Beluga Songs in Polar Country

By Lauren Kramer

There is only one place in the world where you can watch hundreds of beluga whales cavort in the wild, their gleaming white bodies arching above the surface of the water. Its name is Churchill, a small town in northern Manitoba where the population of people is diminishing, but not the number of whales.

Some 20,000 beluga whales inhabit western Hudson Bay and the Churchill River estuary, waterways that meet at the lip of land bordered by the town. Of those, 3,000 whales spend summer at the river mouth, moving in and out of the estuary with the tides and feeding on capelin and Lake Cisco fish.

From land, they look like sandbars, or whitecaps on the waves at first. But look closely and you realize there are hundreds                                                                                   Image by Mike Macri

of magnificently smooth beluga backs, surfacing only briefly for air before they dive down again.

They come to calve in the slightly warmer waters of the Churchill river in August, and by the middle of that month, there are grey-brown baby belugas to be found in every pod, their colour fading first to grey-blue and then to white as they mature.

To get a better view I clad myself head to toe in a 7mm wetsuit and, snorkel in mouth, slip off the side of a Zodiac in the Churchill River, allowing myself to be gently towed along by the boat. At first I see nothing but great blue-green vastness, the occasional lost jellyfish floating by. Then suddenly they are below me: a pod of ephemeral, ghostly beluga whales swimming gracefully through the water.

Sound is everything to these mammals, whose chirping and shrill, seagull-like calls have earned them the nickname canaries of the sea, for they are the world’s most vocal whales. So I start to hum and soon find myself a few feet from an eight-foot beluga, which turns its head

Image by Mike Macri

briefly to get a better look at its human companion. Releasing a balloon of bubbles that cascade upwards toward my face, the beluga slips playfully from its stomach to its back, and then, with a barely visible movement of its tail, it is gone.

They are spectacular to watch, these gliding, 13-foot mammals who live to the ripe old age of 60 and can dive to depths of 600 meters without even feeling the cold. On a wet, cold day in Churchill, even a wetsuit can’t keep the chilly, 6 degree Celsius water from my bones, yet I stay submerged, transfixed by the eerie beauty of this underwater world.

At first the belugas stay a cautious 15 feet from me. But after a half hour they are friendlier, their bodies arching closer to the vessel and the snorkelers it is trailing. Some have harpoon scars testifying to a lucky getaway, while others sport the claw marks of a polar bear who just missed his prey. In the Churchill River, they can cavort in relative safety from their two main predators: orca whales and Greenland sharks.

There are two main draws to Churchill, a town with a single paved road and one accessible only by air, sea or rail. One of them is the belugas. The other is its polar bears.

The belugas don’t disturb anyone, but with the bears, it’s a different story.

On the sunny afternoon I head out with Paul Ratson, owner of Nature First Tours, I can’t help but notice the massive rifle he carries loaded at all times. “This is the bear’s back yard,” he explains. “Whether or not we use this rifle is up to them. They’re the boss.”

Churchill is a natural stopping point for the population of 1,000-odd polar bear that roam this terrain. In the summer, when the ice begins to melt, they come on land 80 miles away and prepare to wile away the hot days until October, when the ice begins to form again.

With so many bears in the vicinity, it is only natural that some will come into conflict with the town residents and the buildings they occupy. To deal with those making a nuisance of themselves and posing a danger, the town created a 28-cell polar bear jail in 1980. The jail houses 100 bears a year for 30 days of solitary confinement, during which time they receive only water. At the end of their sentence, they are drugged, hoisted into a net and relocated by helicopter to greener pastures some 40 miles away, at a cost of a whopping $2,000 per flight.

Polar bears dominate the landscape in Churchill and add caution to the lives of the townspeople. There are signs everywhere warning that bears could be close, and encouraging visitors and residents to keep their wits sharp and their eyes open. Still, there’s more chance of being killed by a bus than a bear in this town, says Ratson. “Our polar bear safety program starts in kindergarten and the town is patrolled 24/7,” he explains.

Fifty years from now, though, that level of caution may not be necessary, because the population of polar bears in this vicinity is has decreased by 22 percent in the last 20 yeasr according to Mike Goodyear, executive director of the Churchill Northern Studies Centre.

“Over the last few decades, due to global warming, the sea ice is breaking up earlier every year, which reduces the amount of time the polar bears can spend hunting,” he explains. Ian Sterling, one of the world’s foremost polar bear researchers, has revealed that for every week earlier that the ice breaks up, female bears come ashore 10 lbs lighter, reducing their ability to give birth and wean their cubs.

“The females are having fewer cubs, and fewer cubs are surviving to adulthood,” says Goodyear. “Things are looking pretty dire, as evidence suggests this decline will continue until there are no polar bears left in western Hudson Bay.”

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