Singer reminds us what community can do

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Singer the whale could have washed ashore anywhere in Puget Sound. Before he died, he was seen as far south as Budd Inlet, near Shelton, and over by Des Moines. But for his final resting place, he came to us. And whether by divine intervention or random occurrence, he came to rest in a community well suited to honor him.

Singer came to an island with an organization, Vashon Nature Center (VNC), that had the staff and board expertise, professional network and engaged volunteer core able to take on this huge and biologically complicated project.

He came to an island whose oldest and most established nonprofit is an art center (VCA). This art center had just built a new building with an atrium that had floor-to-ceiling windows in a main intersection of town with the structural capability of holding a sculpture weighing more than 3,000 pounds! VCA and VNC had an art-science partnership, and the staff and boards of both organizations had the vision and the trust in this fledgling partnership and said an enthusiastic yes to a project many would have shied away from.

This whale came to an island full of musicians who happened to have a protected outdoor area, outside of tempting hands, where he would be guarded by musicians late into the night as his bones dried and cured. His time at the Coop earned him his nickname, Singer.

Singer came to an island with an engaged school district and organizations like Schools Foundation and PIE who provide extra support for education. VNC’s well-established Scientists in Schools program used this funding to involve more than 100 schoolchildren in recording Singer’s legacy.

Singer came to an island whose largest employer happens to be a company named Sawbones where engineers and fabricators work around the clock, designing, molding, printing and connecting bones. The engineering team provided crucial help with 3D scans, equipment, space and more.

He came to an island where businesses like Island Lumber and Metal Creature chipped in to design custom parts and allow for supplies and moving assistance. Singer moved five times before his final move to Vashon Center for the Arts. We even took him to the dump once in people’s pickup trucks to get a rough weight on him!

Singer came to an island full of creative engineers like Rob Wheeler, who designed the kinetic tail mechanism. And a local and hugely visionary metal artist, Ela Lamblin, who specializes in nature-based, kinetic, larger-than-life sculptures. Together with Wes Cherry, Bob Powell, Kevin Flick and Jon Schroeder, this crack team honored the hard work of VNC whale ambassadors who spent more than 500 hours retrieving, cleaning, ordering, cataloging and 3D scanning the bones.

The result is like no other articulation of a whale ever seen on this planet. We know of no other whale sculpture that moves. What a beautiful tribute to the longest migrating mammal in the world. He will swim forever. Together with Singer, this community created an icon that will last for generations, not only imparting knowledge about whales to many but also invoking a sense of wonder for these magnificent creatures.

Vashon Nature Center’s vision is a world awakened to the wonders of nature. Wonder is a powerful catalyst and a prerequisite for long-lasting, transformative action. Wonder motivates and deeply changes us more so than a sense of guilt, responsibility or despair.

Gray whales are not doing very well. This year, 30 gray whales have stranded and died in Washington, the state’s second-highest annual total on record, and scientists expect more before the stranding season ends. The formal unusual mortality event that devastated eastern North Pacific gray whales from 2018 to 2023 had ended by the time Singer died in 2024, but elevated mortality is again alarming researchers. Many of the whales are dying from starvation. And this is mostly due to warming ocean temperatures melting the Arctic ice of their feeding grounds. Arctic ice grows algae on the bottom of it that feeds the entire Arctic food web. When the ice melts, the algae disappear and the abundant food web diminishes. Singer brought us a message through his body and his death: human carbon emissions are changing the heart of our climate and the oceans, and this change is having consequences right now.

All of us working on this project have felt both the personal sadness for Singer and the despair of confronting a problem or a challenge that’s bigger than any of us can handle alone. But this is where the wonder of Singer comes in. If you follow his story from sea to sky, it is a story of connection, community values, love for nature, tenacity of the human spirit, and our ingenuity in creating things that this world has never seen before. His story also tells of our ability as humans to coalesce behind a common vision, even though we don’t know whether we’ll be able to pull it off.

The creation of the Singer sculpture has been an exercise for our whole community. More than 100 adults and 200 schoolchildren, as well as more than 20 organizations on Vashon and throughout the region and the world, contributed to this effort, either monetarily or through knowledge or through time. Singer showed us, through the process of re-creating him, who we are at our best as humans.

All of the traits that we used to raise Singer up, all of the talents that we drew upon individually and collectively to create this sculpture, are the exact same traits needed to solve the climate crisis and other environmental and social challenges that seem enormous. Working together on challenges is good for us. Many of us now have new friends, new colleagues, new connections, a new knowing of ourselves in our relationship to the world, and precious closeness with a species of the deep that most humans rarely get a chance to be close to. It has been an epic experience to take this journey with Singer and with all of you. Thank you, Vashon.

VNC is dedicating the next year in honor of Singer to actions and education for climate and ocean protection. You can join us by participating in events on our events page, adopting a bone in the sculpture, or even voting for Singer as mayor.

Bianca Perla is founder and science director of Vashon Nature Center.