Of White Bears And Black Fish

Found only in the wildlife-rich remote islands of British Columbia, spirit bears have long been revered by First Nations peoples. We visit in search of the elusive ursine.

- Lyn Hughes

The osprey took off from a cedar tree and soared above, framed against a brilliant blue sky, its white underparts gleaming in the sun. My legs were braced, steadying me against the boat’s motion, as I watched the beautiful raptor through my binoculars.

A whooshing noise next to the boat made me jump, and I looked down to see that two orcas – killer whales – had surfaced right beside us. It was one of those extraordinary moments when time both stands still and races by.

There was just time to be impressed by their size and power before they descended again under the waves. There were half a dozen of us on the back of the boat, and we were all equally stunned. “Did anyone get a photo?” I asked. No, we had all been as surprised as each other by the close encounter.

The pair surfaced again further away. We also spotted a third orca that was clearly part of the little group but not travelling as closely to them. Our boat was following the coastline south, and the orcas were travelling in the same direction, albeit slaloming across our path – sometimes surfacing on one side, sometimes another; sometimes relatively close, sometimes several hundred metres away. We each took hundreds of photos of bits of dorsal fin peeping above the waves as the orcas shallow-dived.

“They are hunting for fish,” said our guide, Brady. “Or anything else they come across, such as seals or porpoises.” As if on cue, a large salmon leapt out of the water. The orca were circling in pursuit of the fish so we stopped, turned the engine off and Brady lowered a hydrophone into the water, but there wasn’t much to be heard. “They will be transients,” said Brady. “If they were residents they would be a family group and communicating with each other all the time. But these guys are hunting and not really communicating with each other.”