Smolker - To touch a wild dolphin : a journey of discovery with the seas most intelligent creatures

To Touch a Wild Dolphin is comparable to Jane Goodalls great classic In the Shadow of Man. This book is undoubtedly important.

Daily News

Evocative and thought-inspiring. Fascinating work, part of the animal research that has led us to redefine intelligence and reconfigure our notion of kinship with other species.

Kirkus Reviews

An intimate, engaging glimpse into the world of wild dolphins. [Smolkers] worry for the safety of her cetacean acquaintances lends gravity to this animated, empathetic account of life among Flippers wild kin.

Publishers Weekly

Smolker has the ability to take the reader with her as she wades into the water to visit the dolphins. Entrancing reading.

Booklist

Lyrical prose offering captivating insight into research in the field.

Science News

Rachel Smolker
TO TOUCH A
WILD DOLPHIN

Rachel Smolker co-founded the Monkey Mia Dolphin Research Project in 1982, which continues to produce groundbreaking insights into virtually every aspect of dolphin life. She has participated in other studies of dolphins and whales all over the world, including British Columbia, the Bahamas, and New Zealand. She has also observed various species of primates in Southeast Asia, Central America, and Madagascar. She is currently a research associate at the University of Vermont and maintains an affiliation with the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan, where she completed her doctorate. She lives in Vermont.

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2002

Copyright2001 by Rachel Smolker

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.

Anchor books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition as follows:
Smolker, Rachel.
To touch a wild dolphin / Rachel Smolker.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79410-9
1. Smolker, Rachel. 2. BiologistsUnited StatesBiography.
3. DolphinsBehaviorAustraliaShark Bay (W.A.) I. Title.
QH31.S6124 A3 2001
599.5315dc21

[B]
00-053649

Illustrations of dolphins by Richard Waxberg/Dancing Bears Design

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

TO THEM AND US

A loud, percussive pfhooo awakens me from the shallow half-sleep one has on board a boat. I lay still for a moment, wide-eyed, listening. No doubt a dolphin breathing and, again, surprisingly close. After pulling back the salt-damp covers, I clamber out onto the deck of Nortrek, our forty-foot catamaran. A persistent cool breeze blows out of the southeast, and the stars are blinking fiercely, a broad and brilliant arch overhead. The moon is trailed by a strip of shimmering water, but otherwise the water is dark and calm. The flow of an incoming tide tugs gently on Nortreks moorings and slips back along her twin hulls. There in the moonlight I see the silvery shape of a dolphins back rolling at the surface as it breathes and submerges in one fluid motion. Then a burst of glittering phosphorescence shoots forward like a comet and dissipates in a sparkling splash as the dolphin lunges after a fish, then breaks through the surface to breathe again.

I can just barely make out the dorsal fin, squat with nicks along the top edge; it is Nicky. She moves past the line of moonshine, and her silver-smooth skin glows as she rolls back under the surface and is transformed into another comet of phosphorescence. I know by her breathing and the way she is moving that she is hunting.

My mind still in that floating, receptive state of the recently asleep, I settle down on the deck to admire the spectacle: the phosphorescent comets below and the Milky Way above. The magnificence of the scenery pulls me far above and beyond myself. Shark Bay is a tremendous, wide-open expanse, jutting out into the Indian Ocean. Distant from any city lights, it is a place where the night skies offer up a slowly rotating banquet of constellations, pulsating multicolor planets, bright clouds of star clusters, and dark, eerie nebulae. The occasional passing satellite and shooting star are the only objects that disrupt an otherwise constant and by now familiar geometry. Right now Orion is low on the horizon, so it must be about three A.M .

On a night like this, the water seems literally to seethe with creatures that flip, splash, jump, skitter, snap, and gulp at the surface. Just a small indication of the world that lurks below. I am glad to be sitting up above it on Nortreks deck, high and dry, and cant help but wonder what it is like for Nicky, moving through this underwater world in the dark. Her echolocation permits her to see things with sound, but only in a narrow flashlight beam in front of her. So many of the creatures that are swimming around with her in this dark liquid soup are dangerous, even deadly. This is Shark Bay, after all. Some of the sharks are harmless, but others, like the tiger shark, prey on dolphins. There are also poisonous scorpionfish with their elaborately decorated and deadly spines, the hideous cryptic stonefish, whip-fast stingrays, and sea snakes. All are capable of making life miserable for a dolphin who might blunder into them on a dark night.

I hear at least one other dolphin breathing in the distanceprobably Nickys mother, Holeyfin, and perhaps also her age-mate and friend Puck. After listening to the rhythms of their breathing for a while longer, I can tell that Nicky is progressing out in the direction of the other dolphins. I can envision the others pausing to wait for her as she catches up: gliding alongside Holeyfin, Nicky subtly tilts her belly toward her mother in greeting as they both dive down to examine a seagrass patch on the bottom where a fish has taken refuge. I know Nicky well, and she is not prone to excessive displays of affection. She is smart, usually quite serious, hard to please, and introspective, it appears, at times. In some ways she reminds me of myself, and I have always felt a particularly strong bond with her.

Nicky, her family, and the many other dolphins in Red Cliff Bay (a small embayment within the much larger Shark Bay) have been the focus of much of my life for over fifteen years now. I have been granted the privilege of sharing their world and in the process have cultivated a deep affection for them. It is the sort of eager affection I have felt at times when encountering some unusually interesting and exotic foreigners while traveling in their country. Though we can barely communicate, and I know little about their world, somehow the juxtaposition of what is common and what differs between us inspires in me both a deep sense of kinship and a keen and inescapable awareness of being merely an observer. With dolphins, the kinship is further removed, and I am even more an observer from outside.