“There is no season this year. There is no ice, ”says Ariane Bérubé, sales director of the Château Madelinot hotel in the Magdalen Islands of Quebec (also known as the Madeleine Islands).
This is not the first time that the seal puppy observation season has been canceled: since 2010 there have been five winters with insufficient ice in the Gulf of Sant Llorenç due to warm temperatures.
“It takes four months to build a good layer of ice,” says Peter Galbraith, an oceanographer with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans of Canada (DFO) and a Gulf climate emergency specialist. “You need December, January, February and March to get cold. This is the ice season. A few days at -20 ° C are not enough to form a good ice. “
Little or no ice, or poor quality ice, is not only a problem for tourists, who cannot land in a helicopter, but also a problem for harp seals. They migrate to the Gulf of St. Lawrence from the Canadian Arctic and Greenland in December, giving birth in late February and early March. As “ice-bound” animals, harp seals need ice as a platform to have their young, infants, and during the first few weeks after weaning, when the young learn to swim and feed.
Mike Hammill, head of the marine mammal section and a pinniped, or seal, an expert with the MPO, says: “Ice should be quality ice. The seals prefer that the masses of ice have a minimum thickness of 30 cm and should also be quite wide, about 36 meters.
When the ice is too thin and unstable, the pups can die. “The ice breaks from the waves,” Hammill says. “Either you get a storm to pass and the waves hit the pieces of ice together and grind or break. Some puppies can be crushed and others can be thrown into the water. If they repeat themselves repeatedly in the water, they get tired and drown ”.
In the 1980s and 1990s, tourists who came to see the “white seals,” as newborns are called, used to generate as much income as the annual seal hunt. “When I started in 1990 [seal tourism], he was going to make big guns at the time, “Hammill says.
But the situation now seriously worries the islanders, known as Madelinots, many of whom have switched from seal hunting to seal tourism in recent decades.
Map showing the location of the Magdalena Islands, Quebec, Canada
In years when the ice sheet was consistent, the white seal observation season would last four to five weeks. Now, two weeks is a bonus. “We usually get a few hundred people during the season, so a lot of revenue is lost,” says Mario Cyr, filmmaker, photographer, diver and head of the expedition. “And it’s something we love to do, which is incredibly beautiful to witness.”
There are guests from all over the world, year after year, to see and photograph the young. “Château Madelinot and the Madeleine Islands are unique in offering this experience,” says Bérubé, “because the coast of the islands is really the main place to observe the world’s largest harp seal nursery and we have a good access “. “.
A canceled season causes great disruption and disappointment.
“2010 was our breaking point,” Bérubé adds. “It was the first year we had to cancel. We had over 350 people who had booked and we had to try to tell them what was going on. It was the first time since 1958 that we had no ice. Then it happened again in 2011. And again in 2016 and 2017. And now this year. We have noticed that every time we have had to cancel there is always a two year cycle. So will this happen again in 2022? “
Cyr, a born and raised madelinot, says the loss of business is bad, but he is also saddened by what happens to the stamps. “Last year there were many more fatalities from harp seal pups than in previous years.” Due to the lack of ice in recent seasons, harp seals have been forced to return east to the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. “Sometimes moms go golfing for five or six days, looking for a place where there’s enough ice to give birth,” Cyr says.
Prior to 2010 there was consistent ice cover on the islands. But after the last decade, “we all seriously wonder what’s going to happen,” Cyr says.
White-capped sightseeing tourism is not an easy business, says Bérubé. “I’m selling something I’m not sure I can deliver. For the magic to happen, the stars and the planets must be perfectly aligned: there must be ice, there must be seals. But when everything falls into place and we finish the season, customers thank us 1,000 times ”.
As for the future, Cyr says he and his colleagues are worried, but he knows that eventually Magdalena Islands tourism will end.
“We must keep in mind that seals always return to the place where they were born. So if we skip a year, like now, nothing changes genetically for seals. But if it continues for three or four years in a row, during which seals do not give birth to their young, they will not return because they will have changed their migration route. Therefore, for every year we lose, those who will return are reduced. These are the effects of climate change that are really visible. ”
In 50 years, or even 30 years, “they’ll probably spend a couple of years with sea ice in the gulf and years without sea ice, and 50 years later we’ll almost never be,” Galbraith says.
For now, Hammill maintains that at 7.6m, the harp seal population is in good shape.
“They don’t think it’s good in the Gulf of Sant Llorenç, but we anticipate that we will see a change in distribution over time,” he says. “They will gradually disappear from the gulf, so instead of a third of the harp seal pups being born, perhaps all the pups will be born on the Labrador coast.”
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