"Hoyt's passionate sense of kinship with orca makes his account effective as both a science and literature. He has chronicled his adventures and discoveries ...with grace, insight, wit--and a comprehensiveness that might satisfy even Herman Melville."
(Discover Magazine)

Star performers in aquariums and marine parks, killer whales were once considered to be too dangerous to approach in the wild. Erich Hoyt and his colleagues spent seven summers following these intelligent and playful creatures in the waters off northern Vancouver Island, intent on dispelling the killer myth. Orca: The Whale Called Killer is Hoyt's exciting account of those summers of adventure and discovery, and the definitive, classic work on the orca or killer whale.

The Free Willy films, inspired in part by Hoyt's pioneering writing about orcas, tell the story of a captive orca being returned to the wild. (Hoyt, in fact, recommended Keiko, the orca who became the star of Free Willy, to Warner Bros.) But Orca: The Whale Called Killer tells the true story of wild orcas befriending humans.

Erich Hoyt

CONTENTS

Foreword
Prologue
Part One: First Summer

Killer Whale Country
The Sonic Creature
The Predator and Man
The Whale Census
Swimming With Whales
Sleeping Whales

Captives

A Killer Whale Day
Stubbs

The Rubbing Beach

A Future For Orcas in the Northwest?

Appendix 1: The Diet of the Killer Whale: A List of Known Prey
Appendix 2: Population of Killer Whales in British Columbia and Washington Waters: Pod Size and Composition 1981-1987
Appendix 3: Local and National Names for Orcinus Orca
Appendix 4: World Catch Statistics for Killer Whales
Appendix 6: Killer Whales Kept Captive
Appendix 7: Institutions That Have Kept Killer Whales Captive
Appendix 8: A Concise History of Man and Orca