Don’t tell me you can read these snippets without wanting to read the whole thing:
. . . humpback whales seem to be using rhyme as a way to help them remember what comes next in their complex songs. Troubadours used the same trick: they put rhymes into the epic poems they memorized because it helped them remember them.
. . . the loudest, lowest sounds that whales make can carry across oceans . . . Listening through Navy hydrophones located off the Virginia coast, Chris Clark found that he could hear the lowest notes in the songs of humpback whales that were singing as they migrated out of the Norwegian sea into the Atlantic, thousands of kilometers away.
. . . every ocean basin has a unique song that all the humpback whales that live there sing . . .
. . . And now Japan is going to kill Humpback whales – the singer/composer/poets – a species the rest of the world values and protects – a species whose songs inspired the world to avoid the catastrophe of the mass extinction of whales. . . .
. . . I have put one of the great 1970s songs of the Bermuda Humpback master singers on this website: and have arranged with the company that markets it (Living Music Records), to let you download it free. . .
☞ Dr. Roger Payne has been studying whales for 39 years. You read his open letter . . . and you think back to that day, aged 13, when you dropped a single grain of salt into the pond water under your microscope and watched its teeming life stop dead . . . you see Al Gore’s movie . . . and you consider that there are six times as many of us as there were a century and a half ago, living, on average, perhaps (just guessing here) 20 times heavier on the land – so 120 times the daily impact – and you wonder how the next 1,000 generations (for whom we hold it in care) will fare on our miraculous but fragile planet.
