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Fins to Feather

by Scarlet Colley - September, 2000

For all of you that read our story about the baby dolphin that died in April, we finally got the necropsy done. A necropsy is like an autopsy and is the method used to find out why a dolphin dies. This little girl was in her first month of life when she died and her mother loved her dearly and would not give up on trying to revive her. That is where Colley and I, being with the Marine Mammal Stranding Network, went out to try to help the mother by getting the baby from her .. To read about this further you can go to our web site fin2feather.com and the story is on the home page. That the mother actually gave us the baby was phenonamal and we now understand our dolphins even better knowing the deep love and bonds they have for each other. The veterinarian from the Gladys Porter Zoo and I went over to the Coastal Studies Lab where we kept the little dolphin until we could do the necropsy thoroughly. My concern was that the baby might have been hit by a wave runner or had a deformity of some kind. Everything during the whole necropsy turned out to be perfectly normal. The skin around her naval was not right and the vet's conclusion is that she died of infection of the umbilical cord area . We see the mother out on the water and she still comes up to the boat and seems to remember the sad event of losing her little girl. It put us all at peace with the loss of this baby to know what happened to her. But for the few babies we loose each year there are many that are thriving and it is a joy to watch them growing up by their mothers side.

One thing of late, that is really amazing us, is how our dolphins are coming up to the boat and talking to us. Everyday we are hearing them use their clicks and whistles as they swim around our Skimmer. Because we are missing out on recording the sounds of all these dolphins each day we now have a hydrophone so we can now record the different sounds that each dolphin makes. This is very exciting for us as we were never part of their sound world for our first years out on the bay with them. They are almost insisting it seems that we listen to them...One reason our dolphins are very verbal we feel is that our water has low visibility and our dolphins use sound rather than sight to communicate. They must have an extensive language by now after generations of low visibility and we feel too that their echo-location is more highly developed for this same reason. Being out on the water now with our dolphins for so many years we are learning about so many of their habits and social behaviors and their needs as wild dolphins.

In the past two weeks we have had two people with brain cancer out with us to be with our dolphins. They both felt that it was an experience that uplifted them and that they would treasure each day they had to live. Mac who is eleven is the only one left of the thirteen children that had the same tumor that he has. His vision gone in his left eye and impaired in his right eye he says he is using his other senses more too. He had a wish from the Make a Wish Foundation and he opened the New York stock exchange by ringing the bell. He was so proud of that . His email has the letters nfs which stands for never freaking surrender. I had him look thru my binoculars and he was thrilled that he could see so well with them. At the end of the trip he asked how much they were and when I told him he sighed and said that he could never get a pair for he couldn't afford them. I came so close to giving him mine but when I got home I couldn't get Mac off my mind and how much he would see if only he had a good pair of binos. So I emailed Eagle Optics and told them about Mac and inside of a week mac emailed me and said he was getting a pair of binos from Ron at Eagle Optics and that he was so happy that he was going to write to their web page all the wonderful things he will see now. Then just a week later Kay, with the same tumor, as she hugged us goodbye, said that the two hours with our dolphins will be in her mind forever for the surgery that she was going in for next week was going to leave her totally blind. . These were very moving moments for Colley and me as we realize how wonderful our dolphins make people feel and how they touch them forever.

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