Word: putu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...took nearly a day to reduce the barrier to rubble. By late afternoon a sister ship, the Vladimir Arseniev, plowed within 400 yds. of two California gray whales that had been trapped in the ice off Point Barrow, Alaska. Sensing that their escape was at hand, the whales, nicknamed Putu (Ice Hole) and Siku (Ice), swam out of their icy prison into the slush-filled channel, cheered on by more than 100 spectators. Said Arnold Brower Jr., a local whaling captain: "I feel like my burden is lifted...
...toward an open lead in the ice pack, while Eskimos, many of them whalers, sawed breathing holes in the 6-in.-thick ice. The effort had its setbacks. The third member of the original trio vanished under the ice and was presumed dead. It took two days to lure Putu and Siku around a shoal. And a "hoverbarge" being towed from Prudhoe Bay bogged down and got stuck...
...Eskimos, too, tired of the occupation army. "They are all making a big deal out of nature's way of feeding other animals," said local whaler Bob Aiken. Putu and Siku, for their part, lingered in the channel for more than a day. They still had to navigate some 7,000 miles southward to their Baja California winter home. But at long last they had been granted a new start...
...hunting Eskimos, oil company officials and environmental activists mustered in frigid Point Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost point in the United States, to organize a $1 million rescue effort. Biologists nicknamed the trio of young whales Bonnet, Crossbeak and Bone. By week's end the whales had competing Eskimo names -- Putu, Siku and Kanik, or Ice Hole, Ice and Snowflake. They also had the good wishes of President Reagan, who called to tell rescue workers that our "hearts are with you and our prayers are also with you." The media frenzy prompted a bewildered Ron Morris, the National Marine Fisheries biologist...
...sense their distress, as well as the danger that they might again become lost or trapped by the ice. As naturalist Roger Caras remarked last week on Nightline: "They are exhausted, they are stressed, and they've got a gamut to run." Caras and others did not believe that Putu, Siku and Kanik would ever reach their wintering grounds off the coasts of California and Mexico. Meanwhile, conservationists and whale lovers might reflect on this conundrum: How can the human outpouring of concern for three whales, however sentimental or misplaced, be translated into real protection for whales in general...