Word: humpback
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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First there was Humphrey, the desultory humpback whale saved from starvation in California's Sacramento River in 1985 by an armada of whale lovers who successfully herded him out to sea. Last summer there was Henry, a young whale who made a wrong turn and ended up in New York's polluted harbor before regaining his bearings. Then last week the sight of three battered and bloodied gray whales gasping for breath at holes in a thickening Arctic ice pack caused Americans to forget, for a moment or two, both the World Series and the Bush-Dukakis race...
...could be torn from yesterday's headlines: SEA SHEPHERD FROM OUTER SPACE. Imagine that the environmental activists who recently sank two Icelandic whaling vessels were the rulers of a 23rd century planet, and that they had sent to earth a probe with signals that could be answered only by humpback whales -- a species that had been hunted to extinction by blubber- lusting 20th century man. If the whales don't talk back, the earth blows up. So the Star Trek crew must become time travelers. They must boomerang their stolen Klingon warship around the sun, land in San Francisco...
...benign resonance of deep space. All nature is grist for its mill. Former Bebop Jazzman Paul Winter, who is now making New Age records, lists his inspirations as he "African mbira (a hand-held instrument played with the fingers or thumbs) as well as the sounds of the humpback whale, eagle and the timber wolf." If much of the music does not actively demand attention in the way that Beethoven or even the Beatles do, it does require some imagination on the part of both composer and listener...
Nature should have told him that when he heads south from Alaska during his herd's annual autumn migration to warmer water, he has to bear right at San Francisco. Instead, the 40-ton, 40-ft. humpback whale turned left and headed inland under the Golden Gate Bridge. For more than a week he has been swimming aimlessly in the shallow Sacramento River delta 40 miles northeast of San Francisco, a freshwater environment that eventually may kill the giant saltwater mammal...
...loss of Humphrey, as the nearby Rio Vista whale watchers have named him, would be a serious one. The humpback whale is an endangered species: only some 12,000 still exist, about 5% to 10% of the original population. "They used to be very good hunting," says Mark Ferrari, a whale photographer who has helped coordinate efforts to direct the whale back...