“There is no season this year. There is no ice, ”says Ariane Bérubé, sales director at the Château Madelinot hotel in Quebec’s Magdalen Islands (also known as Îles de la Madeleine).
It is not the first time that the seal pup watching season has been canceled – since 2010, there have been five winters with insufficient ice in the Gulf of São Lourenço due to exceptionally high temperatures.
“It takes four months to build a good ice cap,” said Peter Galbraith, an oceanographer with the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and a specialist in climatic emergence for the gulf. “You need December, January, February and March to be cold. This is the ice season. A few days at -20C 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 by helicopter, but also for seals. They migrate to the Canadian Arctic and Greenland Gulf of San Lorenzo in December, giving birth in late February to early March. Like animals “forced by the ice”, harp seals need ice as a platform to have their young, breastfeed and in the first weeks after weaning, when the young learn to swim and feed.
Mike Hammill, head of the marine mammals section and a pinniped, or seal, specialist in the DFO, says: “The ice needs to be of quality. The seals prefer that the ice blocks are at least 30 cm thick and must also be quite wide, about 36 meters. “
When the ice is very thin and unstable, the chicks can die. “The ice breaks with the waves,” says Hammill. “Or you are going to have a storm and the waves break the pieces of ice and they break or break. Some chicks can be crushed and others can be thrown into the water. If they are repeatedly pushed back into the water, they get tired and drown. “
In the 1980s and 1990s, tourists who came to see the “white-coat seals”, as newborns are called, used to generate as much revenue as the annual seal hunt. “When I started in 1990 [seal tourism], was using big guns at that time, ”says Hammill.
But the situation is now a serious concern for islanders, known as Madelinots, many of whom have switched from seal hunting to seal tourism in recent decades.
In the years when the ice cover was consistent, the white-coat seal season lasted four or five weeks. Now, two weeks is a bonus. “We usually receive a few hundred people during the season, which means a huge loss of revenue,” says Mario Cyr, filmmaker, photographer, diver and seal pup expedition leader. “And it’s something we love to do, it’s incredibly beautiful to witness.”
Guests come from all over the world, year after year, to see and photograph the puppies. “The Château Madelinot and the Îles de la Madeleine are unique in offering this experience,” says Bérubé, “because the coast of the islands is really the main place to observe the largest harp seal nursery in the world and we have good access to it. “
A canceled season causes a lot of inconvenience and disappointment.
“2010 was our breaking point”, adds Bérubé. “It was the first year that we had to cancel. We had over 350 people who had booked and we had to try to explain to 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 realize that every time we have to cancel, there is always a two-year cycle. So, will this happen again in 2022? “
Cyr, born and raised in Madelinot, says the loss of business is bad, but he is also sad about what is happening to the seals. “Last year, there were far more deaths of harp seal pups than in previous years.” Due to the lack of ice in recent seasons, harp seals have been forced to return eastward towards the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland. “Sometimes mothers travel the gulf for five or six days, looking for a place where there is enough ice to give birth,” says Cyr.
Before 2010, consistent ice cover was taken for granted on the islands. But after the past decade, “we are all seriously wondering what is going to happen,” says Cyr.
Observation tourism with an apron is not an easy business, says Bérubé. “I’m selling something that I’m not sure I can deliver. For magic to happen, the stars and planets must be perfectly aligned – there must be ice, there must be seals. But when it all comes together and we continue with the season, customers appreciate it 1,000 times. “
As for the future, Cyr says he and his colleagues are concerned, but he knows that tourism on the Magdalen Islands will end.
“We need to keep in mind that seals always return to the place where they were born. So, if we skip a year, as now, nothing genetically changes for seals. But if it continues for three or four years in a row, during which the seals do not give birth to their young here, they will not return because they will have changed their migration route. So, for every year we lose, fewer people will return. These are the effects of climate change that are really visible. “
In 50, or even 30 years from now, “it will probably be a uniform division of years with sea ice in the gulf and years without sea ice, and 50 years later we will be almost never,” says Galbraith.
For now, Hammill says that at 7.6 m, the harp seal population is in good shape.
“It doesn’t look good to them in the Gulf of St Lawrence, but we anticipate 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 there, maybe all the puppies are born on the Labrador coast.”
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