WHEN Pierre B茅land saw five white whales huddled together, he
switched on his hydrophone to record them. All he heard was the odd screech or
squawk. Then a startling crescendo: all the belugas were squeaking, whistling
and gurgling at once. The fracas lasted three minutes, then stopped. What was
this? Soon after, a newborn beluga calf bobbed to the surface.
But B茅land’s book, Beluga: A Farewell to Whales (Lyons of
Burford, $25, ISBN 1 55 821 3988) is about death, not birth. His stories
of individual whales鈥擨gor and Briz, the “Soviet spy” belugas, who
accidentally escape into the Black Sea and find themselves celebrities in
Turkey, and the abandoned little whale with the custom-made helmet鈥攁re
sprinkled lightly through a grim story. B茅land thinks the St Lawrence
belugas, and whales generally, are doomed.
He became involved with belugas in 1982 when asked to inspect a dead one on
the shore of the St Lawrence River. Since then, B茅land has seen 180 dead
belugas with bloated spleens, stomach ulcers and cancerous tumours鈥攁bout
15 a year from a population of only 500.
B茅land’s work has shown that Beluga blubber is full of toxins: DDT,
dieldrin and PCBs. “Because of the hazardous nature of these compounds, ships on
the St Lawrence carrying waste with more than fifty milligrams of PCBs per
kilogram require a special transit permit,” he writes.
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B茅land intersperses historical scenes, such as the Quebec government’s
1929 air bombing campaign against the belugas, with his own experiences.
Unfortunately, you need a whale’s sonar to find your way from one time period to
another. Although at times tiresomely sentimental, Beluga is still a
beautiful tribute to the small white whale.
