Among Whales 



In the fall, southern right whales return to the waters off 

 Patagonia to mate and raise their young 



by Roger Payne 



In 1970 I read about a sighting of 

 twenty right whales along a little-traveled 

 section of Argentine coastline called 

 Peninsula Valdes (about halfway between 

 Buenos Aires and Cape Horn). Because 

 right whales were almost extinct before re- 

 ceiving protection in 1937, seeing several 

 at once was a rare event. 



I had never heard of Peninsula Valdes 

 but noticed it was at the same latitude 

 south of the equator that Cape Cod is in 

 the north. I knew that right whales came to 

 Cape Cod every year, even though they 

 are rare. Peninsula Valdes's two nearly 

 landlocked bays, Golfo San Jose on the 

 north and Golfo Nuevo on the south, bear 

 a striking similarity to Cape Cod Bay and 

 Nantucket Sound; and the combined land- 

 forms of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, 

 and Nantucket are so like Peninsula 

 Valdes that I wondered whether right 

 whales might also be coming there each 

 year. The New York Zoological Society, 

 where I then worked, provided the funds to 

 go investigate, and so, in late September 

 1970, I went to Argentina with an old 

 friend, Oliver Brazier, and my then wife, 

 Katharine Payne. 



We drove from Buenos Aires to Rio 

 Negro, the northern boundary of Patago- 

 nia, on what is now a paved highway (at 

 the time it was a dirt track in places). Four 

 days later we stood on the beach at Punta 

 Norte, the northeast point of Peninsula 

 Valdes. Three right whales were playing in 

 the surf less than fifty feet offshore. 



Lysa Leiand 



^^li 



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40 Natural History 1/94 



