Every now and then there is an exception to the rule

THE QUALITY I admire most in nature is mystery. Every time I hear scientific experts say: “We don’t know . . .” I am oddly reassured. Ours is such a know-all of a species, but we know so little of what nature knows. Any non-scientific non-expert like myself who spends a lot of time in nature’s company will be baffled dozens of times in any one year. That bafflement fuels the impetus to keep looking, in my case to keep writing.

Many of nature’s secrets are usually accessible to anyone who has the resources of patience and humility to watch and question time after time after time, reworking the same set of circumstances, the same creatures in the same landscapes, so that knowledge progresses towards intimacy then towards a degree of understanding. But all that gets much, much more difficult if your subject happens to be a whale.

The beluga, the white whale that has just washed up dead and decomposing at Lunan Bay is a mystery that is quite possibly unsolvable. The waters off the Angus coast are no strangers to whales, up to and including the famousTay Whale whose skeleton has been part of Dundee’s heritage for 130 years. But the Tay Whale was a humpback and humpbacks wander all the world’s oceans. The beluga is a specialist, and its speciality is theArctic. It is also a sociable animal. You can find herds of 500 or more in the St Lawrence River of north-west Canada and up to 10,000 in Hudson Bay where it is a favoured prey of killer whales, walruses and polar bears thanks to its particularly thick layer of blubber. So what was a single beluga doing in the North Sea as far south asAngus?

The Courier’s own report of the incident highlighted the problem. The man who found it said: “The condition it was in suggests it may have deceased further north and drifted down.” But the report also quoted a veterinary investigations officer with the Scottish Marine Animals Stranding Scheme who said: “What this find suggests is that it is not an animal that has drifted down. It’s likely that these animals have been existing in the waters around Scotland, which is pretty unusual.”

But a marine biologist who was called in said: “It is often difficult enough to understand the reasons why a freshly dead cetacean has stranded and died, let alone a very decomposed animal like this one. All we can say is that the distribution of belugas is normally a lot further north than this and that the species is considered to be a vagrant in UK waters.”

In other words, we don’t know. What we do know is that sometimes whales do what to us seems inexplicable behaviour, a thing they have in common with wolves. Travel is the natural habitat of both species, travel in a herd or in a pack. But the behaviour of both species as we understand it is punctuated with extraordinary journeys by solitary animals. In the case of both wolves and belugas, those solitary journeys mostly head south.

Solitary belugas have been recorded a surprisingly (to us) long way south on both sides of theAtlantic – off Massachusetts in the United States and in European waters the Mediterranean and once, as far up the Rhine as Bonn. So Lunan Bay is not an exceptional exception to what we think of as “normal” beluga behaviour. Likewise, a wolf will suddenly depart from the pack it has known all its life and journey alone for hundreds of miles, and the one is no better understood than the other. We just don’t know why it happens.

Belugas are, however, extraordinary animals even within the extraordinary world of whales. They are, uniquely among cetaceans, capable of facial expressions. They seem to smile and to frown. No-one knows if they are smiling or frowning, of course, or whether that is our hopelessly anthropomorphic interpretation of the fact that its lips and the so called “melon” of fat that distinguishes what we think of as its forehead are both particularly mobile.

It has another character trait that endears it to whale watchers, and especially to underwater photographers who study whales. Its neck vertebrae are not fused like most whales, so they can – and do – crane their necks in a very human way to take a better look at the strange creature following them with a camera.

I have my own idea about what goes on when we find ourselves grasping at straws to explain the inexplicable in nature, because inexplicable solitary behaviour happens in people too. It is one of the few traits our species still has in common with all those nonhuman species we call “wild”. Seton Gordon, that great ambassador of the Highland and Island landscape, once wrote:

“In the immense silences of these wild corries and dark rocks, the spirit of the high and lonely places revealed herself, so that one felt the serene and benign influence that has from time to time caused men to leave the society of their fellows and live on some remote surf-drenched isle – as St Cuthbert did on Farne – there to steep themselves in those spiritual influences that are hard to receive in the crowded hours of human life.”

So the particular straw that I have grasped is this. We tend to dismiss the possibility of individuality in wildlife. We think in the oftrepeated generalities of field guides. Whales live in herds. Wolves live in packs. Sea birds live in colonies. But now and again we discover the travels of creatures that have not read the field guides, the exceptions that prove the rule, the ones that leave the society of their fellows, to steep themselves in whatever influences they happen to need and which cannot be supplied by the crowded hours of beluga life or wolf life, whatever.

I’m guessing, of course, but from time to time, I know how they feel.

The beluga is a sociable animal which is capable of facial expressions.