Welcome Back A73 (Springer) and A104 (Spirit)!!

A73 belongs to the A24 matriline of the A4 pod which is part of the Northern Resident Community of orcas of the Pacific Northwest, primarily frequenting the waters of the "inside passage" of British Columbia. Their range has been known to include the southern waters of Alaska.It usually doesn’t work. When humans interfere with nature, the results are usually not good for nature. So when several people from a diverse range of groups came together in 2002 to save a young wayward orca in Puget Sound, a tide of skepticism rolled in.The plan was to capture the young female orca and take her to rejoin her pod some 250 miles away. Complicating factors included the fact that Springer was not well. She was also getting dangerously close to boats and ferries; she was too young to make it on her own. Marine parks took an interest in the young resident orca. But other groups, including OrcaLab, the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation and Orca Conservancy, successfully persuaded NOAA Fisheries to directly intervene, capture the orca and return her to her family in BC.”It worked and on July 4, 2013, “Springer (A73),” the once-orphaned orca, was spotted with a calf "Spirit (A104)," off the central coast of Vancouver Island, BC.At the time, that left no doubt the young whale was accepted by and was now thriving with her pod. It was an unlikely outcome. Some of the groups cooperating on the rescue would not sit together in the same room much less share boats and resources. And capturing an orca without injuring is difficult; keeping it alive during a long journey and getting it back together with its pod, well, that’s unheard of.Does that sound skeptical? It should, we certainly were. Now we are just amazed.Welcome back home, Springer (A73) and Spirit (A104).For more information on this amazing journey, please visit Orca Conservancy archives   The Springer Project.