, he was also a hunter and a guide, and in that capacity he became an invaluable resource and a fount of local knowledge for the NARL scientists, making countless contributions to their research.
In that regard, his son, Harry Jr., was destined to follow in his footsteps.
But Craig George, who these days serves as a senior wildlife biologist for the North Slope Department of Wildlife Management (and who successfully transited the Northwest Passage with author and whale authority John Bockstoce aboard his motor-sailer Belvedere in 1988, the very same voyage Ocean Watch is currently attempting) was yet to know that when he hit the ground running after arriving in Barrow in ‘77.
“There were some very unhappy people here, to say the least,” he recalled. “At least a two-thousand-year whaling history had, boom, come to an end. It was a tense situation. You can imagine there were some choice expletives when they saw a white biologist walking down the street. It was a different world.”
Into the Wild
To understand what the biologist was facing, a short recap of the whaling era is very useful. Most of the world’s bowhead population had been driven to commercial extinction when the New Bedford whalers discovered the Bering Sea whale fishery in the mid-1800s. “They really hit ‘em hard,” said Craig, of this new, unexpected resource. “In a single season they took over 2,000 whales in a population of fifteen- to twenty-thousand. At the tail end of commercial whaling, in 1915, there were probably 1,000-1,500 animals. The native people still hunted them (afterwards), but they were making a slow recovery despite that hunt.”
Then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a couple of things happened. The oil pipeline hit, and suddenly there was a lot of cash in Barrow. And there was resurgence in traditional Native American culture and practices. Suddenly, instead of inheriting all the equipment, as had always been the case, there were a lot more young hunters who could buy all the gear they needed to go whale hunting. So the numbers of crews increased and so did the harvest levels.
That’s when the IWC intervened, believing the bowhead population to be in free-fall, with what they estimated to be no more than 1,500 animals in existence. The Eskimos, who’d been observing the whales for centuries, believed the estimates were far short of the true figures, and based on that claim they were able to negotiate a small annual quota to continue the hunt. The federal government had funding in place to try and get a firm grasp on the numbers. Craig George was the biologist assigned to that mission.
After the steeps of Wyoming, he was ready for an Alaskan adventure. And then he actually arrived in the Arctic. “I’d imagined Denali (Mt. McKinley) looming overhead,” he said. “But everything was flat. I was living on a gravel pad. It wasn’t quite what I pictured.”
And then there were the whales themselves, in and of themselves another hazy picture for the newly arrived biologist. “I didn’t even know what a bowhead was,” he said. “All my training had been in terrestrial biology. Very little was known about the whales scientifically; in science, they were very poorly described. So I didn’t understand the animals. And I didn’t understand the ice. I just started writing things down.”
He also set out upon the ice, into the wild of the unforgiving Arctic.
“It’s a dynamic environment, where the local hunters are really on their game,” he said. “They understand this. They know the dynamics, when it’s safe, when it isn’t, when it’s going to break off, when the pack ice is going to come in, when the leads are going to open and the whales are going to migrate through.
 |
| With the help of whale hunters, Craig George has expanded the baseline understanding of the bowhead whale. |
“So we started going out there and counting whales. We learned from the hunters how to cut trail through the pressure ridges, how to put camps in, how to deal with the polar bears, all that sort of thing. It took a long time. Initially I was more interested in the logistics and the camping. And I started to see that it really is very beautiful on the ice. In a weird way it sort of filled my need to be in mountain country.”
With the guidance and support of both Harry Browers – senior and junior – and the other hunters, Craig and his associates began to expand their base of knowledge and understanding. Though they disagreed with the actual numbers, the Eskimos who’d been fishing for decades, the “old-timers,” acknowledged that there were problems with the hunt, that the bountiful population of bowheads had, in fact, dwindled.
“Once we started to really work together, that’s when things started to really take off scientifically,” he said. “The collaboration allowed some good science to take place.”
The Science Emerges
As the Eskimos took Craig under their wing, they began to tell him things that, at first, seemed difficult to believe. “They watched us observing the whales and said, ‘You’re not doing this right. You’re only counting what you can see. There are whales out there you can’t see, in the offshore leads, and when it’s frozen they’re still swimming right through here.’ That was a little hard to accept at the time.”
To their credit, the scientists weren’t dismissive of the claims; instead, they conducted tests to establish their veracity. Take, for instance, the issue of bowheads swimming beneath the ice.
“Sure enough, they were right,” said Craig. “We began to track them acoustically and (realized that) thousands of bowheads can move under a complete ice cover. They crack the ice and punch holes in it (so they can breathe). Anything less than a foot thick seems pretty transparent. And once one whale breaks through, other whales will find these holes and use them. It’s just amazing. Over the course of the day hundreds of whales can use one of the holes.”
Beyond observing the whales, the hunters allowed Craig to conduct post-mortem examinations. Not long ago, he discovered the fragment of a Yankee whaling weapon, patented in 1879, embedded in the scapula of a captured bowhead. Yes, there’s little doubt that it struck the whale over a hundred years ago: The life span of a bowhead can be 150 years, perhaps more. These days, most captured bowheads average about 60-feet in length, though the Yankee whalers once took an animal that was 80-feet long and yielded over 11,000 gallons of oil.
“That’s a lot of bio-diesel,” said Craig. “The amount of energy is astronomical.”
Over the course of his career, he’s made other important discoveries and greatly expanded the baseline understanding of the bowhead in the scientific community. “It turns out, the hunters were right in the beginning,” he said. “The early estimates of a thousand whales turned out to be around 4,000. It took us a decade to figure it out and show that was the case. It’s been a win/win deal. The bowheads are increasing. We believe the population is somewhere around 12,000 bowheads, and it’s increasing at a rate of about three-percent a year. The quota has gone up, and the hunters are happy.
“It’s been a great working relationship. They’ve shared a lot of information about the behavior and biology of the whales, and they’ve allowed us to sample the animals they catch which has been a tremendous benefit to science. I can’t stress their contribution enough. If you ask a commercial fisherman very specific questions about their catch – where, when, how many – you’re generally going to be shown the door. The Barrow hunters have been remarkably willing to share that.
“The collaboration is very important. I look around at other wildlife and fisheries management regimes that aren’t in it together; they’re separated and even in conflict. These are the resources that are often in trouble. But when the biologists and users are walking side by side, good things happen. I think this is a perfect example, and arguably one of the greatest conservation success stories of the last century.
“Your North Atlantic cod fishery is a good example of where things went horribly wrong. The science was ignored. It was a perfect storm of how not to manage a resource. Hopefully we can learn from these things.”
The Eskimos who hunt bowheads believe you can’t catch a whale unless you’ve done so with honor, dignity and respect. A whale, it’s been said, will offer itself to a worthy hunter. It’s called “the gift of the whale.”
Craig George has earned his own gift from the bowheads. “The animal has really given me a lot,” he said. “Kind of a life focus: direction in many ways. And they’re just incredibly interesting. Everything we’ve looked at in terms of their life history has been very interesting and unusual. They’re really outliers in the mammalian spectrum in a lot of respects.
“We’re doing pretty well,” he added, and then smiled. “I say ‘we.’ I’m not a bowhead.”
That’s true: Craig George is not a bowhead. He’s just completely, and totally, at one with them.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
To add a comment to this story click on the comment link below the post title. Please direct your messages for the crew to crew@aroundtheamericas.org instead of submitting them here. Thanks for following the Around the Americas Expedition.
