North Atlantic right
whales, the most endangered mammal on the planet, were once a regular
attraction here in the Rhode Island.
“In February 1828, ‘a
Right Whale forty four feet long, and rated at about seventy barrels of oil,
was killed in the waters off Providence, R.I., after having been seen for
several days ‘sporting in our river’,’” wrote URI Oceanography professor and
right whale expert Bob Kenney wrote in the 2010 Ocean Special Area Management Plan.
These massive marine
mammals – they can be 50 feet long and more than half that wide – still travel
our waters on their annual spring migration from Florida to the Cape Cod Sound.
In 2011 57 were spotted in Rhode Island
Sound. And in 2010, 98 were noticed here. That’s approximately one-fifth of the remaining population. An
endangered species, there are said to be fewer than 500 left in existence.
And so yesterday
Deepwater Wind announced that it would add extra precautions as it studies
these waters for the first ever large-scale offshore wind farm in the United
States.
“We could plow forward
with plans and fight it out at the end,” said Deepwater Wind CEO Jeff
Grybowski, “or you can decide to embrace solutions constructively.” He said the
concessions will cost his company “several hundred thousand dollars.”
The agreement, signed
with the Conservation Law Foundation and applicable only to the planning phase
of the project, says Deepwater won’t construct weather towers in the spring
when whales are likely to be in the vicinity. It also requires the company to
employ year-round “real-time human monitoring for whale activity in the site
area,” according to a press release.
This could potentially
be good news for John Lang, skipper of the MV Ocean State, a 36-foot center console boat he uses to
search for entangled or otherwise distressed whales in the waters of Rhode
Island. To his knowledge, he’s the only one actively looking for whales in
these waters. Check out his Facebook page
here.
“If I could afford to
go out every day, I’d find an entangled whale,” he told me as we motored out of
Narragansett Bay Thursday. He can’t afford to go everyday, as it can cost him
upwards of $1,000 a trip in fuel.
We were planning to
“run the trap lines,” or check the network of lobster traps and gill nets used
for commercial fishing that can entangle whales and other marine mammals.
“There are strings of them, for miles and miles.” His routine is to look anywhere
from 20 miles south of Block Island to just east of Nantucket.
Lang says whales
frequently become entangled in fishing gear, and research shows it is a major
cause of unnatural whale death. In 1995, an entangled right whale washed up
dead on Second Beach in Middletown, and in 2000 an entangled right whale was
found floating dead off Block Island.
In other states,
networks of volunteers and scientists monitor offshore waters for entangled
whales. Lang thinks the only reason entangled whales are being spotted off
Rhode Island is because no one is looking.
A wildlife
cinematographer by profession who earlier studied the spotted owl, Lang sailed
solo from Miami to the Ocean State four years ago and decided to stay. Last
year, he decided to help protect whales while he’s here.
“I can drive a boat
and I’ve always worked with endangered species,” he said. “That’s the core of
the mission. If I get an email from the network, there’s a good chance I can
find that whale and wait with that whale until the recovery team comes. Nobody
else as far as I know would be ready to go in a moment’s notice in a boat that
can go 50 here in Narragansett Bay.”
He has yet to see a
whale, but for the time being he’s willing to invest his own money in looking.
“I’m gonna have to be
patient,” he said. “It might take a year or two, it might take two or three
years. But at some point, though, we will, we will get our whale.”
Bob Plain is the editor/publisher of Rhode Island's
Future. Previously, he's worked as a reporter for several different news
organizations both in Rhode Island and across the country.
