Playful large white beluga whales bring joy and healing to Hudson Bay. Their happy chirps leap out in an environment and economy threatened by the warming water melting sea ice, starving polar bears and changing the entire food chain.
Loud and curious belugas swarm boats here, clicking, nudging and frolicking. At any given summer moment on the Churchill River that flows into the Hudson Bay, as many as 4,000 belugas can be up and down the waterway, surrounding vessels of all sizes. That makes it hard to find a place where you don’t see them, said whale biologist Valeria Vergara, senior scientist at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation. It’s in their nature.
“The social butterflies of the whale world… You can see it in Churchill,” Vergara said.
The town of Churchill, Manitoba, is counting on that to continue. The mostly Indigenous community, pulled out of economic doldrums by polar bear tourism, faces the prospect of a dwindling number of bears because of climate change. So it is counting on another white beast, the beluga, to come to the rescue and entice summer tourists — if the sea mammals can also survive the changes to this gateway to the Arctic.
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