When we can drop our veil of fear and come from a place of softness and inner strength...
...we just might experience a connection far beyond that of our minds.
HUMPBACK WHALE
Front-page story of the SF Chronicle on Thurs Dec 14. 2005.
A female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso and a line tugging in her mouth.
A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farralone Islands (outside the Golden Gates) and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her; a very dangerous proposition. One slap of the tail could kill a rescuer. They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.
When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time and nudged them, pushed them gently around; she thanked them.
Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth says her eye was following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.
MANTA RAY
By Jennifer Anderson, Dive Master.
It was like many Maui mornings, the sun rising over Haleakala as we greeted our divers for the day’s charter. As my captain and I explained the dive procedures, I noticed the wind line moving into Molokini, a small, crescent-shaped island that harbours a large reef. I slid through the briefing, then prompted my divers to gear up, careful to do everything right so the divers would feel confident with me, the dive leader.
The dive went pretty close to how I briefed it: the garden eels performed their underwater ballet, the parrot fish grazed on the coral, & the ever-elusive male flame wrasse flared their colours to defend their territory. Near the last level of the dive, two couples in my group signalled they were going to ascend. As luck would have it, the remaining divers were two European brothers, who were obviously troubled by the idea of a woman dive master & had ignored me for the entire dive. The three of us caught the current & drifted along the outside of the reef, slowly beginning our ascent until, far below, something caught my eye. After a few moments
I made out the white shoulder patches of a manta ray in about one hundred & twenty feet of water.
Manta rays are one of my greatest loves, but very little is known about them. They feed on plankton, which makes
them more delicate than an aquarium can handle. They travel the oceans and are therefore a mystery. Mantas can
be identified by the distinctive pattern on their belly, with no two rays alike. In 1992 I had been identifying the manta rays that were seen at Molokini & found that some were known but many more were sighted only once & then gone.
So there I was…. A beautiful very large ray beneath me & my sceptical divers behind. I reminded myself that I was
still trying to win their confidence & a bounce to see this manta wouldn’t help my case. So I started calling through
my regulator “Hey.. come up & see me!” I had tried this before to attract the attention of whales & dolphins who are
very chatty under water & will come sometimes just to see what the noise is about. My divers were just as puzzled by my actions but continued to try to ignore me.
There was another dive group ahead of us. The leader, who was a friend of mine & knew me to be fairly sane,
stopped to see what I was doing. I kept calling to the ray & she shifted in the water column, I took that as a sign that
she was curious. So I started waving my arms, calling her (the manta) up.
After a minute she lifted away from where she had been riding the current & began to make a wide circular glide
until she was closer to me. I kept watching as she slowly moved back & forth rising higher until she was directly beneath the two Europeans & me. I looked at them & was pleased to see them smiling. Now they liked me. I could call up a manta ray.
Looking back to the ray, I realised she was much bigger than what we were used to around Molokini – a good fifteen feet from wing tip to wing tip & not a familiar looking ray. I had not seen this animal before. There was something else odd about her. I just couldn’t figure out what it was.
Once my brain clicked in & I was able to concentrate, I saw deep V-shaped marks of her flesh missing from her backside. Other marks ran up & down her body. At first I thought a boat had hit her. As she came closer now with
only ten feet separating us, I realised what was wrong. She had fishing hooks embedded in her head by her eye
with very thick fishing line running to her tail. She had rolled with the line & was wrapped head to tail about five or six times. The line had torn into her body at the back. These were the V-shaped chunks that were missing. I felt sick & for
a moment paralysed. I knew wild animals in pain would never tolerate a human to inflict more pain.
But I had to do something. I forgot about my air, my divers & where I was. I went to the injured manta.
