Churchill, Manitoba, is known as the polar bear capital of the world due to the roughly 1,000 bears that summer on its shores. The bears wait for the ice to freeze up, jump on and float back home to the Arctic. In the meantime, they also have company, because another Arctic species chooses to summer in Churchill: the beluga whale.
During the summer, more than 3,000 of these gregarious cetaceans gather in coastal areas and make their way to the Churchill River Estuary, where they feast on the nearly unlimited bounty of capelin fish, and where the females give birth in the protected waters.
“This is their Hawaii,” said Tress Kemick, a guide for Sea North Tours, a company that provides several different types of beluga tours, including a two-hour kayaking excursion in the estuary. (A two-hour tour is $160 per adult. Kids ages 12 and under are $60; children 5 and under are free.)
Kemick handed me a kayak skirt and a double-bladed paddle, and we walked the rocky path to the estuary, where he fit me into a yellow one-seat kayak. I could already see the belugas in the water and couldn’t wait to meet them. I asked Kemick why some were gray and others were white.
“The darker ones are younger,” he said, explaining how brand-new calves are dark black and become lighter gray as they grow. Then, between the ages of 5 and 7, belugas take on the phosphorescent white they are famous for, which is why they are referred to as “white whales.”
With that tidbit of information, Kemick pushed my boat out into the water.
There were already other kayakers on the river, and I could hear them giggling and laughing as the belugas came up to their boats. They are not small creatures — especially up close. Adult males can sometimes weigh up to 3,300 pounds and span 18 feet long.
“They’re playing with my GoPro!” I heard one boater say. I saw him holding onto an extended camera stick that went underwater, where his action camera was attached. I can only imagine the footage he’ll be watching later.
All of a sudden, I felt a bump underneath my kayak, and the back end rose up out of the water. I wondered in panic if I had hit a beluga.
I tried to steady myself, knowing my narrow craft was already precarious enough.
“Be careful those belugas don’t tip you over,” Kemick said as he rode over to me on an inflatable kayak. “Belugas love to use kayaks as back scratchers.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh at their cleverness or panic at the thought of winding up in the water.
As I made my way through the estuary, I noticed that belugas look less like traditional whales and more like dolphins with swollen heads. The bump on their foreheads is called a melon, an echolocation organ that acts like sonar and earns belugas the nickname “melonheads.”
Yet belugas — whose closest relative is the unicorn-horned narwhal — are also referred to as sea canaries because of the high-pitched sounds they make. And indeed, these creatures are very chatty, and we were encouraged to sing to them because they appear to love it.
“Singing seems to bring them on, and they tend to respond to women’s voices,” Kemick said. “I’m not sure if it’s because it’s a high pitch, or if it’s something else.”
I remembered “Baby Beluga,” a childhood song by children’s entertainer Raffi, about a little singing beluga whale. I sang the refrain all through the estuary as the belugas swam around my kayak. The song seemed to transport me back in time, and I was overcome with emotion in the surreal moment. My 9-year-old self would never have imagined that one day I’d be singing my favorite Raffi song to a pod of belugas.
The experience was incredible because it was an authentic and genuine interaction between two species. These are not trained animals in an aquarium that are instructed to hang out with humans. Belugas honestly want to check people out, satisfy their own curiosity and stay and play for a while. There’s absolutely nothing forced about it.
Unlike dolphins and whales, the vertebrae in a beluga’s neck are not fused together, so they can turn their heads. I did not realize this until a fluorescent white beluga floated toward my kayak then turned and looked me straight in the eye — I was not prepared.
“Bear season is huge for this town,” Kemick said. “But I would pick beluga whales over bears any day of the week because the experience is beyond interactive. You don’t want a bear swimming up and knocking over your kayak. If you do, you’ve got a different situation going on!”
The Details
Sea North Tourswww.seanorthtours.com
