Friendly Whales

Sunday's NYT Magazine brings a bit of wish-fulfillment: the story of a group of whales in Baja California who seem to be encouraging humans to study them.  The whales come in close for a careful look, give scientists a ride on their backs, and generally seem to be welcoming a human presence.  The writer, Charles Siebert, goes so far as to use the term "forgiveness" to evoke the sense of emergent, restored interspecies trust.  There's also a nice description of apparently spontaneous outbursts of ecstasy on the part of human observers--bursting into song, or tears, on contact with the whales.