I moved very slowly & talked to her the whole time, like she was one of the horses I had grown up with. When I
touched her, her whole body quivered like my horse would do. I put both of my hands on her, then her entire body, talking to her the whole time. I knew that she could knock me off at any time with one flick of her great wing. When she had steadied I took out the knife that I carry on my inflator hose & lifted one of the lines. It was tight &
difficult to get my fingers under, almost like a guitar string. She shook, which told me to be gentle. It was obvious that the slightest pressure was painful. As I cut through the first line it pulled into her wounds. With one beat of her mighty wings she dumped me & bolted away. I figured that she was gone & was amazed when she turned & came right back to me, gliding under my body. I went to work. She seemed to know it would hurt & somehow she also knew that I
could help.
Imagine the intelligence of that creature. To come to me for help. And to trust.
I cut through one line and into the next until she had all she could take of me & would move away, only to return in
a moment or two. I never chased her. I would never chase any animal. I never grabbed her. I allowed her to be in charge. And she always came back.
When all the lines were cut on top, on her next pass, I went under her to pull the lines through the wounds at the
back of her body. The tissue had started to grow around them & they were difficult to get loose. I held myself against her body, with my hand on her lower jaw. She held as motionless as she could. When it was all-loose, I let her go & watched her swim in a circle. She could have gone then & it would have all fallen away. She came back & I went back on top of her. The fishing hooks were still in her. One hook was barely hanging on which I removed easily. The other was buried
by her eye at least two inches past its barb. Carefully I began to take it out hoping I wasn’t damaging anything. She
did open & close her eye while I worked on her & finally it was out. I held the hooks in one hand while
I gathered the fishing line in the other hand my weight on the manta.
I could have stayed there forever. I was totally oblivious to everything but that moment. I loved this manta. I was so moved that she would allow me to do this for her. But reality came screaming down on me. With my air running out
I reluctantly came to my senses. And I pushed away.
At first she stayed below me. And then she realised that she was free, she came to life like I never would have imagined she could. I thought she was sick & weak since her mouth had been tied closed & she hadn’t been able to feed for however long the lines had been on her. I thought wrong. With two beats of those powerful wings she
rocketed along the wall of Molokini & then directly out to sea.
I lost view of her & remembering my divers turned to look for them. Remarkably we hadn’t travelled very far. My
divers were right above me & had witnessed the whole event, thankfully. No one would have believed me had I
been alone. It seemed too amazing to have happened. But as I looked at the hooks & line remaining in my hands & still felt the torn calluses from her rough skin, I knew that, yes, it really had happened.
I kicked in the direction of my divers whose eyes were still wide from the encounter, only to have them signal me to stop & turn around. Until this moment the whole experience had been phenomenal but I could explain it. Now, the moment turned magical. I turned & saw her slowly gliding toward me.
With barely an effort she approached me & stopped, her wing just touching my head. I looked into her round dark
eye & she looked deeply into me. I felt a rush of something that so over-powered me, I have yet to find the words to describe it, except a warm & loving flow of energy from her into me.
She stayed with me for a moment. I don’t know if it was a second or an hour. Then she lifted her wing over my head… and was gone.
A MAN, A WOLF AND A WHOLE NEW WORLD
Steve Gooder tells the tale of a British-born hunter and his mighty foe - and how their duel in the dying days of the Wild West led to the birth of America's conservation movement. Telegraph, March 2008.
It was the moment Ernest Thompson Seton had been waiting for. After months of frustration, the professional wolf hunter finally had his quarry in his sights.
He raised his Winchester rifle and prepared to put a bullet between the eyes of "Old Lobo", a notorious wolf that had killed hundreds of cattle.
But, face to face with his adversary for the first time, something deep within the hunter changed. He slowly lowered his gun and decided to take Lobo back alive.
The year was 1894 and it was a moment that would prove a crucial turning point, not just for Seton, but also for the fate of America's wilderness and its wild creatures.
British-born Seton had grown up with wolves on the Canadian frontier and written the definitive manual on how to catch them. More than two centuries earlier, his Scottish ancestors had helped wipe out the last of Britain's wild wolves.
Yet there was another, less bloodthirsty, side to Seton. His backwoods childhood had left him with a real love and fascination for nature and he would eventually go on to become both a leading light in America's emerging conservation movement and a tireless advocate for the protection of wolves.
