Doing the bump with belugas
Whales overlooked in Manitoba town best known for its polar-bear tourism
Beneath the waves, two smouldering coals for eyes watched me with an intense, unyielding stare. Pristine white bodies floated up elegantly from the depths, one after another, surrounding my kayak in the open water. Their ghostly pale faces with wide, Joker-esque smiles pushed closer. A long, powerful sound burst up through the air, like a slowly deflating balloon, followed by silence and more expectant staring.
I was having a one-sided conversation with a pod of curious beluga whales. The mouth of the Churchill River in northern Manitoba was calm and quiet on this chilly, overcast July day, but these bright white whales were not. Belugas, nicknamed “the canaries of the sea” thanks to their song-like sounds, are social, playful and highly communicative. They repeated their shrieks and tunes, floating around me in anticipatory silence. There was only one thing left to do: sing along.
In response, raucous clicks and squeals drifted upward out of the dark water, like someone tapping on a microphone for attention, broken by steady streams of blowhole bubbles. I got the distinct feeling that I was being discussed.
“Brace yourself,” warned Noah Ransom, my wildlife guide, who had been singing his own songs to belugas in another kayak about 20 feet away.
A beluga lined up beneath me in the water. An adult female beluga can reach four metres in length — roughly the same size as my sea kayak — and weigh more than 1,300 kilograms. The kayak rose seamlessly and evenly as the beluga pushed me up about a foot out of the water, then lowered me back down. A storm of bubbles arrived off the side, then a flash of white appeared.
An impish face stared up at me, looking for a reaction, like a puppy who had just nosed over a ball. I laughed in shock while Ransom clapped and cheered. The beluga dove back down, raising and lowering the kayak a few more times, like the world’s most gentle roller-coaster. Although the belugas were massive and their potential for destruction seemed enormous, in those mere seconds, their actions were light and playful.
“We are kind of like their rubber duckies in the tub,” Ransom said. “This is playtime.”
Each June, approximately 60,000 belugas migrate from Arctic waters down to Hudson Bay, which serves as a summer playground of sorts for the largest concentration of belugas worldwide. The whales give birth in these relatively warmer, sheltered waters, where there is no real pressure on the fish population nine months out of the year.
In this part of North America, with its wide-open, often inhospitable landscape, keeping a distance from other humans comes naturally. (As of May 8, the isolated tundra town of Churchill had no cases of coronavirus. The province of Manitoba lists 283.) The belugas interpret personal space much differently.
Hudson Bay feeds into Churchill River, where around 1,000 belugas had taken up residence alongside our two sea kayaks last summer. They arrived in pods — bright, almost fluorescent white adults with happy clown faces and the occasional grey baby tucked in between, trying to keep up with everyone else. As I paddled, belugas raced alongside the kayak. When I stopped, they’d nudge the paddles and rudders with a palpable curiosity. The sounds of gasping blowhole spouts mixed in with their normal chatter, which developed a kind of conversational rhythm as time went on.
I arrived in Churchill knowing that nothing is guaranteed when it comes to wild animal encounters. I hoped to glimpse a beluga or two. Instead, out on the water, I entered a completely different world — one devoid of humans, where I was the strange creature on display. I had come to watch them, but really, these marvellous creatures were watching me. Even on a summer day on the water, Churchill was a quiet place, where the wind carried sounds for miles. The atmospheric buzz of all-terrain vehicles on coastal bear patrol hummed consistently in the background.
Locals brought their children and dogs to splash in the tide and pick up pretty stones along the shoreline, taking advantage of the long northern sun. Polar bear warning signs went unheeded; the deafening hum of the vicious, biting flies seemed like more of an imminent threat.
Off in the distance, past the fireweed and haphazard wildflowers, bright flashes of white caught the sunlight. That far out, with no accompanying sound, it was hard to tell whether they were cresting waves, swimming bears or (much more likely) belugas.
Signs all over Churchill proclaim it “the polar bear capital of the world.” In past years, roughly 10,000 tourists a year have visited the town of fewer than 1,000 people for exactly that reason — to observe the bears in a kind of cold weather safari from the comfort of intense off-road vehicles outfitted with snow tires.
Wally Daudrich, a tour guide, saw an opportunity to highlight the area’s other, less dangerous summer residents. Like the belugas (and many people who end up in Churchill full time), Daudrich only intended to stay for a season. Four decades later, he runs Lazy Bear Lodge and the associated Lazy Bear Tours, one of only two tour companies in town last year that offered water-based beluga tours, and the only full-service one. Lazy
Bear is cautiously optimistic about the 2020 summer season, but as is the case these days, everything is subject to change.
Every chance he gets, Daudrich is out on the water — usually as the captain of the Sam Hearne, a tour boat named after one of his favourite historical figures, who joined the British Royal Navy at age 13 and then came to Hudson Bay at 18 to work as a trader. On tours, Daudrich navigates along part of Hearne’s old shipping route, around Button Bay, the Prince of Wales Fort and Eskimo Point — a favourite summer resting spot for polar bears.
The day after my first kayaking beluga encounter, I joined Daudrich on his tour boat where he rattled off decades of observations and anecdotes about belugas. The whales like high-pitched sounds, especially women’s and children’s voices, possibly because those sounds hit the frequency belugas are used to. They notice bright colours. They have an uncanny instinct about people. “They can sense chronic diseases and mobility issues, and they seem to have a greater curiosity for them,” he said.
“They’re very intelligent animals. They can clearly recognize the prop of each boat,” said Daudrich, who has often encountered pods of repeat visitors from his tour boat. Off to the side, a bright white whale shot up vertically, as if standing. The belugas occasionally “spy hop” — pop straight up out of the water, like a submarine scope — to get a better look at things, face to face.
Under water, belugas rely heavily on sound. They are some of the most vocal marine mammals, using echolocation to bounce sound waves off surfaces and judge distances. Because of their natural habitat in dark, icy waters, belugas remain somewhat mysterious to scientists in many ways — but they are widely regarded as extremely intuitive and sensitive, with excellent communication skills.
When the belugas are nearby, their many comical sounds drift up above the water. Daudrich likes to use a hydrophone (an underwater microphone) to listen in below the surface, which is nothing short of a cacophony. Beneath the waves, there’s an overstimulated audio highway of chirps, clicks, shrieks, squeals and static.
“It’s crowded down there. There’s lots of background chatter like you would hear in a crowded room,” he said. “Most of their sounds are highpitched but they have a whole repertoire of lower sounds, too.”
The belugas are curious, playful and unafraid — and as a result, Daudrich has lost a number of hydrophones to the whales over the years.
The greater Churchill area is a place that in theory could be overrun with seasonal tour companies ready to cash in — but that was not the case when I visited.
Part of it was because of its isolated geography. Last year, visitors could only travel to Churchill via an expensive charter flight or the notoriously unreliable two-day train, both originating from Winnipeg, about 1,000 kilometres away.
Another reason is its expense. Prices are high across the board in Churchill because of its inaccessibility, with most accommodations disproportionately expensive for their quality. There is no real market for the luxury traveller, and absolutely no patience for the selfie crowds. It’s about the wildlife here, and anyone who wants more is missing the point.
The belugas would be gone in a few weeks. Each September, they head up north to the Arctic, where they live amid sea ice that protects them from predators, relying on their catalogue of singsong chirps, whistles, clicks and tunes to communicate with each other and navigate their environment.
This summer, they will bring their joyful noise back to the shelters of Churchill and Hudson Bay, whether the humans arrive or not.