The Fight to Save Cascadia's Orcas | Free Documentary Nature

foreign [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign the whales are eight to ten thousand pounds are big animals or as big as elephants you really get the impact that they're the king of beasts in that water world when you see things like them swimming 25 knots you know faster than your boat can go or throwing themselves 18 feet in the air you know they're remarkable it was apparent to other people not so apparent to me that I was kind of obsessed with whale stuff oh my first photographs are 1963. that's when I got a 35 millimeter camera and started shooting pictures my introduction to Orca survey or the killer whale photo ID program came through Dr Mike big in Canada I had heard of him since the early 1970s as being somebody that allegedly knew every individual whale in the Pacific Northwest and most people didn't believe him and I can't say that I was necessarily a Believer but I wasn't a disbeliever by the dorsal fin size shape whether or not it has any Nicks and the saddle pattern the gray area on the side behind the fin we can go back 40 years and show you unequivocally in the same whale in 1976 my task was to confirm the identification of all the whales that were in the Sailor sea area and that we did with Mike's help we had 70 whales in and the government who was interested in finding that number said well that's all they need to know but Mike and I were both fascinated with the detail that we had that we could see how long it took to grow up how many babies they had how long they lived and who they hung around with and that was more fascinating than just how many [Music] way up in the top left corner is the first roll of film I ever shot and then all of this top row is basically whale tagging and this is uh the beginning of the Orca survey there's old high eight and Super 8 film roles open up another drawer and it's videotapes computers with terabyte storage of digitized images and movies and so on this is silver Bank where we're doing the study and then every day's notes and sketches it's fun to watch an individual whale grow up I just go back in time back and forth Through Time probably is fun for me doing whale stuff as it is for people doing watching their grandkids grow up well the first summer that I was here was in 2004 and by serendipitous happenings I wound up being a docent at Lime Kiln Point State Park living in a tent I basically slept with my clothes on and my shoes by the sleeping bag and the whales would come by at night in the middle of the night and you can hear it one nice thing about a tent is there's no walls to block out that sound and I'd be down on the water midnight videotaping them for me to learn this has taken a tremendous amount of time I do not do anything else I do not go off Island I do not go out to eat I don't go to the movies all I do are whales 24 7. in the southern resident Community they never leave their mothers their entire lives it's a matriarchal society so the females are in charge historically there was a matriarch of each pod J pod k-pod railpod and then granny J2 is the matriarch of the entire Southern resident community Grant it was estimated to be 105 when she died these whales that are living in this community now have never known another leader Southern residents don't just live here they live on the outer Coast as well they gave him that name Southern residence Southern means that they were basically off the southern end of Vancouver Island this is where they come in the spring and the summer and into the fall and feast on salmon [Music] my friends do like Orca but I'm definitely the most whale crazy one [Music] I'm more interested in acoustics and so I want to figure out what the work I have to say it just excites everything to people this the sound is everything to the orchestra it's how they communicate it's they're like a location how they hunt the southern residents share about 27 different calls with each other and their basic signature call I sort of go is here foreign [Music] syllable but it always has this little Tail Going Down L pod goes you hear that upward tick and k-pod just like a kitten each of the pods have their own different calls but when they form the super pods if they want to communicate with each other they have if they have the shared sounds and the shared dialects that they all have they're like us where you see kids playing together you see who's friends with whom and when you watch them enough and you know who you're looking at you can see all of these different types of interactions foreign has a great story that I think is a little bit of a window onto the Incredible Minds and the Mystery of who these Wills are one day he was following some whales that he had been following for a couple of days on a prolonged trip and he suddenly followed them into this really thick Bank of fog and the fog enveloped him he was pretty lost except that he knew what Compass direction to head generally toward home we were with the j-pod about in Georgia straight and they were out spread out foraging and then they all lined up you know like I think there were 16 whales at the time and they were eight on each side of us and we just crossed the street like we were part of the pod [Music] he followed them for about 15 miles and when they came out of the fog his house was right there on the shore that was one of the most glorious moments of feeling that wow now what in the world does that say about their minds it says a lot more than we ever think to give them credit for right explain what it is about them that touches people's hearts so much I'm gonna cry now when I talk about it I