Beginnings

This story begins with a whale carcass which came ashore in August 2018 at Traigh an t-Suidhe/Strand of the Seat, at the North end of the Isle of Iona, where I live.

Historically, news of a whale washing up in an island community would travel fast, with the carcass rapidly being processed for food, oil and bone material. The ‘north end whale’, as it became known, was no exception to this ancient relationship between human and whale, and the decomposing whale rapidly became less of itself; some of its body being claimed by scavenging birds, and some by scavenging islanders.

The appearance and gradual disappearance of the whale made me curious as to why it had died in the first place, and why we islanders so badly wanted parts of it to keep. There was covert competition for the prize elements - the skull, and the largest pieces of vertebrae. It was a strange but somehow also familiar feeling to realise that I too wanted to have something of this creature to keep. Perhaps the motivation for all of us scavengers was totemic; a response to a visceral call to connect to our ancient ancestors, and to the otherness of the deep, unknown world inhabited by these normally hidden and magnificent mammals.

Then news broke nationally that our whale was just one of 118 that had died at sea and come ashore around the Hebrides, Ireland, the Faroes and Iceland, in a matter of weeks - all beaked whales, the deepest diving group of whales on the planet. One species type, one time period, over a focussed area of sea. More strandings in one month than in the past ten years, and the largest global stranding of beaked whales ever recorded.[1] Scientists from the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme were called in by the UK and Scottish government to investigate an unfolding story of cryptic environments, the military, and the acoustic world of the Beaked whale. 

Before the mechanisation of whaling ships, whalers often heard whale song - the wooden hulls of their ships acting as amplifiers, revealing a world of mythical voices once attributed to sea sirens and monsters of the deep (Giggs, 2020). But the oceans of the world are no longer quiet enough to hear whale song from the deck of a boat. Industrial shipping, seismic mapping for oil, gas and minerals, and active military sonar flood the depths of a largely unexplored world with sound which doesn’t die away in moments but exists for months, travelling and pulsing across vast oceanic distances.

Cuvier’s Beaked whales, the species of the whale washed ashore on Iona, are particularly sensitive to changes in their acoustic environment; they are dependent on echolocation to ‘see’; to hunt, navigate and communicate in the depths of their dark, pressurised environment - exactly like submarines, in fact. Both behemoths occupy territory about which scientists, and the military, know very little. What is known, is that the mid-range frequency of active military sonar is particularly damaging to deep diving cetaceans, causing them to become disoriented, rise rapidly from the depths and suffer decompression injuries leading to death. 

This overlay of military territory with the territory of the whales, along with observing how I and my fellow islanders responded to the north end whale, made we want to find out more - more about the militarisation of our seas, more about the research being done into the impact of anthropogenic sound pollution, and more about my fellow islanders across the Hebrides who collected whale bones, and who felt somehow connected to these distant beings.

[1] BBC online, 2nd October 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-45643374