Recording a Sea of Sound (continued)

We clear camp around 7:00 p.m. as the sunlight softens, headed for yesterday's open-water site. The wind has finally stopped howling, and we have high hopes that we may be able to find and film whales. The light is a perfect gold, and the clarity of the air makes the massive cliffs bordering Admiralty Inlet look close, despite their actual distance of some 30 kilometers. After several hours, the ice, once so solid and seemingly endless, abruptly stops.

Where yesterday there was a massive ridge of jumbled, jagged ice, with an angry sea boiling beyond, today there is a pool of perfect, calm water. An ivory back breaks the shining surface, punctuated by the sound of the beluga's blow as it slides under water. A narwhal's tusk breaks the surface as I hurriedly off load my camera. I spend the next several hours filming whales, seals, and birds as they skirt the ice edge. Marc heads up-floe to drop his hydrophones and record animal sounds, and I work my way up to his position as the light becomes still better, and the whales more concentrated.

The narrow width of an ice crack can be deceptive, as it may be located over hundreds of meters of ocean.

Photos by David O. Brown (2)

When it appears that the whales have reached sufficient numbers to maximize the chance of underwater encounters, I put on my dry suit and slide off the ice edge. Marc hands down the housed video camera, and I kick out from the floe edge to wait for whales.

Narwhals rely on sound to navigate in a dynamic environment.

A small pod of narwhals materializes nearby, and I roll video until they are well out of sight. One curious female approaches within 3 meters, her dappled silver-and-black back gleaming against the black backdrop of Arctic sea. She is a cryptic creature, similar to a beluga in form, but with facial features obscured by her mottled coloration. She is perhaps 5 meters in length, and does not have the sharp tusk of a male.

After some 40 minutes, my hands are completely numb from the hypersaline 28° F water, and Marc helps me wrestle the 70-pound camera rig back onto the ice.

--Excerpts from David Brown's log, June 12, 2005

During the remainder of the trip, we filmed more whales, a variety of seabirds, more seals, and several more polar bears. While tracking a distant swimming bear through our powerful Canon high-definition telephoto lens, we were amazed to see a pod of beluga whales surface around him. This unique natural history moment, along with the other amazing sights and sounds of the Arctic, live in the Macaulay Library and will appear in the educational DVD Sea of Sound.

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David Brown is senior video producer and Marc Dantzker is curator of visual media in the Lab's Macaulay Library.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu