Whales grab our attention because of their immense size, certainly. The blue whale, you have no doubt read, is the largest creature that has ever lived on earth, more massive than any overgrown dinosaur that dragged its multi-ton ass across Pangaea ever was.
But whales hold our attention because they are a paradox: so much like us—smart, social, mammalian—yet, with their smooth hides, blowholes, mouths full of baleen, and so on, they’re so thoroughly alien. It’s no surprise that they inspired belief in “sea monsters” for thousands of years of sailing.
Cetaceans spend their whole existence in the ocean but they breathe air. Their submerged lives are more real to us as metaphor than anything we can actually comprehend. To imagine them gliding slowly through the murky depths is to instantly conjure something from the dream realm, slow, implacable, pregnant with meaning, surely. Could anything be more inscrutable than the mind of a whale, darkened with its giant thoughts at the bottom of the sea?
Inscrutable to you and me, that is, but a bit more scrutable to Flip Nicklin. Nicklin is National Geographic’s “whale guy.” He lives to free-dive down about 100 feet (the bubbles from SCUBA gear tend to scare off wildlife, apparently), whip out his waterproof camera, snap memorable shots of whales in situ, and surface just in time to take a big gulp of oxygen, whale-style.
Nicklin shares wild stories and amazing photos in Among Giants: A Life With Whales, a new book he’ll be signing and showing off with a related slideshow at the St. Louis Zoo’s Living World building Tuesday night.
Nicklin, who was raised in a family of divers, has captured delightful photos of the humpback whale, with its accordion-fold neck you want to scratch like the wattle of a dog. Narwhals, with those long, twisted horns extending straight from their heads, manage to look mystical and comical at same time. Belugas’ faces are shaped in a permanent grin. The humpback, bowhead, and minke whales, with their eyes situated below the line of the jaw, look like something George Lucas could pattern one of his alien races after, and probably did.
In his book, Nicklin also shares stories of how he broke in to the elite corps of National Geographic photographers, and how he continues to partner with scientists to discover new aspects about the lives of whales, including migration patterns, and the meanings of the noises they make, aka “whale songs.” There is so much, he stresses, that we have yet to figure out about their world.
He dishes about his seat-of-the-pants lifestyle as a freelancer, which has called for dropping everything to hurry halfway across the world, and then find himself waiting for days or even months for whale activity. So many times, he has mourned the just-missing of great shots, and celebrated the serendipitous just-making of others. He has run out of money, he admits, just in time to receive a foundational grant that kept him going, and squandered grant money in ways that he could not fully understand until he became more experienced.
Now, in his 60s, Nicklin has more than 40 years worth of wildlife photography under his belt. He can tell you what it’s like to have a polar bear rip up your tent, and to watch from just a few feet away in the shallows, while killer whales scratch their bellies on a bed of rocks like languid cats. He can tell you how he feels about whale conservation and the TV show “Whale Wars”—and his opinion may surprise you.
But what he can really do, like virtually nobody else, is take undersea photos of immense whales turning, gliding, fighting, approaching curiously to investigate tiny humans, and so on.
As a whole, the book-length collection of Nicklin’s photos has a way of conferring a kind of silent, aquatic peace, as stolid as the whales that cut through its depths.
