Cover Story
Touched by the Whales In filming, shooting and producing the new Disney+/ NatGeo documentary Secrets of the Whales, Brian Skerry came to new realizations about the sea’s biggest creatures — and their similarities to us By Robert Yehling
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SUSTAINABILITY TODAY | SUMMER 2021
Brian Skerry couldn’t believe his eyes. And his are eyes that have spent 40 years shooting sea photography, and nearly a quarter-century filming and shooting for National Geographic. What developed in front of the Secrets of the Whales executive producer and photographer defied typical cross-species senses: an orca was offering him her dinner — a freshly plucked stingray — while staring at her human visitor 40 feet below the New Zealand coastline. He’d experienced a number of interactions with whales, but never one like this.
“I was hoping to see this population of orca who have figured out how to eat stingrays,” Skerry recalled. “They love international cuisine, and the ones in New Zealand like stingrays. I jumped in the water, was swimming toward this family of orca that were hunting in a shallow harbor, and this female was coming toward me with a ray that she had started to eat. And as I got closer, she dropped it in front of me, and I swam down to the bottom. I knelt on the bottom, sort of next to that dead stingray, wondering if she would come back. “And then out of the corner of
my eye on the right, I saw her swimming around my back. She came around my left, got directly in front of me, and then just hovered there. And then she looked at me, looked at the ray, looked at me, looked at the ray, as if to say, “Are you gonna eat that?” When I didn’t, she just gently picked it up and brought it up. I was able to make a picture of this ray out of her mouth, and then she turned and food-shared with her family, and we got that from the air. We got that scene as well. “So it’s just extraordinary to think that that animal may have been — I don’t know — offering me dinner, and when I chose not to partake, she went on her way.”
