Haida’s Song

Haida Didn’t Know it, but Bob Wright was thinking of setting him free. A longtime attraction at Wright’s Sealand of the Pacific, the male orca had reached twenty-three feet, and despite being paired with several females, he had failed to impregnate any of them. In June 1982, the oceanarium’s director, Angus Matthews, proposed an exchange to the Canadian government. In return for a permit to capture two young killer whales in local waters, Sealand would release Haida to the wild. It was a bold plan, made possible by recent scientific breakthroughs. Using Haida’s own calls, researchers had deduced that he was a member of L pod, one of the three southern resident pods identified and named by Mike Bigg. But the orca’s training for release would begin only after Sealand acquired new whales. Following a successful capture, Matthews explained, the oceanarium would move Haida to a pen in Pedder Bay, where the long-captive orca could learn to catch live fish and make acoustic contact with his family. But Matthews cautioned that success would ultimately depend on the whale himself. “Haida will be given his own choice,” he emphasized, “of joining his old pod and becoming a born-again whale, or returning to his friends at Sealand.” In late August, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO, formerly the Department of the Environment) approved the project and assigned Bigg to supervise it. The respected scientist cautioned the public that there was no guarantee Haida would survive, but he argued that the release “needs to be tried.” Critics disagreed. Some accused Sealand of plotting to abandon Haida now that he had served his purpose. Likening the plan to “throwing out the family pet when it is no longer young and amusing,” one local woman warned that Haida’s “trust in humans will probably result in a bullet from a gun-happy fisherman.” The fiercest opposition came from Greenpeace, which denounced the entire proposal. Declaring rehabilitation “unlikely,” Greenpeace Canada president Patrick Moore argued that to move the imprisoned whale to a “halfway house” in Pedder Bay would be “to condemn him to death—alone.”