Havre de Grace. -- There was said to be a whale in the Susquehanna here on Monday, but I didn't see it. The person who did see it was a lucky fellow named Kevin Dolan, who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Mr. Dolan was eating his lunch on the river bank when the whale broached off Garrett Island. He said it blew spume from its blowhole, rolled, flapped its huge tail, and quietly disappeared, heading downriver. He said he'll never forget the sight, and who can doubt that?
When I heard what he'd seen, I had such a rush of envy it gave me heartburn.
No one else has ever reported seeing a whale there, so close to the Amtrak bridge that Metroliner passengers might have seen it too, had they lifted their faces from their laptops at the right time. But specialists in marine mammals weren't dismayed by the sighting.
Since Americans have stopped rushing after them with harpoons, whales seem much more inclined to do a little coastal exploring. They've been seen recently in the lower Chesapeake, in the Potomac, and in the Delaware River. Experts didn't doubt that Mr. Dolan had seen a whale. They said if he had, it was probably a humpback.
There are two basic types of whales, those with teeth and those with baleen. Humpbacks are baleen whales, which feed on tiny organisms they filter from the water, not on fish. The upper Chesapeake, even in winter, has plenty of such food, mostly copepods -- minute crustaceans related to crabs -- and water fleas. There can be as many as three million in a cubic meter of water.
Herman Melville said the humpback is "the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any other of them." The humpback is also the great singer. Many species of whales sing, but the humpback makes astoundingly complex musical sounds which can be heard for miles under water. Individual whales can be identified by their songs. No one knows exactly how the whales create this music; when they sing, they release no air.
People are fascinated by whales, and whales seem increasingly fascinated by people. In many coastal cities, whale-watching is now a major seasonal industry. Thousands of people each summer travel offshore to look at whales, and the whales become accustomed to the tour boats and benignly look back.
Off Baja California, hundreds of gray whales -- once considered very dangerous to humans -- have over the last 20 years learned to rush after tour boats and roll on their backs alongside, so tourists can scratch their bellies.
To me, watching wildlife of any sort is endlessly rewarding, and I can spend hours at it. But there's no doubt that big creatures -- what the biologists like to call "charismatic megafauna" -- have a special appeal. I know people who couldn't tell a possum from a groundhog, yet seem to care deeply, albeit abstractly, about creatures such as mountain lions, grizzlies and whales.
Such political support has certainly been helpful to some species, which have made a remarkable comeback from the edge of extinction. This doesn't always occur without problems, however.
In California, legislative protection has enabled the mountain lion population to double in recent years. This has resulted in some scares and a few deaths. In April, a jogger near Sacramento was killed and partially eaten by a mountain lion.
The animal was later destroyed, which made some Californians indignant. One, in a letter to a newspaper, suggested that the attack on the jogger was the result of a legitimate political grievance, as "this noble creature may have been venting centuries of mountain-lion anger against the humans who have driven it from its land" -- and who had further insulted its specieshood by using its image to sell cars.
Anyway, the lure of charismatic megafauna is considerable, and so on the day after the humpback whale kept the appointment that fate had made for it with Kevin Dolan off Havre de Grace, I felt compelled to go and look for it too.
I launched my little outboard skiff under the railroad bridge and puttered slowly around Garrett Island. At the place where the whale had surfaced, and again on the far side of the island where the water is almost 100 feet deep, I drifted and wondered. "There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea," wrote Melville about much deeper waters, "whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath."
But the Susquehanna's gentle stirrings were only peaceful. As it was winter there were no other boats out on the quiet river. There were gulls, geese and coots, and I did see a dozen canvasbacks, the first I've noticed this year. But there was no sign of a whale.
Peter A. Jay is a writer and farmer.