“I was eight when I knew I wanted to be a scientist,” renowned marine biologist Alexandra Morton tells me from her home on Vancouver Island. “I knew that’s what I wanted to do but I didn’t have a picture of it. I didn’t know it was possible. I had parents who were worried about my intense interest in reptiles and amphibians rather than boys. So when [Jane Goodall] appeared on the cover of the National Geographic, she just opened the door. This was normal. This was socially acceptable.”
Alexandra got the message. It was okay to be a girl and a scientist so when she grew up, she devoted her life to following Goodall’s example – to observe, to understand the creatures that inhabit her immediate environment and to preserve their habitat. To serve and protect. For the past 40 years, her research has taken her up and down the British Columbia coast into areas most of us would consider inhospitable, but that’s the way she likes it.
“I loved it. I still love it. I’m off grid. I’m so far down the road that the electrical poles don’t get here,” she says. “I still cut all my own firewood. It just makes me feel alive. I love the act of homesteading. I don’t like things being done for me.”
She’s been called “Canada’s Jane Goodall,” a label she’s proud to wear, but Alexandra was actually born in Connecticut and left New England for California as soon as she could drive. Following a boyfriend, she says. Armed with a Bachelor of Science degree and intent on studying language in large-brained animals, she asked Marineland of the Pacific, just outside Los Angeles, if she could use their facilities. Marineland allowed her to drop a hydrophone into their tank to record dolphin sounds but she was quickly drawn to two nearby captured orcas, Orky and Corky.
“They were so beautiful,” she says. “Unlike the dolphin sounds, these calls completely captured my attention, hitting a frequency that resonated throughout my entire being. I knew instantly that orcas were the animals I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.”
When she learned the female, Corky, was captured in Canadian waters, Alexandra headed north.
“I wanted to find her family, and her family led me into a place that I could survive in.”
She arrived in BC in 1979, first to Alert Bay and then east to Echo Bay in the Broughton Archipelago. It was an austere existence, far away from the conveniences of modern life. By the early ’80s Alexandra, her filmmaker husband, Robin Morton, and her three-year-old son were living aboard their 20-metre boat, Blue Fjord. It was both their home and a research station. The day would begin by motoring to a distant location where Alexandra would drop a hydrophone into the water to record orca sounds while Robin filmed the mammals underwater.
“We had a large Zodiac that I had customized so my son had a protected area under a cover in the bow,” she says. “Every day we would get in the boat looking for whales. I would try to figure out which direction they were going and then drop the hydrophone well ahead of them and record them as they passed. That meant running with them and camping at night. Back on the ship, I was correlating what they were saying with what they were doing. Clicks, whistles, calls. I wanted to figure out what they were saying.”
One day while filming, Robin didn’t surface, a victim of faulty scuba gear.
“Something wasn’t right,” she says. “Robin had told me many times not to ruin his shot by bringing the boat in too soon. I waited for some long moments, then I tied myself to the boat, dove in and got him. But it was too late. Emotional loss changes your chemistry,” she continues. “When the emotional floor collapsed under me, a whole other layer was revealed, a kind of sadness that was never part of me before. I likely appeared to be the same, but I was different. I guess I better understood the terms of my existence.”
Now a single mother with a child to support, she took a job as a deckhand on a troller. She sold Blue Fjord and moved into an Echo Bay floathome, a one-storey cabin on logs and tethered to the shoreline with ropes.
“I was very aware that I was now the only parent of my child. I had to learn how to run a chainsaw to keep us in firewood, but I would only run the chainsaw when the weather was good enough for me to fly to a hospital if I needed to be medivac-ed. I was very careful not to orphan my child.”
She continued her orca research. She discovered that in the winter months, orcas didn’t behave as they were supposed to. The so-called transient pods (now known as Bigg’s pods) weren’t so transient after all and stayed where they were while resident pods broke down into smaller, divisible units. She discovered that the transient and resident pods don’t make the same sounds, nor do they associate with each other. Her research added to our understanding of orca families, their movements and their feeding patterns.
She was still immersed in whale behaviour when, in 1989, local fishers complained of smaller salmon catches and a parasite, later identified as sea lice.
Salmon are an integral part of BC’s history, especially among the province’s First Nations who depend on it for food and ceremony. First Nations culture is built around salmon, and they have traditionally seen themselves as stewards of this precious resource. Disrupting the continuum was no minor matter. Thus, the community was spurred into action, driven by a suspicion wild salmon were being exposed to pathogens from the nearby open-pen fish farms. And, of course, any disruption in salmon stocks affected the orca.
Alexandra contributed by measuring ocean currents, performing autopsies on diseased fish and publishing the results in numerous scientific journals. As with her orca research, she immersed herself in salmon lore, attacking the issue with fervour and compassion. She familiarized herself with marine legislation and hosted dinner parties to solicit ideas. She conditioned her body to walk 20 kilometres a day as part of a walk-a-thon and built up her paddling muscles in preparation of a 150-kilometre flotilla down the Fraser River, all part of the campaign to bring the plight of BC’s wild salmon to the public’s attention.
