Reduce beluga hunt or else, biologist says

There may soon be no beluga left to hunt in Nunavik waters if the region’s hunters continue to kill as many as they did last year.

That’s the message Mike Hammill, a biologist with the federal department of fisheries and oceans, plans to deliver this week at the annual general meeting of Nunavik’s Anguvigak hunters and trappers association in Kuujjuaraapik.

“Do you want this for your children? If you want beluga for your children, the hunting of the Eastern Hudson Bay beluga has to go down,” Hammill said in a telephone interview from Quebec City.

“At the current levels of hunting, there will no more beluga in the Eastern Hudson Bay within 10 to 15 years.”

Hunters say noise is driving beluga away from the coasts and estuaries, but Hammill says disturbance from noise doesn’t explain why an aerial survey conducted last summer by the DFO didn’t find more beluga in quieter offshore waters.

“Plain over-hunting” is the major problem, he says.

Nunavik’s new beluga management plan, negotiated last spring, increased the region’s total allowable beluga harvest to 370 animals from 290.

But, in 2001, 395 beluga were reported killed — and the real figure could be much higher. “We think there is a large amount of under-reporting. We think it was higher than 395,” Hammill says.

Results from last summer’s aerial survey paint a bleak picture of beluga numbers in Nunavik. According to the survey, there are less than 2,000 beluga in the Eastern Hudson Bay. This means that since 1985, the number of beluga has dropped by half.

Last year, hunters killed 140 beluga from this population. Hammill said a more sustainable harvest would be about 20.

To give the beluga a chance to recover their numbers, Hammill said communities along the Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay will also have to reduce their annual hunt and change when and where they kill beluga.

That’s because genetic analysis of tissue samples from beluga killed in the Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay shows many of the animals actually came from the shrinking Eastern Hudson Bay stock. One out of five beluga shot in the Hudson Strait and one out of three shot in Ungava Bay originated in the Eastern Hudson Bay.

Hammill says the entire Ungava Bay is supposed to be closed to hunting because the number of beluga is too low to support a harvest — fewer than 200. But in 2001, beluga were killed in Ungava Bay and even in its off-limits Mucalic Sanctuary.

“For all intents and purposes, they’re gone,” Hammill says.

Last spring’s new beluga management plan gave all Nunavik communities an allowable harvest of 25 beluga each. Hunters in the Hudson Strait communities could take an additional five animals.

But several communities went way over these set limits. On the Eastern Hudson Bay, Puvirnituq reported 50 beluga killed and Akulivik reported 33. In the Hudson Strait, Salluit reported 57, Kangiqsujuaq 34 and Quaqtaq 60.

In the Eastern Hudson Bay, hunters were supposed to kill no more than 15 beluga in the Nastapoka and Little Whale River estuaries. They were supposed to travel to James Bay for 30 of their zone’s total allowable catch and to the Hudson Strait for an additional 65. However, according to reports given to the DFO, they reported only one beluga killed in the James Bay and brought in most of their beluga close to home in the Eastern Hudson Bay.

When the beluga management plan was being negotiated last spring, hunters agreed to provide more samples so DFO could gain more information about where the beluga are from.

The DFO promised to carry out another aerial survey, continue sampling, participate in a study with the Makivik Research Centre on the impact of noise on beluga and work on gathering traditional knowledge on the animals.

“You guys agreed to observe the quotas and you agreed to furnish the samples. You didn’t follow the rules. You didn’t keep up your end of the bargain,” Hammill said. “The DFO has to do some things, but people in Nunavik have to say, ‘We can’t go out and kill like we used to.”

The DFO doesn’t want to try and strong-arm Nunavimmiut into reducing the numbers of beluga they hunt. “We don’t want another Burnt Church. We can’t have another Burnt Church,” Hammill said.

But the DFO will argue for a lower harvest and more enforcement, and it will move to permanently close Ungava Bay as well as the Little Whale River and Nastapoka River estuaries on the Eastern Hudson Bay to all beluga hunting.

Bill C-5, the new federal species-at-risk act now in its second reading in the House of Commons, is expected to give the DFO more clout to protect marine life.

A new ministerial-level council created by Bill C-5 will be able to order a stop to the killing of species at risk of extinction. The new law also calls for tough enforcement measures.