Training sessions prepare volunteers to help with annual viewing events
Oregonians who would like to volunteer to help with the state's seasonal whale-watching programs can become qualified by attending training sessions Saturday and Sunday.
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Internationally recognized whale expert Bruce Mate of Oregon State University's marine mammal research program will lead the opening-day session of training at OSU's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport.
Volunteers who complete the training will be qualified to help during Oregon whale-watch weeks in the winter, spring and summer. The winter whale-watch dates are Dec. 26-Jan. 1 at 28 sites along the Oregon Coast.
The spring whale-watch week will be March 24-31, and the summer watch, which focuses on whales that drop out of the northward gray whale migration in the spring to feed in waters off the central Oregon Coast, will be Aug. 27-Sept. 3 at three watch sites in the Depoe Bay-Newport area.
Saturday's session in Newport will begin at 9 a.m. and continue until 4:30 p.m.
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On Sunday, there will be classroom presentations from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. followed by an afternoon interpretive field trip to the Oregon Whale Watching Center in Depoe Bay.
Application forms are included in a "Call for Volunteers" packet available at www. whalespoken.org or by contacting Morris Grover, the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department's whale-watch-week volunteer coordinator.
About 1,300 participants have become trained "Whale Watching Spoken Here" volunteers.
"We now have the largest whale-watching organization in the world with a lot of people who know about whales," Grover said. "A big reason for that growth has been the world-class level of instruction offered in the training."
Mate, the whale expert, recently appeared in a PBS documentary, "The Gray Whale Obstacle Course," produced by Jean-Michael Cousteau. Mate, whose work helped motivate the launch of Oregon whale-watching programs in 1978, has been interviewed in several documentaries about gray whales and has been involved in major worldwide whale-research projects.
Ken Balcomb, one of the world's leading experts on orcas, also known as killer whales, also will give presentations at the training sessions in Newport. Balcomb is the director of the Center for Whale Research in Washington.
Training participants will receive the latest information and findings about whale biology and natural history and will be given tips on interpretive techniques used by volunteers.
"That information will then be passed on to the 30,000-plus visitors who come to watch the whales," Grover said.
