all by himself

Do you wanna hear the saddest thing ever?

I'm reading a book about whales (This is not the saddest thing ever. It's coming.) which I heard about through NPR, and it's awesome! I've always been terrified/amazed by whales, and now I'm starting to fall in love with them.

Here's a sad story about one whale that The New York Times reported about back in 2004, an excerpt from the book I'm reading:

Twelve Years of Tracking 52-Hz Whale Calls From a Unique Source in the North Pacific was the result of research on a whale cruising from California to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, 'calling out with a voice unlike any other whale's, and getting no response'.

'The call, possibly a mating signal, suggests that the animal lives in total, and undesired, isolation.' The sound had been tracked for more than a decade, and in that time its timbre deepened, suggesting that the whale was still maturing. One scientist thought it might be 'miswired, broadcasting on the wrong frequency but listening on the right one'; another considered that the caller could be the miscegenic result of a liaison between a blue whale and another species, 'and hence truly alone of its kind'.

Isn't that so sad?

Anyway, I totally love this book. It's called "The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea" by Philip Hoare. He weaves literature, history, personal account and zoology together to talk about his most favoritest animal!

This post is best when read while playing Celine Dion's "All By Myself" in the background. It'll make you cry!

More about whales to come.