She became the de facto face of the campaign. It ate up all her time and took her away from orca research, but it also drew her closer to her indigenous neighbours and an appreciation for their point of view.
“I didn’t realize I was in somebody else’s territory,” she says. “When I first arrived here, I didn’t understand the land or the people, especially First Nations. Because I had not built a relationship with them, there was no way for us to connect.”
She reached out. She did connect. And as the campaign intensified, more and more indigenous communities got involved.
“We got an incredibly powerful send-off from the Musgamaqw Dzawada’enuxw’,” she says of the 2016 flotilla down the Fraser River. And then other Nations picked it up. Realizing it was not her place to tell her First Nations allies what to do, she stepped back.
“It switched around. It became me contributing to them. I just withdrew and became a paddler and a facilitator, and the Nations took it over. It was incredible to be able to fall in line with something much bigger and more powerful than I could ever be. I thought I had been listening to these leaders but, in fact, I was filling in too many details from my own head. I had been the face of the issue for a long time, but it was essential that no one mistake who was leading the fight now.”
She was no longer out in front but part of the support team, there to witness and to communicate. Thirty years of campaigning had taken its toll. Facing exhaustion, she sought out rest and rejuvenation.
“I had to take a break to recharge. I did not want to be awake. I only wanted to sleep.”
If someone mentioned salmon, she crashed. She Googled the word “depression.”
“I thought I was immune to depression, but I got there,” she recalls.
Google told her to break the cycle and do something new. She went for long walks and disengaged from the frenzy of campaigning.
“When I was a younger woman, anger was a big motivator. At some point, I realized it was very bad for my children and very bad for my own health and I was going to burn out.”
Today, Alexandra says she’s rested and healthy, making time for herself and visiting her two adult children and grandchildren when possible.
“I’ve allowed my lifestyle to be a little bit overtaxing and I’m trying to remedy that and take care of myself,” she says. “I’d like to see my grandchildren grow and get engaged in the issue of climate change. Now I’m very careful about what I take on. I weigh it out.”
“There’s something wonderful that happens when you get older,” she continues. “I call it the grandmother effect. You have this kind of authority that can be completely immovable. When you’re in your sixties they know you’ve been around the block, and it has given me a sense of authority, so I can just speak the unvarnished truth. I don’t have to think about my career.”
Still concerned about the ecosystem, Alexandra works with First Nations in an advisory role, sometimes as a hired contractor, sometimes as a volunteer. Money has never been that important to her, she says. She’s always lived on the edge, happy in her marginal existence and financing her work through lectures and donations.
“I always manage to get by. The work is the important thing.”
Above all, interacting with her indigenous neighbours has taught her a lesson, a lesson she says applies to today’s discussion on reconciliation.
“I learned that when it comes to First Nations, the only way is to simply say I’m here for you if you need me. I have the skills and I can bring them to the fight if you need me, not to assume that I know better or I know what they should do. I am so comfortable now in a relationship where they ask me what do the fish need? That’s all I need to answer to the best of my ability, and they make the changes.”
And the changes are forthcoming. A 2018 federal decision gave First Nations dominion over the Broughton Archipelago, paving the way for an orderly transition plan to remove the 17 open-pen fish farms from the water and possibly move them inland.
“In the Broughton, there is nothing that is going to happen with salmon ever again without the approval of the Nations,” she says.
That makes it safe for her cherished orcas.
“In 1995, the whales I was researching, the northern residents and, in particular, the A5 pod left the Archipelago. In January of this year, one of the orcas I researched 26 years ago came back into the Broughton bringing her family with her. This is them coming back. That is the ultimate seal of approval for what I’ve done. The place has been made safe for them again. It just makes me feel really good.”
Jane Goodall would be proud.
“I am encouraged for sure. I want the earth to stay alive. I’m working to keep orcas alive, and the bears, and the salmon. I want to keep the ecosystem that I live in alive.”
Snapshot:
If you were to meet your 20-yer-old self, what advice would you give her? “Build your allies. Don’t think you can do it by yourself. That was my fatal flaw. I should have made the rounds to First Nations, to environmentalists, to the local fishermen and brought them along on this adventure with me.”
Who or what inspired you the most and why?
“When I saw Jane Goodall on the cover of the National Geographic, I thought, ‘oh my gosh. I didn’t know a person could be an adult and still study animals.’ I knew that’s what I wanted but I didn’t think it was possible. She just opened the door.”
What are you grateful for?
“I’m grateful public support has kept me in the fight, and I didn’t have to drop my work because I couldn’t feed my family or myself.”
What does success mean to you?
“My definition of success is to see these salmon runs come back. Their return is going to be an indicator, to me, of whether we caught it in time.”
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