Whale Song: Journeys into the Secret Lives of the North Atlantic Humpbacks
Bermuda is the only mid-ocean platform in the northern hemisphere providing a window into the migratory social behaviour of North Atlantic humpback whales. Four years ago, as Andrew Stevenson and his young daughter Elsa watched a forty-five-foot, forty-five-ton humpback launch itself out of the water off a Bermudan beach, she asked the question, ‘Why does a whale breach?’This was the beginning of an interesting and challenging project to film the whales underwater, fifteen miles off shore, in the middle of their migratory crossings. The whales have since become an overriding passion. Andrew’s unique, close-up underwater photographs and footage, audio recordings and close to 500 identifying photographs of flukes have provided remarkable new evidence of the whales’ lives in the waters around Bermuda, their breeding grounds in the Caribbean and their feeding grounds off the coast of Canada.In the early 1950s, Frank Watlington, listening out for Soviet submarines off the coast of Bermuda, first recorded the ‘singing’ of humpback whales. Andrew has cast new light on the role played by these‘songs’ in enabling the whales to communicate as they group themselves in convoys to run the gauntlet of orcas, or killer whales, further north. However, Andrew is the first to admit that he is not a marine biologist – this is his personal story of his journeys with these awe-inspiring creatures.In 2010, Andrew’s pathbreaking work was recognized when his filmWhere the Whales Sing, which was co-written and narrated by his daughter Elsa, won the Best Emerging Underwater Film-maker Award at the Blue Ocean Film Festival in Monterey, California.