Orca Awareness Month 2020 Is Going Ahead COVID-Style
S. B. Julian
Orca Awareness Month (June) began as an annual celebration in Washington State. In 2016 a group of orca-defenders in BC asked the Lieutenant-Governor to proclaim June as Orca Month in BC as well, since we and Washington share the same Salish Sea killer whale population. The Proclamation was granted, and June 2020 will be the fifth year in which British Columbians have made June the official month of orca-awareness.
Our southern resident killer whales were labelled endangered back in 2001 under the federal Species At Risk Act, but governments have been slow to protect them. SRKWs suffer from lack of salmon (the J, K, and L pods rely almost exclusively on Chinook salmon, which are scooped up by human fishers), and from boat-engine noise. Underwater noise is louder and goes further than noise in air, and the sound waves interfere with echo-location, by which cetaceans communicate, socialize and locate food. Like other sea creatures, orcas get entangled in fishing gear, swim through pollution, and often end up with plastic in their stomachs.
All this has prevented the population of SRKWs from rebounding after it was devastated by live whale captures for the aquarium industry in the 1960s and ’70s. The highest population thereafter was 98 in 1995. In December 2019 only 73 orcas were counted in the resident J, K and L pods.
When we compare that to the human population around the Salish Sea – over seven million – the prospects for resident orcas look grim. Nevertheless the Orca Month BC team, a loose group of volunteers with no budget or formal meeting schedule, continues to advocate for them. Most Orca Month events have involved letter-writing to politicians and other actors in the conservation field, and hosting talks, art and performance events. None of these can happen this year, so we must rely on public display rather than gatherings to remind people of orca needs.
The Orca Month team is asking everyone who cares about marine wildlife to invent their own ways of spreading awareness about orca starvation, underwater boat noise, fishing gear entanglement, and plastics in the ocean. We lobby for orca protection zones around the Gulf Islands and we support the sanctuary movement for captive cetaceans. We suggest that people find places in their own communities to put orca images and literature in front of fellow residents, such as bulletin boards, the windows of their homes and windows of boarded up shops. Life has largely gone online in these COVID days but we want to step beyond that, to have actual physical displays. As for the online part, we also share orca literature and factual information and link the websites of participants to our blog: www.orcamonthbc.blogspot.com. Through email and print we are building a list of Orca Month art sites — and hope there will be lots of them. Please send news of yours to: orcamonth@gmail.com.
Garden art is included, household gardeners making horticultural displays of painted driftwood, shells, kelp, salmon-shaped hangings and the like to be set up in front yards just as decorations are at Christmas and Halloween.
Orca Awareness Month 2020, then, will be a spontaneous upsurge of creativity spreading the “help whales” message in a time of physical-distancing. People are urged to come up with their own ideas and to support our conservation partners: the Centre For Whale Research (whaleresearch.com), the Georgia Strait Alliance (georgiastrait.org), the World Cetacean Alliance (worldcetaceanalliance.org), and the Whale Sanctuary Project for captive cetaceans. (whalesanctuaryproject.org)
(See some photos of past events, and some talking points about orca needs on the Orca Month blog: www.orcamonthbc.blogspot.com)