New survey aims to count hundreds of beluga whales in James Bay

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans will be logging some serious airtime over the next few weeks, counting belugas over the James Bay area.

The survey is being commissioned by the communities on the east side of James Bay and Hudson Bay for the next harvesting season. In order to create harvesting plans, these communities need to know how many beluga whales are in the waters.

Continuing until mid-September, the results of this survey will also be used to create a marine conservation area.

Caroline Sauvé, a biologist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, told CBC Radio's Morning North that they usually fly the surveys at 1,000 feet altitude. She says they always use the same protocol so the results are comparable.

"These surveys have been done since the mid 1980s," she said. "This is the ninth survey of a time series."

Counting beluga whales by hand is no easy feat. 

Sauvé says the number of beluga whales in the water can vary greatly in the summer. Some days, she and her team can fly around for hours without seeing anything. Other days, hundreds of beluga whales will appear at a time.

"We just have to be alert and be ready to spot them when they come," she said.

Adult beluga whales can grow to be four and a half metres in length, but from roughly 300 metres above the water, they're only about two and half centimetres long.

"They're small and they're all white. We pass at 180 kilometres per hour, so we have to be quick to spot them," she explained.

If the beluga whales are swimming by too quickly, Sauvé says she'll circle and take pictures so her team can count them afterwards. 

While the tracking of beluga whales might seem a little odd, Sauvé says the Department of Fisheries and Oceans mandates the assessment of marine mammal stocks across Canada.

She says it's important to understand how to provide scientific advice on management of not only beluga species, but also right whales, among others. 

When it comes to sharing this information with communities that harvest belugas, Sauvé says her team is training locals in the James Bay area as observers in this survey.