can't think of a better way to spend a lifetime really are you going to study the southern residents when you grow up well that really just depends if the southern residents are still around when I grow up if they haven't gone extinct by the time that I'm grown up foreign [Music] ly the current status of our Southern resident killer whale population is a downward Trend since being declared in danger they're almost 100 whales in the mid 90s and we're down to 74. oh there's been a horrific decline but not only in the numbers but it's also in their behavior they used to really play a lot in really big groups you know they'd have an extended family gathering we call it a super pod and they'd probably can play and and the chattering like God you put a hydrophone in the water it was like 15 cocktail parties at once and everybody's loud I mean it was just an incredible experience you could feel the enthusiasm and the joy of them being together what we didn't know in the early years is what species of salmon they were eating and rather than eating minnows they went for the big fish eighty percent of their diet was Chinook when we began the study in 76 there were 50 60 pound fish right in front of this house all the time it'd only take three of these fish a day to make a meal now you can see the statistics of weight per fish over the years has diminished we've seen that when they don't have sufficient Chinook salmon that they have issues with their survival [Music] when I was 18 four girlfriends planned a trip for me up to the San Juans from California to see the whales we did the thing that now I hate which is we saw whales and we stopped in the middle of the road and jumped out of the car and uh so I got to see them on my 18th birthday from the San Juan County Park all day long and I was just transfixed I was I was sold and it took me 11 years to get up here and start researching and I've been really studying them intensively since 2005. the biggest threat to the southern residents is the lack of prey specifically salmon and most specifically Chinook salmon you can see that the whales are thin compared to their mammal eating cousins these whales are fairly puny you can sometimes see their ribs in dire cases you can see the outline of their skull and what's known as peanut head you should never see bones outlines of Bones on a on a healthy killer whale overall the population has been shrinking we can tell that by looking at photogrammetry so by measuring the length and girth of the animals so the babies are born smaller and the females and males are not getting as big as past animals the overall shrinking of the population is directly attributable to the fact that females are not getting enough to eat when they're gestating their fetuses my first favorite was j28 Polaris she died my second favorite was j-34 double stuff he died so right now my favorite whale is j16 slick seems like a healthy whale so I'm hoping that she doesn't die that would be that'd be just depressing I don't know they're they're starving so it's in the realm of possibility we're losing the males that would be the next generation of breeders they're not getting to that older age which is horrifying what alarms me the most is we have a serious lack of productive matrilines mother Offspring families we're down to one breeding male alive and five breeding females even though you have others in the population you have total of 27 females that are of reproductive age but only 14 of them have had a baby in the last 10 years and only five of them in the last five years we utilize conservation canines on the front of our boat and the dog is trained to locate killer whale feces in the water based on the fecal matter that's been collected in the last couple of years Dr Sam wasser's lab has been able to figure out how to tell whether or not the females are pregnant and what the preliminary analysis is showing is that 50 percent of the whales that leave in the winter that are pregnant are not coming back with calves and are not pregnant any longer for those females that do carry their calves to full term especially for first Mothers up to 50 percent of those calves die within the first couple of weeks or months of life they're almost into functional reproductive Extinction right now but if we can give them enough food so they can bring up another generation and that generation can bring up another we can bring them back to good numbers [Music] I think it's important that we try to save them because they're an important living can't just let them that's just cruel the number of whales that we have in the population right now they require just to sustain themselves somewhere between six hundred thousand and seven hundred and thirty thousand fish per year in order to grow that population clearly there needs to be more fish that really should be the goal of everybody that's involved and invested in these whales is to try and figure out how to get more salmon into the water for the wells to find throughout their entire range throughout the entire year thank you we've been looking at this very carefully for a couple of years taken every river system in the eastern North Pacific and looked at what its historic production of Chinook salmon has been what the Harvest has been what the chances of recovery are and selected a few that have the biggest bang for the buck and the biggest overall is the Snake River system [Applause] all right [Music] salmon will even if they've been virtually decimated almost extirpated completely give them some water and spawning habitat go get there and they will spawn and some of them will make it back to the ocean they have a will to live that's