Go, Keiko, Go!

By Helen Gibson/Heimaey, Iceland

All day long, the silver helicopter swooped and hovered over the waters around Heimaey, one of southern Iceland's volcanic Westman Islands. Three small boats tacked around the islands like erratic beetles, changing direction abruptly, doubling back on themselves, then spending long periods in one spot. For the uninitiated, it was hard to make out what was going on. A drug-smuggling bust? A search-and-rescue operation? The filming of the next James Bond movie? The reality was odder still: all these humans were scurrying around in an effort to take a killer whale for an ocean walk and find him some of his own kind to talk to.

An extraordinary effort, but then again, this was no ordinary cetacean. The 22-ft.-long, 10,000-lb. orca with the droopy dorsal fin was none other than Keiko, the star of the 1993 hit movie Free Willy. In the film, Keiko plays a killer whale condemned to a life in cruel captivity until released to ocean freedom through the efforts of a small boy. The part came easily to Keiko, whose real life story paralleled Willy's, and the movie inadvertently made his plight known worldwide. Now, in an ambitious experiment, a dedicated team of scientists, animal behaviorists, trainers, divers and technicians wants to make the fairy-tale screen ending come true. They are working to free Keiko from dependence upon humans and teach him to live again in the wild seas from which he was captured two decades ago.

The boats gathered near a circle of churning sea, where gannets plunged like dive bombers into shoals of herring that had been rounded up by a pod of orcas. When eventually the pod left the feeding ground, Keiko swam in line with them. "It's like taking your kid to school for his first day," says animal behaviorist Jeff Foster, who has worked with whales for 30 years. But Keiko did not, Hollywood-style, swim off with his relatives into the sunset on this August day. Once again he returned to the boat and his more familiar human companions.

If Charles Vinick, sitting in the chopper overhead, was disappointed, he didn't show it. Instead, he was upbeat about the progress made since Keiko saw his first wild cousins a few months ago--and fled in fright. Vinick is executive vice president of the California-based Ocean Futures, a nonprofit environmental organization headed by Jean-Michel Cousteau (son of Jacques) that has taken over the job of returning Keiko to the wild. Ocean Futures sees this as a "labor of the heart" but hopes it will also help raise public interest in marine issues. "The knowledge we are acquiring with this enormous effort is going to help all whales, all orcas," says Cousteau.

He speaks with confidence, but the obstacles are far greater than the breakwater over which the fictional Willy jumped to regain his freedom. For a start, whales' 70-to-80-year lives, 80% of which are spent below the surface, are a mystery. "We have seen a tiny percentage of the lives of just a tiny percentage of whales," says Foster.

Keiko has shown signs of wanting to mate, which may push him to try to join a group with fertile females, but whether he will be accepted into a pod is impossible to predict. He also has to "unlearn" what he was taught during his long years in captivity. Bit by bit, he has had to be distanced from humans, and his trainers reluctantly have had to drop, albeit gradually, the affectionate fuss they made over him. Physically, too, Keiko has had to be conditioned for a different life. The easy parts were training him to swim faster and for longer periods and, using weighted balls placed at different depths, to dive ever deeper. It was trickier to teach him to catch his own, live fish after years of frozen-fish dinners.

At least, says Vinick in tones of relief, "Keiko speaks killer whale." Long years alone in a concrete-sided pool--which, unlike the open seas, quickly bounced back any of the sounds Keiko made--did little to hone his conversational skills. Keiko was only a juvenile of two in 1979 when he was captured in Icelandic waters by the Gudrun, a ship that, ironically, is based in Heimaey's harbor, next to the bay that is Keiko's present home. Shipped to a marine park in Canada, Keiko did not respond well to captivity, and lesions started appearing on his skin. Within three years, he had been sold to Reino Aventura amusement park in Mexico City, where he spent 11 years in a small, warm concrete pool too shallow for a proper dive. He lost weight and became flabby and lethargic, and the viral skin infection spread. Reino Aventura tried to sell him, but no one wanted a sick whale.

Producer Richard Donner's Free Willy saved him. The 1993 Warner Bros. movie was a hit and was followed by an international public outcry, led chiefly by children, when it turned out that Willy in real life was Keiko, a sick and far from free whale. In January 1996, UPS helped pick up the tab for flying him in an ice-water-filled crate to a new home in Newport, Ore.--a $7.3 million pool, four times the size of the Mexican tank, with pumped-in, 37[degrees]F seawater deep enough to dive in. The pool was built with contributions from Warner Bros., the Humane Society of the U.S. and cell-phone tycoon Craig McCaw; and the environmental group Earth Island Institute organized the project.

Within 18 months of arriving in Oregon, Keiko gained just short of a ton, mostly in muscle weight. His skin disease cleared, he started mastering the skills of catching his own fish, and he seemed much happier. But Keiko was still not free.

In September 1998, Keiko took another long flight, this time to Iceland, where he quickly adapted to life just below the Arctic Circle. His new pool was the size of a soccer field, fenced off within beautiful Klettsvik Bay. After two storm-lashed winters, Keiko graduated to the bay, 20 times the area of his pen and closed off with a 850-ft.-long barrier net. To encourage him to explore, his trainers built a large slingshot, which sent fish out 50 yds. in all directions. They took him on training swims behind a boat to build up his stamina and speed. In May a gate was opened in the barrier. Keiko, who had exchanged his wide, cuddly aquarium shape for that of a sleek, fit predator, went for his first "walk."

The costs in Iceland of bringing Keiko to this point--including his daily 100 lbs. or more of fish and an 18-member staff--total around $3 million a year. Critics, including some Icelanders resentful of the whaling ban imposed on them by other Western nations, have been complaining. But Keiko's people point out that only private money is involved, and that the project also supports half a dozen scientific studies.

The million-dollar question remains: Will Keiko ever return to the wild? "All we can do is provide him with the opportunity and still be here if he chooses to stay with us," says Vinick. If Keiko does leave, there are risks: he may join a pod and get hurt in a fight over a mate. Or his new family may abandon him, making it harder for this sociable cetacean to survive. If he does stay, Ocean Futures has pledged to look after him for life. With winter approaching, Keiko will remain in Iceland, but his team will be ready in early spring to coax him back to the oceans. The final scene of this extraordinary adventure still awaits a script. This time, however, it will be written by Keiko himself.