Zoologist
A cross between an old-school naturalist and a modern environmentalist, KB is credited with educating the public and lawmakers about the hazards facing whales while advocating for their preservation.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
KB’s parents were divorced. His father became a leading figure in Colorado’s struggle with California over access to water. His mother was a homemaker and a professional singer.
EARLY CHILDHOOD INTERESTS
As a child living in a town near the Pacific Ocean, KB enjoyed walking on the beach sand of the ocean’s shoreline, looking for whale bones.
EDUCATION
After high school graduation, KB attended a ‘junior’ (2 year) college before transferring to a university, from which he graduated with a degree in zoology.
(Editor’s note per Wikipedia – ‘Zoology’ is the branch of biology that studies the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of animals, both living and extinct, and how they interact with their ecosystems.)
FIRST ADULT JOB COMMENCES A CAREER PATH (Editor: Careers don’t always proceed along a straight path.)
After college graduation, KB worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at a whaling station in California, one of the last in the country. His son later remembered visiting him at work, sitting on his shoulders to avoid walking through ankle-deep pools of whale blood.
KB spent a year studying whales while at the university but then realized that his real interest (he said it was “a calling’) was studying whales “in the field” – in other words: in their natural environment, the ocean.
MILITARY SERVICE
During a time when all American men between ages 18 and 30 had to register for the military draft, KB volunteered to enlist in the U.S. Navy, hoping that branch of military service would provide the opportunity to serve in some capacity involving the sea. Although he made his wishes known to the Navy recruiter that after basic training, he hoped for assignment involving service on the sea, KB was first trained as a Naval pilot. But through his persuasive persistence to Navy influencers, KB was transferred within the Navy to the position of “Oceanographic Specialist” which involved listening, with special audio equipment, for hours for the underwater ‘pings’ that might herald a Soviet (Russian) submarine.
Instead of hearing potential enemy submarines approaching, KB often heard whales’ eerie, low-pitched songs reverberating through the water for hundreds of miles.
CAREER PATH
Following his Honorable Discharge from the Navy, KB was employed by the federal government, focused on whale tracking in the Pacific Northwest. He then began to accumulate and organize information about orca whales, leading to his appointment as the Research Director for the Ocean Research and Education Society (based in Gloucester, Mass.) where KB tracked humpback whales in the Atlantic Ocean.
Editor’s note – There are several differences between humpback whales and orca whales, starting with their different sizes: humpbacks can grow to 50 feet, while orcas grow to only 31 feet long. Orcas often hunt in packs, which could spell disaster for a lone humpback, which has been known to make a valiant, defensive stand against a pack of orcas. Orcas themselves are divided among those which remain within the same relative area, and ‘transient’ orcas, which form small groups to range across wider areas and are known to be more aggressive than other orcas.
Before KB and others dedicated to the same cause were able to gather the occasional attention and sympathy of some state and federal lawmakers, the common understanding was that orcas were numerous, living far out in the ocean. But KB’s research discovered otherwise.
Eventually, KB was spending all his time on the Pacific Coast, overseeing a growing operation at the “Center for Whale Research”. Though the center had an official title and produced impressive results, the center was mostly just KB. Volunteers came from all over the country to camp out in his yard, eat in his kitchen and head out every morning on his boat, which he named the “Chimo.” (Editor – “Chimo” is the nickname, cheer and mascot created for the Royal Canadian Sea Cadets but more likely related to the name given by an unknown person to the only white killer whale – probably an orca – displayed in captivity, at Sealand, on the Pacific coast, from 1970 to 1972.)
KB’s work was focused on a group of whales in and around Puget Sound, called “The Southern Resident orcas” numbering about 70 when he started, eventually expanding to about 120.
KB eventually learned to distinguish the sounds of each whale so well by looking at the unusual white patch behind each whale’s dorsal fin. He knew most of his subjects from their birth and they seemed to know him! The whales would swim up to his boat to display their young, or poke alongside playfully as he returned to shore. He rigged his home at the shoreline with a stereo linked to hydrophones out in the water. When an orca passed, he could often identify its whale song.
CAREER CHALLENGE – EARNING A LIVING DOING WHAT YOU LOVE
KB’s career goal never included earning a lot of money doing what he loved to do. Fortunately, KB was content to not spend much money, living a simple life, earning just enough from donations and grants to his whale studies projects, to keep a roof over his head, dress in basic clothing, keep food on his table (with enough for occasional guests), keep his boat in shape and his whale tracking gear up to date.
A friend said of KB: “He was the kind of person they don’t make anymore. His life existed in relationship to his natural environment, an extreme intimacy that is way more than most researchers have.”
CAREER CHALLENGE – ENVIRONMENT ISSUES YOU CAN’T CONTROL
Despite KB’s personal efforts to grow or at least preserve the population of orca whales, their numbers began to decline, in part due to the accumulation of toxins in the water but mostly because of the parallel decline in the numbers of Chinook salmon, orcas’ favorite food. Dams built decades ago had choked off the fishes’ breeding grounds, and the orcas were starving. By the 2010s, the Pacific population was down to about 70.
KB lobbied Washington State and the federal government to remove the dams and several did come down. Still, KB grew pessimistic about the future of his aquatic friends. The population had leveled out, but birthrates were declining. “Once they stop reproducing, they may still swim around here for 50 more years but there will be no babies,” KB said. “Functionally, they will be extinct.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
Thanks to the public and scientific awareness which KB’s work helped to raise, orca hunting had declined by the 1980s, and the Southern Resident orca population was expanding very well. Office workers in Seattle ‘skyscrapers’ (extremely tall office buildings) were thrilled to see pods of whales playing out in Puget Sound, and tourists packed excursion boats to get close to the whales.