just amazing here we are in Moose Creek at the convergence of the Selway and moose Creek river in Idaho flew in with dick Walker and here I am in Paradise well we came here because this is where the salmon spawned well the salmon life cycle starts in the upper reaches of rivers where the eggs have been deposited and they hatch into fry and they live in the Stream for a year and then they head out to the ocean they go Downstream and spend time in the Estuary getting used to salt water and then they go on out in saltwater and they run for their lives generally salmon come out of their natal River and go right they hang a right and go to Alaska after they've spent anywhere from three to five years in Alaska getting big they make their southern migration down with the intention of spawning and it's at that point the killer whales can intercept them on their return migration South in the history of the Columbia before settlement of Europeans there was probably 30 million fish coming into the Columbia seven of different species and destination that's a far cry from today at one time the estimate was that um the Snake River produced approximately 50 percent of the salmon in the Columbia Basin it was highly productive it still could be highly productive because most of the area Upstream on the Salmon River in the Clearwater and all most of this is pristine area I wanted to put my eyes on the habitat I've heard that it's pristine and available to the salmon if they were allowed to come here and I totally believe it if it's not the most intact anatomous Fisheries habitat left in the lower 48 it's one of because there's no human interruption in this whole system from Selway Falls up this is where Life Begins the forest is fed by these fish and in the ocean the whales are fed by these fish the habitat is not the question it's the access that is the question and the lower Snake River dams are the primary interruption a man or a woman off the street in the central part of this country they're pretty familiar with the dam and they they say well what's the problem they have fish ladders well that's not the problem the problem is on the other half of their life cycle when the juveniles are migrating from their freshwater spawning and rearing habitat in the Idaho mountains and trying to get to the Pacific Ocean it's that part of their life history where all the mortality takes place before the dams were there a fish could leave Stanley Idaho and be to Astoria in a week now with eight hydroelectric dams in position four in the snake four in the Lower Columbia it can take a month to six weeks these juvenile salmon get to the ocean past the biological window where they can transform from a freshwater fish to a saltwater fish up in Moose Creek where we just were those little smolts when they start down river travels are facing upstream and floating with the current Downstream and they hit the slack water of the reservoirs and basically they have to swim and not only is there no current but there are all these Predator fish in there the bass and the pike minnow they're just gobbling them up you also have the sun baking down on these reservoirs creating temperatures that are above the threshold for salmon survival when they get to the dam all of a sudden there's this giant piece of concrete in the way they Mill around for three or four or five days that takes them a long time to try to figure out how to get to the dam and then if they go through the PowerHouse the turbine mortality Associated going through the turbine blades is devastating to a fish the mortality that these juveniles face is so high that they're no longer replacing themselves and that's been happening for over 40 years they're not recovering at all I am very uncertain about the future of all these fish the fish passage Center which is kind of the gold standard in terms of fish data produced a study that showed that if the Snake River dams were removed that we would have two and a half times the present level of salmon production in the Snake River well if the dams are gone the snake portion of their migration Corridor is going to return to a free-flowing river the mortalities associated with the PowerHouse the spillways The increased Predator population living in the slack water reservoirs that's all going to disappear from all indications the best opportunity that we have to get more fish into the water for these whales to be able to find is to breach the lower four Snake River dams if we are to control the rest of us Colombia we must first develop develop it for all its values from the glacial Headwaters to the Pacific government Engineers say it can be done and water power is the magic partner in making this development possible the lower Snake River dams were authorized in the 40s and were built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 60s and early 70s Ice Harbor lower Monumental little goose and Lower Granite dams blocked the migrations of the salmon and they were built despite a lot of opposition from tribes that were displaced from their traditional lands and from Fisheries biologists but we went ahead confidence the power would be needed in the years to come I had the most glorious life any child could ever live I lived waking up and going to bed and taking all of my sustenance and my very being to the Roar of the Snake River we had the best water to drink wasn't contaminated we pulled out some of the biggest salmon salmon that weighed over a hundred pounds we had no need of anything else the Earth sustained us it's it's very different today we knew something important was going on because of how serious everybody became there were weeks on end when my