The Register-Guard
Posted on 04/30/2002 12:43:39 PM PDT by Glutton
Keiko to remain at island base; funding plunges
By LARRY BACON
The Register-Guard
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The orca also will soon resume "ocean walks" in search of a pod that will accept him, but the Keiko team will scale back the operation because of a smaller budget.
The Ocean Futures Society, the California organization that for 3 1/2 years has worked with Keiko to try to reintroduce him to the wild, had scouted out alternative sites to his current home in Klettsvik Bay on the island of Heimaey.
But the group now believes the "Free Willy" movie star should remain in the bay as long as he continues to make progress, said Robert Vinick of the Ocean Futures Society.
Ocean Futures officials had worried that a proposed salmon farm would lead to water quality problems in the bay, but the farm is no longer in the works, Vinick said Monday.
The group also thought that a different location might offer better weather than the storm-battered Westmann Islands and therefore provide better logistics to help lower operating costs at a time when money is getting harder to come by.
But Ocean Futures staff members reviewed their options and decided to keep Keiko where he is for now, said Vinick, the society's executive vice president.
Keiko was captured in Icelandic waters when he was a 2-year-old and spent most of his life as a performing whale in Canada and Mexico. He was rescued from a Mexico City amusement park in 1996 and rehabilitated at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport before he was airlifted back to Iceland in 1998.
For the past two summers, the Ocean Futures crew has taken the 24-year-old whale on long ocean swims with an escort boat to give him a chance to meet wild whales. Last summer, Keiko spent almost all the season on such excursions, encountering numerous pods of wild whales.
There was some encouraging interaction, but the problem was finding a pod to accept Keiko, Vinick said. Numerous pods show up in the Westmann Islands each summer to feed on the annual herring migration.
One of the group's top priorities this time will be to put Keiko with the pods that seemed most open toward him last year, he said.
Because of financial constraints, Vinick said, the Keiko team will have fewer resources this summer. The project will have to rely on a broader base of financial donors than in the past when Seattle telecommunications magnate Craig McCaw was the primary source of money, he said.
The project must get by on an annual budget of about $500,000, when in some years the budget has been more than $2 million, he said. That means when the ocean walks resume in May, the team will work with smaller boats and have no helicopters to help spot wild whale pods, he said.
It also means that more of Keiko's handlers will be resident Icelanders rather than Americans rotated in and out of the country.
Still, Vinick said he's optimistic that Keiko will make progress, though the team's expectations have changed. "What we have learned particularly last summer is that this could happen over a number of years in small incremental steps," he said.
That has been the case, Vinick said, in reintroduction efforts for some captive land mammals such as gorillas and big cats in Africa. Some of those undertakings have lasted years, he said, and haven't required a narrow 100-day window of opportunity each year as in the Keiko project.
The smaller time frame, he said, is because of the fierce storms that keep the whale and his handlers confined to Klettsvik Bay for much of the year.
Keiko appears to be in better shape than ever this spring, he said, but if he stops progressing, Ocean Futures may reconsider moving Keiko and further scale back the reintroduction effort.
Copyright © 2002 The Register-Guard
Gotta wonder just where the childrens lunch monies went? Any audits? Any malfeasance? Nahhhh. Yeah right.
THis is why the Orca population is dropping fast in Puget Sound in Washington State; they are getting too many toxins building up in their tissues.
Nah, remember Keiko was re-habilitated in Oregon. He is just being the good, fuzzy-headed slacker the locals taught him how to be. If he could type or write, I am sure he would have applied for Social Security benefits by now. ;-)
There is no justice in the world when one speaks of "free Willy," is there? ;-)
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