It all began in October 1893, when Seton travelled to a remote corner of New Mexico "to catch vermin". What had once been the land of the Apache and the buffalo had now become the domain of cattle ranchers, and the last remaining wolves were being picked off as fast as the bounty hunters could trap and shoot them. But a few "outlaw wolves" still eluded capture.
Among these elite survivors was a reputedly giant beast, known as Old Lobo, who had thwarted every attempt to kill him. Seton was merely the latest in a string of would-be assassins who had come and gone.
What followed - over the autumn and winter of 1893/4 - was an epic duel between hunter and hunted. No matter how clever Seton's devices were, Lobo outwitted him at every turn. Traps were deliberately "disarmed" and poisoned baits were left uneaten. It was as if the wolf knew Seton was after him.
"Wolves are intelligent and very observant of their environment," says Doug Smith, a leading wolf biologist. "When you trap and catch wolves a lot, they get educated. You teach them how to avoid getting caught."
Lobo even appeared to ridicule Seton's efforts, on one occasion gathering several baits into a pile and then defecating on them. A job that was meant to take a couple of weeks was now running into months. Seton faced total humiliation.
But eventually he got lucky. By sheer chance, he discovered that Lobo had a mate and saw that she might be his weakness. The female was a white wolf known as Blanca and Seton devised a cynical plan to use her to catch Lobo.
The first part of his ploy worked a treat. Seton caught and killed Blanca and took her body back to his cabin. Now he could use her scent to lead Lobo into a trap. But what happened next took Seton by surprise.
"There is an emotional attachment between wolves in a pack," says Smith, who studies wolves in Yellowstone National Park. He recounts the case of a pack leader who also lost his mate. "The male wolf seemed to mourn. He howled for two days, more than anyone had heard him howl before… he wailed and he wailed and he wailed."
To Seton's astonishment, Lobo began a strange and plaintive howl that night. "There was an unmistakable note of sorrow in his voice," Seton later wrote. "It was sadder than I could possibly have imagined."
When Seton rode out the next day, January 31, 1894, he found Lobo caught in four of his massive, close-grouped steel traps, one on each leg. Even for a seasoned wolf hunter, it was a staggering sight. Seton recorded the scene with his camera and the remarkable photograph survives to this day.
It should have been the end, but Seton was unable to finish the job. Before him lay a calm and dignified creature that had shown qualities of grief, loyalty and courage. To kill him like a piece of vermin was impossible.
Although Lobo died later that night, Seton had undergone a profound personal change. He returned to New York and wrote a book - Wild Animals I Have Known - that begins with the tragic story of Lobo. It was the first popular account
of wolves that portrayed them in a realistic and sympathetic way and it was an instant worldwide hit.
"As a boy of 10 I was given the book," says David Attenborough, "It had a huge effect on me."
The book's enormous success gave Seton plenty of clout. He became a powerful advocate for the protection of wild animals and helped create a system of national parks across North America.
"Seton took a leading role in what became the conservation movement," says historian David L Witt. "He was
certainly one of the first ecologists."
Alongside his conservation work, Seton was also the inspiration behind the Boy Scouts, a movement that was built on values of respect for nature and which, to this day, encourages children to experience the wilderness for themselves.
Until his death in 1946, Seton was a dedicated champion of the wolf, a creature that had always been demonised before he helped the world to regard it in a new light.
"Ever since Lobo," Seton later wrote, "my sincerest wish has been to impress upon people that each of our native
wild creatures is in itself a precious heritage that we have no right to destroy or put beyond the reach of our children."
If bees dies out, what would be the result?
ALL life on Earth would die within an estimated four years. Most crops rely on bees to pollinate them, so if bees die out, so do humans!
A SHAMAN LIVES LIFE BY THE CODE OF PROTECTING ALL OF LIFE
When Seton rode out the next day, January 31, 1894, he found Lobo caught in four of his massive, close-grouped steel traps, one on each leg. Even for a seasoned wolf hunter, it was a staggering sight. Seton recorded the scene with his camera and the remarkable photograph survives to this day.