mother and my Tilla would be gone and what they were doing was trying to ask the Corps of Engineers to reconsider the plans I remember the day when we had to move and that's when I finally realized that my life was going to change and I would never again wake up by the falls because a group of anthropology students from the University of Washington and Washington State University showed up my mother's eyesight was already failing and so was my grandpa's and they couldn't quite make out what they were lifting out of the earth and I said they're taking a canoe what they were doing was they were actually removing her grandfathers burial and he had been buried in a canoe that's one of the agreements that the Corps of Engineers entered into with the University of Washington and Wazoo was to be able to do their anthropological studies before the water buried them and then finally there were sheriff's cars that's when they escorted us often we were never allowed to come back to our village and even right after that we've seen the water coming up right to where our road and it started covering our road that's how fast the build up was of that water once they closed that Dam off that's how right to the very end my mother and my grandfather hung on to our site that as we got over that Ridge I could see our logs that we played with they were floating now it's all underwater now [Music] I was with the Army Corps of Engineers for over 35 years started off in Charleston District in 1975 as a GS5 and moved up the ranks very quickly and ended up retiring around 2013 out of Atlanta Georgia the lower snake fees a bill to report was a report that was basically started in Walla Walla District at the direction of a federal judge who said we needed to look at the alternative of breaching dams versus keeping dams and come up with the cost benefit economics and biological benefits the report was started in 1995. I actually arrived on the scene in 1999 so I was at sort of the tail end of that report and catching the final drafts and so forth what I began to notice was that there was this sort of built-in inherent bias in in any kind of discussion it seemed to always be you know the dams are providing great benefit to the country and they're not really that bad a deal for salmon and all this kind of stuff but I didn't really know anything about the lower snake I mean I didn't know anything about salmon you know all I knew about it was it comes in a can and you ate it every now and then and so I didn't you know have any preconceived notions about the study or anything like that it was my judgment professional judgment based on the input I had from the report that the dam should be breached the lieutenant colonel who was the commander of the district at the time was was I think when I told him that he was pretty much in panic he assumed that keeping the dams was the answer he was going to get and then that report basically was completed in 2002. the decision at that point was it already been made it was a decision made by the division anyway the politicians Bonneville power Administration and and even National marine fisheries and so I was just a um you know Ripple in the in the process and they you know figured out just we'll just ignore this guy and move on anybody that had read that report would seriously wonder how could we could make a decision to keep the dams and while I was there I felt like okay well at least it's here if if I couldn't get the decision made inside the core somebody outside the court environmental organizations in the public at large could read this and they would have the ammunition they needed to come after that decision and and when one of the major reasons for constructing the lower Snake River dams was to bring barge transportation to Lewiston and people believe that this was going to be a great Boon to the economy Lewiston was going to prosper some people even predicted that it would grow larger than Spokane on the Snake River itself there's no longer any shipment of logs of lumber of petroleum the only commodity being shipped is wheat or grain basically the reason that grain continues to be shipped is because that transportation is highly subsidized by the federal government if there were not the big subsidy Farmers would switch to rail rapidly [Music] the port of Lewiston has been in deficit spending for the last five years are in the red about 1.5 million dollars the cost of operation for the locks just on the lower snake runs about 10 to 12 million a year they have to dredge the channel to keep the port Lewiston open the core says every three to five years the last dredging job cost just shy of 10 million dollars then you have major repairs and Rehab to those locks and dams when you put this all together every barge that leaves the port of Lewiston has a taxpayer subsidy of about twenty one thousand dollars that's for every barge it would be much much cheaper to just pay the farmers the difference between Rail and Barge and Ship by rail the question sometimes arises about gee what would happen if if we lost the power of the Snake River dams and the bottom line answer is nothing all of the power produced by the lower Snake River dams is Surplus to the system in other words if the Snake River dams were shut down tomorrow Bonneville power would not need to replace that energy at all Bonneville power is an agency charged with marketing power generated by Corps of engineer projects the Surplus they historically Market to off-system customers things like British Columbia other Utilities in the Northwest and California via the Northwest dinner time for 30 40 50 years that was a very lucrative business because in the middle