6/10/2019 A whale is pining for the fjords, and Norwegians are worried - Reuters

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A whale is pining for the fjords, and

Norwegians are worried
OSLO (Reuters) - A white beluga whale is loitering o the coast of
northern Norway, and that is starting to worry Norwegians, who are
afraid it might not be able to fend for itself. Also, it might be a spy.

The whale rst showed up a few weeks ago when it swam up to Joar
Hesten’s shing boat. Hesten got in touch with the authorities, who
were interested, because Hesten was o the northern coast and whales
don’t often show up there this time of the year.

“We asked him if he could just try to have it around his boat until we
arrived,” Joergen Ree Wiig, an inspector at the Norwegian Directorate
of Fisheries, said on Tuesday. That wasn’t hard, it turned out.

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6/10/2019 A whale is pining for the fjords, and Norwegians are worried - Reuters

“The whale was really friendly, came up to us and started opening its
mouth, checking us out,” Wiig said. “We were trying to talk to it. It was
really friendly. It was seeking contact with us.”

Possibly it was trying to tell them something. Possibly it was trying to

say ‘Get this thing o me!’, because the whale was wearing a harness
strapped around its neck, and written on the harness strap was
“Equipment St. Petersburg”.

Hesten and Wigg obliged, and then they turned the harness over to the
police, because the nearest St. Petersburg to Norway is in Russia. The
thought occurred to people that they might have some kind of Russian
spy whale on their hands. The harness held a camera mount, so the
thought was not entirely outlandish.

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6/10/2019 A whale is pining for the fjords, and Norwegians are worried - Reuters

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6/10/2019 A whale is pining for the fjords, and Norwegians are worried - Reuters

A white whale wearing a harness is seen o the coast of northern Norway,

April 29, 2019. Jorgen Ree Wiig/Sea Surveillance Service/Handout/NTB
Scanpix via REUTERS

On the other hand, it didn’t entirely make sense, either. The lettering
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on the harness was in English, not Russian, and used the Roman
6/10/2019 A whale is pining for the fjords, and Norwegians are worried - Reuters

alphabet, not Cyrillic. It seemed unlikely the Russians wanted to make

it easier for Westerners to identify any of their lost spy whales.

AVOIDING A ‘KEIKO’ SITUATION

On yet another hand, Russia does have spy whales, although it’s not
claiming this one just yet.

“We have restarted training of military dolphins ...,” said Colonel

Viktor Baranets, a Russian military expert. “Their tasks remain the
same. As to the use of common bottlenose dolphins, for instance, or
beluga whales, I was told in the Sevastopol dolphinarium that these
animals are not used (at the Russian Black Sea naval base) in
Sevastopol.

“As to Russia’s North ... I was told that Russian scientists are using
beluga whales for tasks of civil information gathering, rather than
military tasks.”

Exactly what the di erence might be, the colonel didn’t say. In any
case, the Norwegian police security service, PST, took custody of the
harness, presumably to try to track down its origin.

“They collected it from me an hour ago. They said they would look into
it,” Wiig said. PST did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Wiig’s Fisheries Directorate is more now concerned about how the

whale will make out. It shows no inclination to go home, wherever that
might be.

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6/10/2019 A whale is pining for the fjords, and Norwegians are worried - Reuters

A white whale wearing a harness is seen next to a shing boat o the coast
of northern Norway, April 29, 2019. Jorgen Ree Wiig/Sea Surveillance
Service/Handout/NTB Scanpix via REUTERS

“The beluga whale has been spotted again in the area. We are very
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concerned that it is not able to feed itself,” he said, adding that the
6/10/2019 A whale is pining for the fjords, and Norwegians are worried - Reuters

animal’s behavior suggested it may have been tamed.

The Directorate is considering whether to take further action to help it,

Wiig said. “What we want to avoid is a ‘Keiko’ situation.”

Keiko was an orca who had been captured and tamed and starred in the
1993 Hollywood movie “Free Willy”.

He was set free o Iceland in 2002, and visitors would come from far
a eld to spot him in a particular fjord on Norway’s northwest coast.

But things did not go well. Keiko was unable to re-adapt to the wild,
and died o the coast of Norway in 2003.

Additional reporting by Gennady Novik; editing by Larry King

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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