Clifftop whalewatcher reflects on his dolphin days and sights of the sea
Tukurua resident Buzz Davis. Photo Gerard Hindmarsh
From his home on the coastal clifftop between Tukurua and Onekaka, 62-year-old Buzz Davis has spent more than a bit of time over the years watching passing whales.
One of his most thrilling sightings was in October 2007, when he tracked two southern right whales for 35 minutes with binoculars after spotting them just 50m beyond the remains of the Onekaka wharf. At one stage, the biggest put its head around four metres out of the water and had a good look around. Later it dived, raising its flukes high in the air, surrounded by flocking seabirds as it went under.
“Southern right whales come into Golden Bay every couple of years, but this was the first time I have seen such behaviour,” he recalls. “It could have been ploughing the seabed with its nose, or just feeding on a big shoal of whitebait gathering to go up the Onekaka River.”
Other favourite sights have come when watching orca come in close to snatch the rays, their favourite food, which come to bathe in the shallows. He has noticed that the whales always hunt in pairs, with three or four young ones lurking behind. “Sometimes you see the big orca just grab a small ray and flick it like a frisbee across the water to the waiting young ones, which immediately devour it.”
Buzz is keen to point out that orca and pilot whales belong to the same whale family – Globicephalidae – all distinguished by their blunt, beakless head shapes and fewer teeth. And he is convinced that the reason orcas often appear in the Bay soon after a mass stranding of pilot whales is because they’ve come to help them.
“They’ve never attacked them; it’s only mako and other sharks that move in afterwards. Orca have turned up too many times now not to make this significant.”
Golden Bay has been labelled the world’s best natural whale trap. The largest mass stranding of pilot whales here numbered 340 in January 1991. Strandings have increased from the five-yearly occurrences in the late 19th century to almost annual summer events now, and hundreds of tourists volunteer to get involved.
Everything from chemical contamination, boat engine noise and submerged shipping containers have been postulated as sources of sounding confusion for the whales. Buzz is sure it has something to do with the inbuilt magnetic guidance system of the pilot whales, used along with their sophisticated sonar to detect their way forward. “You only have to check the magnetic anomaly map for Golden Bay to realise that the big freshwater vents that have accumulated big residues of minerals around them actually distort the magnetic lines. The whales’ brains would be reading 90 metres deep, yet in reality it would be only nine metres. Take off a tide of four or five metres, and these marine mammals are swimming into the whale equivalent of a Mt Erebus whiteout.”
Buzz aired his theories before scientists from the Scripps Research Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, a faculty of the University of California. “The marine biologists there agree with it in principle, and have indicated they may even come out to investigate it sometime in the future.”
Buzz was born in San Diego, and was a professional diver by the age of 20. One of his early contract jobs was working at the nearby San Diego Naval Base, where he helped with experiments with dolphins, first to figure out why they could swim so quickly with so little movement, then later helping to train them to rescue people in the water and to find marine mines. But when the military asked Buzz to help train dolphins to kill people, he quit the programme. “Being a civilian contractor meant I had that freedom to say no, whereas the navy guys didn’t get a choice.”
Buzz feels free to talk about it these days. Recently declassified information reveals that the American military used trained dolphins to kill at least 13 North Vietnamese mine-laying swimmers during the Vietnam War. “I understand they put this harness on the animal with a spiked tube protruding out in front. Once given the signal by a transponder, the dolphin would ram it into the identified intruder and a compressed gas cylinder on the dolphin’s back would literally blow the victim up.” This method left the dolphins physically unharmed, but later the US military did try to train dolphins as suicide bombers. All their experiments with dolphins were later stopped.
Buzz has fond memories of Aihe, the three-metre-long female bottlenose dolphin (also called Doris, Dorrie and Old Scarry) who appeared near the Onekaka Wharf around 1990 to cavort with swimmers, and stayed for over two years. “She’d always play this same game with us, suddenly disappearing under the water; you’d be looking around everywhere, then up she’d pop, often surprise you from behind. She’d be wiggling her snout at you while she slapped the water three times every time with her tail.”
Nowadays Buzz doesn’t quite get down to the beach as much because he had both legs amputated just below the knees last year. Being in a wheelchair hasn’t stopped him monitoring the sea from one of the many vantage points along the 4.5-hectare property he owns with Victoria Davis. Several years ago they had their heavily vegetated sea-cliff and its viewing places registered as a QEII National Trust Covenant so the sights of the ocean and its visiting whales can be enjoyed in perpetuity.
Gerard Hindmarsh
