Island community rallies around orca calf rescue effort
ZEBALLOS — It’s just after
10 a.m. and Yvonne Malanfant has finished brewing a fresh pot of coffee and placing a plate of homemade quesadillas with a side dish of spicy mayonnaise on a table for everybody to share.
A little bell above her door rings to announce the arrival of another local to pick up their mail and catch up on recent events. Customer traffic at the small Canada Post outlet at Zeballos has been extra busy over the past two weeks as residents gather to talk about the drama unfolding in a nearby tidal lagoon, where efforts are underway to rescue a stranded killer whale calf that tragically lost its mother.
“This is incredible,” said Malanfant, the postmistress for the community of about 200 residents. “It’s pretty incredible what’s going on. It’s made the news every night.”
Zeballos, at the end of a gravel logging road about 450 kilometres northwest of Victoria, has fully invested itself in the unfolding rescue effort, which could occur this week.
Hunters, loggers, fishing guides and the area’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents all say they are deeply concerned about the plight of the two-yearold orca calf, left alone without its mother in Little Espinosa Inlet since March, and a rescue attempt can’t come soon enough.
“We are compassionate people,” said one resident who participated in earlier unsuccessful attempts to coax the twoyear-old female calf to leave the lagoon through a narrow, swiftmoving channel leading to the open ocean.
James Rothenburger makes his living on the waters surrounding Zeballos on northern Vancouver Island, and said despite the long-shot odds facing the young orca, every attempt should be made to get her out of the lagoon.
“If it’s going to die, you’ve got to do something,” he said. “They can’t let it die there.”
Ehattesaht First Nation Chief Simon John said his people decided early on, after going through the heartbreak of trying to save the orca calf’s pregnant mother last month, that they must do what they can to save the calf.
The mother orca died on March 23 when it became stranded on a rocky beach at low tide, despite efforts of residents to save the whale.
“This is where reconciliation happens on the ground,” John said at a meeting with officials from the federal Fisheries Department.
The First Nation, which has about 100 people living at its Zeballos village site with another 400 members in other communities on Vancouver Island, decided it must do what it can to save the orca calf, said John. “I’m trying to help people understand a perspective of where we are in this crossroads of actually having meaningful deliberations for the sake of the whale or even whales,” he said Wednesday. “This is a really important time and a crossroads related to our connections.”
John played a brief underwater recording the First Nation made of the whale making calls from the lagoon.
“We listen to her calls on the hydrophone, and they make you almost weep, they seem so filled with longing,” said a statement released by the First Nation earlier this week. “We have ancient stories of our whalers being at sea when their canoes fail and they are brought back home on the back of a killer whale. Maybe this is a modern story, but in reverse.”
John said the First Nation, which is working with the Fisheries Department on a complex rescue plan, is providing funding and equipment for the effort to save the calf.