Brian Skerry on diving in Ireland and incredible encounters while making Secrets Of The Whales
Brian Skerry, Secrets of the Whales.
Acclaimed marine photojournalist Brian Skerry has very fond memories of a day in the water with Ireland’s second most famous dolphin. It was one of the most colourful interactions he has had over an extraordinary career documenting marine life for National Geographic. Based in the west of Ireland, Skerry spent several weeks here exploring the Irish waters for the top science and exploration publication.
“You get occasions where they will interact with you, and that's quite rare. But one of my best actually happened off Doolin years ago. I was photographing a resident bottlenose dolphin called Dusty. It was an example where the dolphin was totally engaged and I could work with it repeatedly. That was one of the best experiences.”
Skerry, who is of Irish descent, worked off Valencia Island, Doolin and Aran’s Inishmaan. “I wanted to take readers to a place that they know well, but maybe show them things they hadn't seen so much. I was photographing cuckoo wrasse and seals and birds, underwater guillemots and all these great creatures.
“I worked with some great Irish divers like Martin Moriarty on Valencia Island and his wife Sandra. I spent time on Inishmaan. I would dive all day and I would come back at night to my B&B and have a wonderful dinner and then walk down to the stone pier and do a dive around midnight. Come back and go to the thatched roof pub for a pint of Guinness before bed."
When conditions are right, Ireland does offer good diving.
“I think the waters were a real surprise, very clear, very biodiverse. Lots of richness. But I'm sure like everywhere it's changing, because of these anthropogenic stresses.”
Over the course of his decades-long career, Skerry his witnessed frightening and disturbing changes in marine nature. It’s a topic that’s frequently referred to in his stunning new documentary series Secrets of the Whales, for National Geographic.
It premiers on Disney+ on Earth Day, Thursday, April 22. The series is executive produced by Academy Award-winning filmmaker and conservationist James Cameron (Avatar) and narrated by Sigourney Weaver.
It’s Skerry’s extraordinary work which allows us the wonderment of getting up close and personal with humpbacks, belugas and orcas as they navigate the waters around the world.
“One of the scientists who helped me in the very beginning is a sperm whale scientist, Shane Gero, from Canada, who's been studying sperm whales in Dominica in the Caribbean, for 15 years. He said, the difference between culture and behaviour is that behaviour is what we do, culture is how we do it.
“I think for a very long time, we or science have looked at animals, particularly whales, very clinically. But now more frequently, it's being revealed that these are cultures that within identical species, genetically identical, are doing things differently depending where in the world they are. So orcas in New Zealand have a preference for stingrays, that's their ethnic food that they like to eat. And in Norway, they're eating herring. Beluga whales are giving their babies names, they're playing games.”
One of Secrets of the Whales’ many great victories is the depictions of these cultures. In one passage, we see an orca with her dead baby and family form a funeral procession.
“Sperm whales have dialects, languages, and their clans, their multiple families, belong to a clan that all speak the same dialect,” adds Skerry. “And they don't intermingle with other genetically identical sperm whales that have a different one. To me, it was the neighbourhoods of New York in the 1900s, where you had the Irish and the Italians and the French, and nobody was talking to each other.”
Capturing their behaviour at close quarters does not come easy, as Skerry has to navigate nature, logistics and the deep blue sea to get the perfect shot. To further complicate matters, he rarely uses scuba-diving gear as the oxygen bubbles tend to scare the whales and the weight of the equipment can impede the filming process.
“I remember reading Steven Spielberg, after he did Jaws back in 1970. He said he never wanted to do another ocean film, because it's so challenging. I often kid my colleagues that work on land, and I say: ‘You've got it so much easier. You can sit in a camouflage tent in a jungle and wait for a month with a 600 millimetre lens for some elusive animal to wander by and get the picture’.
“We have to go out on a boat, the weather has to be good. The animals have to be there, we have to get in the water with whales, we're holding our breath. We're not using scuba in most cases, we can go down for two minutes. And then we have to capture some interesting behaviour, the sun has to be out. There are so many challenges, and it's really on the animals’ terms, they have to allow us into their worlds. We were lucky, we were blessed with divine intervention along the way.”
Skerry’s career has always put conservation and the environment at the heart of his work, and the impacts of environmental changes he has seen on marine life over the years frightens him.
“I think it's a cumulative effect of what I've seen throughout my career. That is that the ocean is dying a death from 1,000 cuts. We've taken 90% of the big fish in the ocean, the tuna, the bill fish and the sharks, just since World War Two. We're killing 100 million sharks every year, mostly for their fins. We're dumping 18 billion pounds of plastic into the ocean every single year. We've lost half the world's coral reefs, because of habitat destruction and because of climate change."
While destruction of forests gets the headlines, Skerry points out that the ocean is the greatest carbon sink on our planet. "It takes in more carbon and gives us back more oxygen. Every other breath that a human being takes comes from the sea. And yet we're putting so much carbon into the atmosphere that the ocean is saturated.
“I spent three weeks in Sri Lanka and every few days we would find sea turtles wrapped in plastic and monofilament and fishing nets. One was dragging a laundry basket that it had become entangled in. We were able to rescue those animals and disentangle them, but I think about after I left, how many didn't have that good fortune to be rescued.”
But there are changes we can all make, he says, through being an informed consumer, not using single-use plastics and encouraging our leaders to support science and conservation.
“I think those small acts make us feel empowered to take ownership, I think those small acts are exactly what we need to do. As Margaret Mead [the American cultural anthropologist], once said, never underestimate the power of a dedicated individual or a group of dedicated individuals to change the world, because indeed, that's the only thing that's ever changed the world.”
- Secrets of the Whales launches on Disney+ on Earth Day, Thursday April 22. Skerry’s accompanying book is now on sale
