Empty Sound by Thayer Walker/Sierra Club

Three pods of orcas known as the “Southern Residents” have feasted on salmon in Puget Sound for thousands of years. Now they’re vanishing.

By Thayer Walker

Ken Balcomb’s living room feels like a natural history museum. Two life-size fiberglass porpoises, cast from the frozen remains of animals that Balcomb found dead in the field, hang by ropes beside the fireplace. Mounted above a doorway is the baleen plate from a bowhead whale, its plankton-filtering hairs brushing the wall. On the coffee table, crowding a pile of books, rests the giant, toothy skull of a 26-foot killer whale, nearly as big as the table itself. There’s a small television by the piano, but for years the most exciting shows around here have unfolded on the other side of Balcomb’s bay windows, in the frigid waters of Washington’s Salish Sea.

“When the salmon are running, the killer whales come right up against the shore,” Balcomb says, pointing to an exposed chunk of reef a few feet offshore. The 69-year-old scratches his white beard and continues in a quiet, patient drawl. “That’s why I picked this house.”

Balcomb’s home, which sits on a two-acre rise on San Juan Island, doubles as the Center for Whale Research. Through more than three decades of study, this grizzled former navy lieutenant has become a leading expert on the three pods of Puget Sound whales known as the “Southern Residents.” His research, papers, photographs, and books have helped lay the foundation for much of what science knows about these creatures.

On this unseasonably hot and clear May morning, however, no black fins cut the water beyond his window. This is whale season, but he hasn’t seen the Southern Residents for days and doesn’t expect them back anytime soon. They’ve been spending less and less time around San Juan, and last year an alarming seven whales–nearly 10 percent of the population–failed to return. Standing in his living room, scanning the water for the missing giants, Balcomb faces the most alarming question of his career: What’s killing the killer whales?

Found in every ocean, killer whales are the planet’s most widely distributed cetaceans. The northeastern Pacific orcas in Puget Sound are thought to be a subspecies. Balcomb began studying the whales in 1976 after getting a zoology degree at the University of California and spending seven years as a navy sonar specialist. When his original government-funded census project expired after seven months, he continued his research, supporting himself by hawking orca T-shirts and buttons. During tough times he ate roadkill rabbit for dinner. “This is a high-rent area now, but we were scratching by in the ’80s,” he recalls. “I told myself I’d do whatever it takes to be here.”

Continue here:  http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200911/whales.aspx