Dolphin Address 24
June 2th 2005
Shakespeare immortalized the issue of choice in his ultimate ‘To be or not to be’. After a runway of two months still suddenly the hatchet has fallen. Two weeks of intense surveillance at the Boathousebay have not yielded one single sighting of Dusty. A calculated guess about her absence yields the following theory. Over the past three years I have witnessed an increased presence of other dolphins at Pollenawatch, presumably from a Galway based pod. Most of these posses were definitely all male. Dusty did not join their company, quite the contrary. She fled high speed close along the rocks, thus seeming to try and evade their sonar.
Now dolphins are not always as meek as we like to believe. Recent research has shown that the practice of ‘gang-banging‘ is not uncommon in their sexual behavior. A number of males corner a female so others can have their way with her. This would explain her flight reactions and this could be her reason for leaving Pollenawatch. Issuing from this situation she may have become pregnant and therefore has joined the company of an all-female pod well away from the Galway dolphins. This might explain her choice of location roughly between Lahinch and Miltown-Malbay, over 30 km. to the South.
A fisherman claimed to have seen her socializing with other dolphins. Besides more security from sexual harassment these would also function as midwives to the birth of her supposed young. If this reasoning is correct it is highly probable that she will continue to seek shelter with this pod after her calve is born. Then we may very well never see her again as calves stay with their mother for many years.
We have no choice than to accept this. There is however much comfort in the thought that she has chosen for and is accepted by her own kind. When I went for the shore after a swim with her she used to several times cross my path as if pleading to me to stay a little longer. This always gave me a slight feeling of guilt. Also the thought that in wintertime she was hanging out there all by herself for all these months was not a happy one. One can only hope that her input in this group would result in an increase of human-dolphin encounters.
Maybe because of her absence my heart filled with Irish beauty. This only made the decision harder. In a last attempt to do dolphin in Ireland I drove down to Dingle, or more precise to Ventry Bay, as a sociable dolphin had been contacted there by Ute. For a day and a half I posted on the drizzle shed pier, but I seem to have totally run out of Dolphin credit. After a while I caught myself hoping the dolphin would not appear at all, so I could throw my heart and soul in Verena’s suggestion to check out Dony and Jean F’loch in Brittany.
Meanwhile I have arrived in Berlin and joined Verena. Now I can even more vividly imagine Dusty’s decision to join kin. We are preparing to leave for Brittany in a fortnight and hope to find two friendly wild dolphins out there. As both of us have our birthday coming soon, Verena on the 13th and myself on the 27th of June, we intend to massively upgrade our photo and video capture to make the website ever more inviting. Before that I have no intention to muzzle my writing compulsion, so you might as well stay in touch.
Jan Ploeg, Berlin, June 2th 2005
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