![]() “Back then, whaling was killing 33,000 whales a year, and it occurred to me that if we could get the music of the humpback whales into the ears of the world, we could stop the slaughter.” “We began listening and I thought, my God, these animals are repeating themselves, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard from the wild world,” he recalled. Payne was haunted by the beauty of the sounds, and by something else too. ![]() Payne and another researcher, Scott McVay, confirmed that the sounds Watlington recorded were coming from humpback whales. Watlington told him how, every now and then, he would hear unusual sounds – the navy called them “unidentified biologics” – and guessed that they might be made by whales. There he met Frank Watlington, an engineer who was working for the US navy using newly developed underwater microphones to listen for Russian submarines. In 1967 he travelled to Bermuda because he had heard that humpback whales regularly passed through its islands. Commercial whaling was then at its peak and Payne soon discovered that whale stocks had plummeted, with some species being practically extinct, yet no one was focusing on their protection. The indignity led him to find out more about the animals. “Two others had carved their initials deeply into its side, and someone had stuck a cigarette butt in its blowhole.” Someone had cut off its fins as a souvenir,” he recalled. “It was a small whale, it had been mutilated. A turning point came when he heard that a dead whale had beached itself off the coast nearby and he went to have a look. At Cornell, Payne wrote a PhD thesis on how owls locate mice in darkness by hearing them move, and he did similar work on moths as a postdoctoral student at Tufts University in Boston.īut he became dissatisfied, feeling that his work did not seem relevant to the problems facing wildlife. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he had worked with Professor Donald Griffin, the man who discovered animal echolocation by studying how bats navigate. Roger Payne, who has died aged 88, was an American conservationist who first introduced the world to the unearthly sound of whale song and played a leading part in campaigning for a ban on commercial whaling.
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