of the day California would run short of power the price per megawatt hour would go 50 60 70 as high as a hundred dollars a megawatt hour but starting in 2009 that changed when turbines started becoming economical solar panels started becoming economical and instead of the prices coming up in the middle of the daytime they started coming down so it used to be 50 60 70 megawatt hour power in the afternoons is now 30 20 10 and occasionally you will see the prices even go negative because and this is kind of critical because sometimes there is now so much power being produced that the companies are actually paying people to take it when Bonneville power says its power costs 36 dollars a megawatt hour what they used to sell for 50 is now being sold at 20 or less so what used to be profitable power for Bonneville power is now a money losing situation when you look at what's been going on the last few years with the pressure on our revenue streams with the pressure on the cost structure that the changes in the industry the collapsing wholesale electricity prices I think that the commercial pressures on Bonneville have become much more significant everybody knows we've taken huge hits in the secondary Revenue Market just like every other Hydro provider up here it's been a bloodbath for folks in the wholesale Market that situation is not going to turn around the amount of solar and wind energy coming into the market is increasing steadily and in fact today wind and solar in the Pacific Northwest has replaced the energy produced by the lower Snake River dams six times over Chronicles rates have gone up 30 percent since 2008 and you know I have heard it since the day I took the job that we've got to get ourselves off of this unsustainable rate trajectory I will tell you that today with the PF rate at around 36 dollars per megawatt hour in the market in the you know 21 22 23 range you know we're we're we are not um strictly competitive on a pure price point basis Bonneville power Administration is approaching a fiscal cliff they have exhausted their Reserves they've raised their rates they charge their preference customers by 30 percent and they have this big surplus of energy that they can't Market you know it's it's tough for me to have to point this out you know after over the last decade Bonneville has burned to about 800 we're down close to zero in terms of cash reserves on the power business line that is it's an unacceptable position to be in so Bonneville power has a serious problem and consequently so does the Pacific Northwest whether you're a family paying your power bill or a business that uses power Reckoning day is coming so to speak can Bonneville power survive without making changes probably not I think it's important that we don't get into a panic mode I'm not in a panic mode but I'm in a a very very significant sense of urgency mode and I do think that the risks facing Bonneville are real and I feel that even though we've got 10 years left in our long-term contracts until 2028 that the time for action and I think real action is now we're not getting what we paid for out of these dams I'm paying for fish killing machines rather than uh anything useful to to me or to my Society really I know the fort lower snake Dam should be removed if a private entity rather than the Corps of Engineers owned those dams and was paying the bills on the dams you'd have a backhoe up there taking them down tomorrow afternoon they are that bad these four dams are crucial to meet bpa's Peak loads during those hottest days in the summer when the wind doesn't blow or the coldest days in the winter when we do not have sunlight I can't express how important these these this hydro system is for the entire Northwest I've heard you couldn't match the energy produced by these dams with six or more coal-fired power plants none of us want to return to that if they go away what happens it means more natural gas more fossil fuels it makes no sense it's not uncommon for the pro Dam contingent to make statements that are literally unsupportable that would be one of them they're just lying more total salmon have returned this year than before the dams are actually put in place we've seen several years of record or near record returns of adult salmon both politicians and some Fisheries biologists have said that there are record runs of of salmon returning to the Columbia Basin I actually don't know how to to rectify that with what I know to be true just go ask any Idaho steelhead fisherman or salmon fisherman how much he's enjoying these record runs and you'll have your answer you should let the experts in U.S fish and wildlife Bonneville power NOAA nymphs lead the way this is a 50-year PR program of misinformation to tell people the dams would bring prosperity to the whole region and it hasn't [Music] foreign I think it was July 24th 2018. one of my colleagues called from Victoria he was out on the boat and saw a brand new baby in j-pod and he called excitedly you know a new baby and we had a boat on the water so I sent Dave over and said check it out document this baby right now and by the time he got there the baby was dead and the mother started pushing this baby all the way over to San Juan Island from Victoria up Harrow Street that evening I expected she'd lose it sometime next day she was pushing it again and the day after and the fourth day I began taking video of this tragic event and we started spreading it in the news media a mother Orca whose calf died after birth is still carrying her baby 17 days later researchers say that they're now concerned for the mother's health this is a mother that has lost her baby and she is going through the