ORCAS FOREVER

An illustrated nonfiction work for children about a special group of whales: the Southern Resident orcas of the Salish Sea in Washington state and British Columbia.

The story opens describing two matriarchs of the orca group hunting for Chinook salmon to eat and share with other whales in the pod. After introductory information about orcas, regarding their methods of communication, their diet, and their familial structure, retired educator Mahoney describes an almost magical event that only Southern Resident orcas engage in: a meetup known as the Greeting Ceremony, in which all the whales line up and regard each other silently for a few moments before joyously swimming and playing together. In this book’s account, the evening ends with a whale giving birth to a new calf. The author also tells of how these special creatures have also been documented traveling with a dead orca calf in what may be described as a thousand-mile grief swim. The Southern Resident orcas are closely monitored by scientists, Mahoney notes; they’ve found that Chinook salmon, which make up most of the whales’ diets, are in a sharp decline—they’re smaller, and there are fewer of them in recent years. Triplett’s painterly illustrations are beautiful, with a style that’s both realistic and dreamlike. Overall, the main text of this book is effectively tender and positive. However, the work intriguingly doesn’t sugarcoat events in the 1960s and ’70s that gave the Salish Sea the nickname “the sea of troubles”; a large number of Southern Resident orca whales were forcibly captured and taken to tanks all over the globe, which is how scientists learned about how they communicate. An afterword presents even more information about orcas as a species and specifics regarding the three pods that make up this specific group.

An affecting and informative book about a remarkable set of aquatic mammals.