Hunters ready to kill whales trapped by ice in the Arctic

Nathan VanderKlippe, CanWest News Service
Published: Tuesday, October 24, 2006

YELLOWKNIFE -- Dozens of beluga whales are trapped in an Arctic waterway, and as ice begins to clog their sole escape route Inuit hunters are preparing to shoot them and collect their blubber.

Earlier this month, flights near the Arctic Coast hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T., spotted more than 200 belugas in the Husky Lakes, a labyrinthine network of saltwater inlets and bays connected to the Arctic Ocean by narrow channels.

By last Friday, the number had dwindled to 76, but with ice forming in the single 100-metre-wide channel that connects the lakes to the sea, time is fast running out for the whales to free themselves.

Because of costs to fly boats and people to the remote spot in the waning Arctic daylight, no attempt was made to herd them from the lakes. Still, some northerners remained hopeful the late onset of winter this year could help the belugas.

"Right now, it's a transition period where slush is developing and it's freezing slowly," said Paul Voudrach, chairman of the Tuktoyaktuk hunters and trappers committee. "So there's a possibility that they might be going in the next couple of weeks. They gotta go to Russia for that Christmas holiday they always have."

In early November, Voudrach and other local hunters will overfly the area to search for a circle of open water, a sign that some whales remain. As the ice forms, the stranded whales will be forced to use their energy on keeping an area open to breathe, rather than finding enough to eat.

If the whales aren't culled then, "they'll slowly suffer and they'll die on their own," said Emmanuel Adam, a Tuktoyaktuk hunter.

The blubber and meat of any whales shot would be distributed among the community, where beluga remains a food staple.

Although they don't know why, local hunters say that some years large numbers of the whales enter the Husky Lakes in July to feed on schools of blue herring and other fish. Sometimes they can't find their way back out of the hundreds of kilometres of intersecting waterways.

"They kind of get lost, disoriented, chasing around those fish," said Adam.

In 1989, when a group of whales were similarly trapped, hunters were forced to kill 125 belugas.