intense morning process to carry her calf around she would have to um dump the calf off of her head and then take a breath and then go down underwater and pick the sinking calf up and come back up to the surface and swim with that dead calf draped across the front of her head and sometimes over the her blowhole so whenever she would need to take another breath she would have to drop the calf off again and so that was absolutely heartbreaking to see and to know that that was a conscious Choice every time she had to take a breath she knew she was going to have to drop her calf and it was a conscious Choice every time for her to go down and retrieve it and just to think about that from the perspective of a grieving individual it's a really horrifying thing to have to consider but she did it she considered it for every breath for 17 days I know you've seen these pictures Governor what's your reaction to it well it's the same as 7 million washingtonians which is heartbreak it touches us all very deeply and I am hopeful is going to inspire all of us to put our shoulders to the wheel to do what is necessary to save the orcasm but a lot of people are saying in order to make a real move in the right direction for Chinook salmon we need to breach the lower four snake dams do you take a position on that yeah my position is we should consider the science and that is a decision that is being considered what we have to do is get our political leaders to go the same direction and start taking down these dams the public has to provide the political backing for these leaders who are unwilling to make a decision to do what has to be done I wonder if you could be kind enough to Circle back to one of the themes which was take action can you talk about actions that everyone could take Carl and I went to the offices of the Senators Murray and Cantwell today and if we had all been there they would have been real impressed you got to just let him know let him know let him know yeah and never confuse process with progress or progress with success the biggest single bang for the buck for getting habitat and salmon back is remove these four deadbeat money-sucking taxpayer leeching dams that never should have been put there in the first place and do all the other nice things you can do but don't let your focus be diluted foreign [Applause] this is beautiful and it is so what we need to do The Missing Link and saving these whales is the masses of people that are interested in them and love them to have a voice speak up start doing things gotta get everybody wearing a button and knowing these whales and they're voting they're pressing for solve this problem but for those who don't have a voice the way that you and I do can't speak up for themselves like you and I can I'm very sad about the damage that my generation has done to this ecosystem and I'm angry with the people who have allowed that to happen Mr Governor you have heard from over 700 000 of your constituents who are unwilling to postpone the removal of the lower floor Snake River Dance I'm trying to spread awareness to people my age and kids and teens I do public speaking and also writing to our Senators if enough people do that I think that it can make a big difference they can't really do it without the will of the people without this without us without the pressure without the words this is what is going to make it happen [Music] we're not talking about removing all the dams on the Columbia River system we've got four lower Snake River dams that are the most egregious of all and those dams they had a good run they had a great run but the run's over we messed it up and we need to do everything we can to clean it up it's all one body of water from the top of the mountain in the Continental Divide to the bottom of the ocean it's all one water I want our grandchildren our great great grandchildren to know and see an orca see the Lamprey to see the salmon see us [Music] the more that people become aware the more a chance there is for these whales to survive every time [Music] [Applause] this is probably the most important project I've undertaken in my life to try and do something for these animals foreign there's a lot of opposition [Music] it's a World treasure we can't let it go the salmon or the whales it's time to act [Music] [Music] we feel your power Great River [Music] Great River won't you wanna let your salmon got us Upstream Gotta Keep Your Waters clean let our lives feed the names generation let your salmon guide us Upstream Gotta Keep Your watches free let our lives feed the Next Generation let our lives be the next generation [Music] feel your power Great River [Music] feel your power Great River [Music] Don't You Wanna let your salmon got us Upstream Gotta Keep Your Waters clean let our lives be the next Generation let your salmon guide us Upstream Gotta Keep Your Waters free let our lives feed the legs generation let our lives be the next Generation [Music] that our lives be the name generation that our lives be the next generation

Channel: Free Documentary - Nature

Views: 72,848

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full documentary, HD documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), nature documentary, Free Documentary Nature, Nature, Wildlife Documentary, Wildlife, Animals, Animal Documentary, Ocean, Ocean Documentary, Whales, Whale Documentary, Orca Whales, Orcas, Killer Whales, Killer Whale Documentary, Marine Life, Ocean Life, Endangered Species, Endangered Species Documentary, Marine Life Documentary, Orca Documentary, Damned to Extinction

Id: xBQ-3xjZzHU

Length: 50min 36sec (3036 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023