Another revelation: Dusty always keeps her fluke away from me, so I stopped trying to touch her there years ago, in the understanding her fluke is as essential to her as her blowhole. She just needs to be able to get away at the slightest of danger. But sometimes she allows Kate to touch her there and she tells me Dusty is very ticklish there. I never thought about that, but indeed, why not, us humans are often very ticklish there too. I wonder how this is for other mammals. Feet and fluke both carry a lot of power, maybe it has to do with some energy surplus. Kate can feel Dusty reacting to the tickling with shivers, particularly on the downside of the fluke. Sometimes Dusty even reacts with tail slapping, apparently to get rid of the tickles.
Dusty and Kate (click for video)
Kate says she sometimes feels like she is Dusty’s cleaning station and I fully agree. The only part Dusty doesn’t like her to scratch is her dorsal fin. Instead Kate puts her hands on either side and sort of pulls on the fin. Maybe this has to do with that she absolutely loathes it when somebody tries to hitch a ride on her dorsal. A grave misinterpretation of what people see Flipper doing. People think dolphins like to do that, not knowing the only reason they allow this is because in captivity they’re kept hungry and don’t get fed if they refuse. If, like sea parks claim, they do all the tricks from their own free will, why feed them during the show? I wonder how much is left of the show when they are NOT fed after each trick.
Kate tells me sometimes Dusty is training her. She comes down with her and each time extends the time they are under water. Then she goes up to the surface very slowly, so Kate is in no way hurried and can go ever further past her contractions. Until she is totally out of breath.
Dusty likes a challenge. We both don’t like ’the bottle game’ very much, but when she brings them over we oblige. Kate once took the bottles down and tied them to the seaweed. Dusty could not get them loose and began lashing her tail under water. ‘It was such a display of power, almost frightening.’
I had a similar experience with Dusty.
Kate says Dusty sometimes mimics her. She is very impressed with us having hands and sometimes, when Kate places her hand on the sand, Dusty does the same with her pectoral fin. Like as if she says, ‘Do something, then I’m trying to do that as well.’ And even if she can’t, she’s trying.
Photo by courtesy of George Karbush-http://www.georgekarbusphotography.com
As a breath-holding exercise Kate made a heart of stones on the sea bed. Each time Dusty went up with her to breathe and looked very intensively at what Kate was doing.
‘She was admiring my hands. It must be magical to her to see me do this. She can only move rocks by pushing them with her beak, but she has so much power and sometimes takes on very big rocks as if to show that is what she can do.’
Dusty likes to surprise with things you totally don’t expect. I ask Kate what the weirdest thing is Dusty ever brought her.
‘Maybe not so weird, but all the same remarkable. One day at Green Island there were lots of plastic bags floating in the water. Quite disgusting. Then she began bringing me bags on her ’nose’, one after another, she was cleaning her bay.’
Dusty did that too at Inisheer last summer and I posted a video of that on Fb, ‘Be drastic, no plastic!’.
We recall a funny event at Green Island. Dusty threw a fish on the rocks and Kate wanted to pick it up. But the fish was very slippery, slid out of her hands and to my dismay fell back into the water. After that I brought this up several times, teasing Kate with her ’typical female clumsiness’. And Kate already felt bad about it, ‘as if she brought me a present and I threw it back’.
‘I think that in the wintertime she gets very lonely’ says Kate. ‘Last winter she was at Fanore and we were very happy to meet. I did some scratching, but suddenly she disappeared. The visibility was disastrous, max a meter. Then I saw something flashing by, couldn’t make out what it was, much smaller than Dusty. She came back for some more scratching, then suddenly disappeared again. Next I saw was that she was pushing a dead porpoise. And she wanted to play with it, with me. The porpoise had been dead for a while because as soon as she let it go it sank straight to the bottom. I wasn’t interested, so she let it go and went on playing with me. Dolphins sometimes do kill porpoises, but of course I don’t know if she killed this one. She must have been with it for a while, that’s how lonely she gets.’
Kate says she once saw Dusty torturing a live porpoise.
‘It was very cruel, but I tried to see it as part of Nature. It was at Green Island, she had cornered the porpoise against the reef and was pushing it under water. Then she let it come up for air and pushed it under again. Just playing with it like cat and mouse. There were a lot of people in the water and she finally let it go. I think we saved it as then she came to play with us.
On our way through the fields to Green Island we already had seen her chasing the porpoise. They went very fast and from time to time jumped out of the water. She showed us so many things, in the Boat House Bay (2005) she brought us a basking shark, a dead one. She loves to have something to show us.’
Kate never saw her playing with a seal, but remarks, that at every location she has been over the years, there always was a seal around. Boat House Bay, Green Island, Fanore and this summer also at Inisheer, Doolin too.
I ask: ‘Have you ever heard Dusty making funny noises?’
‘Only once, at Fanore. It was early in the morning, no one else around. We swam together and then I sat down on the single rock. Dusty came and put her head in my lap and began making weird noises. That was the last time I saw her there. After that she was at the Boat House Bay.’
Another question: ‘What was your favorite spot through the years?’
‘Every place she’s been has its own attraction, but I liked Green Island most because it was so diverse. There are the caves, the reef, it runs quickly deep there, much underwater life and the water is relatively clear as there is no sandy bottom there. And Doolin I like a lot as it’s beautiful to dive there, especially at the drop. And the Boat House Bay as well. Recently I was scuba diving there and discovered that underneath ’Two Bottle Island there are beautiful arches, two, at 18 meters.’
I’m sure we could have continued our conversation till the dolphins came home. But the everyday chores are calling. For an hour and a half we were in the other world, talking dolphin, nice, cosy in the warmth of ‘Guru’, while outside Barney was raging and the rain was blown to smithereens on the windows.