Meeting Tyonek

I was escorted into the presence of the beluga calf, Tyonek.  "Presence" is the right word.  He makes quite and impression slowly swimming  in the pool, rhythmically breathing through his blowhole.    For a few brief minutes, I was able to see him up close.  

He was soon to be fed three bottles of formula that appears to have the consistency of liquefied oatmeal.  The mixture replicates as close as possible the nutrients he would have gotten nursing from his mother in the waters of Cook Inlet --including a dash or so of herring.   But, Tyonek is an orphan, found stranded near his namesake village at the end of September2017 and transported to the Alaska Sea Life Center where began the long campaign for his survival.  With the heroic efforts of people at the Alaska Sea Life Center and beyond, and against the odds, he survived and began to thrive.  Tyonek cannot be released back into the wild and will soon be transferred to his permanent residence in San Antonio, Texas.

As I stood near the edge of the pool, Tyonek rolled, first to one side and then to the other, and seemed to look up, his eyes meeting mine.  “What do you suppose he is thinking?” I wondered out loud.  I can only imagine.  Like many people, I tend to “anthropomorphize”—attribute human traits, emotions, or intentions to animals.  It seems to come natural where cetaceans in general and belugas in particular are concerned.  The beluga has countenance that seems to be perpetually grinning as if it knows the secret to perpetual happiness, a secret it would love to share if only we could communicate.   But there is something about the eyes.  Perhaps the eyes are truly “the window to the soul.” 

Prior to seeing Tyonek at the Alaska Sea Life Center, my encounters with belugas had been from varying distance of “afar.”  I have seen them from the roadway along Turnagain Arm where they blend in with the wind driven whitecaps.  While flying as an observer on annual bowhead whale aerial surveys over the Beaufort Sea, I have spied them from fifteen hundred feet by the hundreds along the ice edge, their bright white bodies standing in vivid contrast to the cobalt blue water.  Last September, a couple of weeks before Tyonek stranded, we saw two pods close in to shore at Point Wornzof near Anchorage International Airport during the first annual beluga count. Previously, I viewed Tyonek from the public observation area above his pool where I had once encountered a toddler with his face pressed up against the window singing “Baby Beluga.”  

Many ocean and land conservationists recollect the transformative moment that an encounter like mine had on their outlook towards another species.  I recall a passage by Aldo Leopold in the book, Sand County Almanac, in which an encounter with wolves he and others just shot transformed his worldview.  “We reached the old wolf,” Leopold wrote “in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.  I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and the mountain.  I was young then, full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean a hunter’s paradise.  But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

Seeing Tyonek was a great experience for me.  What it meant to Tyonek I can never know.  I like to think if I ever see him at Sea World San Antonio, that he would remember the encounter and greet me with a flash me that ever present smile as if to say "Yeah, I remember you standing in that Alaska winter sunlight. Good to see you again."  There goes that tendency to anthropomorphize again.  I don’t know yet how the encounter with Tyonek will affect me in the long run, but it has given me pause to reflect.

All photographs of Tyonek are from NOAA press releases or from the Alaska Sea Life Center Facebook page, no pictures were taken by the author.