Juvenile Orphaned Orca Rehabilitated Into Wild

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image: Vancouver Aquarium

Lance Barrett-Lennard remembers when he first saw Springer the killer whale almost nine years ago.

The young calf was emaciated, dehydrated, suffering from skin parasites and was behaving unusually.

“It looked to be in rather poor condition,” Barrett-Lennard, head of the Vancouver Aquarium cetacean research program, recalled Tuesday.

Barrett-Lennard went down to Seattle with former aquarium trainer Clint Wright and veterinarian Dave Huff in February 2002 after Springer was spotted off Vashon Island.

Springer, a northern resident killer whale, was orphaned and out of her element.

Barrett-Lennard was part of the group that planned Springer’s capture, rehabilitation, move and release.

“It was tricky because both governments, the American government and the Canadian government, had to agree,” he said.

Springer was initially kept in a net pen near Seattle, where she indulged in salmon.

“She began to perk up right away,” Barrett-Lennard said. “Within a month or so she was in good shape.”

A couple of weeks later, amid a media frenzy, Springer was transferred to B.C., where she waited in another net pen to be reunited with her pod in the Johnstone Strait.

“She immediately swam out to them and they looked at her as she approached,” Barrett-Lennard said.

However, Springer and the other whales went in opposite directions.

“It was a sad moment, actually. She clearly wasn’t quite welcome,” Barrett-Lennard said. “She had the right calls but without her mother she didn’t have a free pass back into the group.”

Springer followed her pod for more than a week before being adopted by a young adult female from a closely-related group.

Barrett-Lennard said that in the beginning the big question is whether Springer would reintegrate. Generally, he said, pods are “absolutely closed to immigration and emigration.”

“This is a real precedent-setting case,” he said. “We never see animals normally leaving the group and joining another one. Only because she was a very young calf with no mother, maybe the rules were bent a little bit.”

Now, Barrett-Lennard said, Springer spends most of her time with the closely-related group but sometimes visits her grandmother’s group.

In August, Barrett-Lennard was on a research trip funded by the B.C. Wild Killer Whale Adoption Program, when the researchers took photos of a pod of whales north of Vancouver Island and saw Springer, who is now 10 years old.

“The day we saw her I didn’t recognize her,” Barrett-Lennard said. “She looks very robust and healthy.”

According to the Vancouver Aquarium, Springer’s rehabilitation is a “complete success.”

“There was a lot of skepticism and a lot of doubt about whether this operation could actually work,” Barrett-Lennard said. “She’s looking absolutely fabulous."

source: The Province