Inupiat people from certain villages in Northwest Alaska were blessed with an unusual harvest of 70 beluga whales this summer, a bounty that had not been possible for more than a decade, according to Beluga Bounty — a story from the Arctic Sounder newspaper republished on Aug. 13 in the Anchorage Daily News.
The intelligent white whales had not been visiting the Kotzebue Sound area in large numbers since the 1990s, and biologists had experienced some difficulty counting the eastern Chukchi Sea stock of the species.
This situation changed for several villages along the northwest coast this summer, but it also raised some intriquing questions. As Tamar Ben-Yosef wrote in the Arctic Sounder:
Over the past 20 years, the Inupiat of the Northwest Arctic had come to terms with the fact that they might never be able to hunt beluga whales as they and their ancestors had in the past. …
And they could only speculate about what had happened to one of their main subsistence food sources, which in previous times would frequent local shores with the preciseness of a clock. No one really knows why the white whales stopped showing up in large numbers in the Kotzebue region.
Then in late July, another mystery swam to the shallow waters of the village of Kivalina: hundreds of beluga, mainly large males, coming from the north.
The surprise appearance of the belugas spread through the villages of Kivalina, Point Hope, Buckland, Kotzebue and Deering. Residents took to the beaches and harvested as many as 70 whales. And that sparked a local debate: Did they take too many?