Keiko Still Popular

Friday, April 25, 2003
Central Coast of Norway - As many as 200 people a day are flocking to see Keiko, the killer whale star of the 1993 movie Free Willy, as he frolics in Taknes Bay along Norway's central coast.

The tourists, mostly schoolchildren out this week for the Easter holidays, want to see Keiko play among pods of killer whales that traditionally follow schools of herring into Norway's central and southern fjords from January through April.

But for the first time in nine years, the whales didn't come.

Scientists say warmer ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic might have caused herring and orca populations to stay 40 to 50 miles offshore this season, rather than venturing closer to the coast.

There were those who felt that this spring he might have done anything - from going back with wild whales to going back to Iceland, said Dave Phillips, founder and president of the Free Willy Keiko Foundation.

Last summer, the 26-year-old killer whale swam nearly 900 miles to Norway from Iceland, where he had been kept in a netted bay since 1998.

Keiko was captured off Iceland in 1979 at about age 2 and displayed as a show whale until the Warner Bros. film spurred an effort to return him to the wild.

The privately financed price tag for that controversial effort, which included a 32-month stay at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport, was more than $20 million.

Keiko's caretakers and Phillips, whose foundation is based in San Francisco, are working with a Norwegian whale researcher to pinpoint coastal regions where some tagged orcas have congregated in past summers. They hope to find likely spots, then lead Keiko there this summer, giving him opportunities to interact with his own kind.

I've been positively surprised by the public reaction in Norway, Phillips said. The people who come are really interested in learning his story.