Keiko Remains Resolutely Solo, Plying the Fjords of Norway

Monday, July 21, 2003
NORWAY -- Nearly one year after the orca star of "Free Willy" dealt his keepers a new hand, cruising 900 miles from Iceland to Norway, he's still playing solitaire.

Keiko the killer whale swims alone in picturesque Taknes Bay, along Norway's central coast, and at least three times a week follows his handlers' boat 10 miles or farther out to sea. Toward the mouths of Norway's fjords, the whale can stretch his pectorals as keepers search for wild orcas that Keiko might like to meet.

The project's goal to reintegrate Keiko with a pod of wild killer whales remains, but its scale is dramatically reduced from the days when Craig McCaw, the Seattle-area billionaire, paid the bills.

Though it still receives some funding from his ex-wife's Wendy P. McCaw Foundation, the Humane Society of the United States and other sources, the privately financed Keiko project now operates with four keepers on-site and an annual budget of about $500,000. At its peak in Iceland, costs ran about $500,000 a month, with a 15-person staff, several boats and the use of a helicopter to search for migrating whales.

David Phillips, founder and president of the Free Willy Keiko Foundation, which manages the project, said Friday that without such resources, keepers must rely on information from local fishermen, ferry operators and fisheries officials to learn where the whales are.

So they wait -- and curious onlookers watch.

During the long Norwegian summer days, Phillips said, tourists school by the busload on the shore above Taknes Bay, where they can often see Keiko swimming just 30 yards away. Weekend days see 200 to 300 visitors stopping by for a eyeful of orca.

The numbers don't approach the 2.5 million visitors who gazed at Keiko at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport, where the orca lived from January 1996 to September 1998. But they far exceed those who watched him in Iceland, where he spent the next four years in a netted sea pen on a remote island.

The effort to return Keiko to sea started 10 years ago this month, when Warner Bros. released "Free Willy," a heartwarming box-office smash in which sympathetic humans help set a long-captive killer whale free. It inspired the real-life reintroduction project, which has cost more than $20 million and stirred both interest and ire worldwide.

Keiko, estimated to be about 26 years old, was captured near Iceland in 1979 and sold to the marine park industry.

During his recent summers, keepers led the whale to sea, where he swam freely among pods of killer whales that follow schools of herring through Iceland's Westmann Islands. During one of those outings last July, handlers lost track of him. He turned up the following month in Norway, where he followed a fishing boat into a fjord.

This winter, keepers had hoped to introduce him again to wild orcas, which for nearly a decade had migrated near Taknes Bay. But they didn't show. Scientists surmised that warmer-than-usual ocean temperatures may have kept the herring and orca populations much farther offshore than usual.

A smaller summer herring spawn may attract orcas to the region. Phillips said the whale crew recently had a report of four orcas about 10 miles from Keiko's bay.

"We high-tailed it out there," Phillips said ". . . and weren't able to find them. But that sort of thing could happen next week or the week after."

He and other Keiko watchers remain optimistic.

"When he's back in and around whales," Phillips said, "he'll pick up where he left off."