“There is no season this year. There is no ice, ”says Ariane Bérubé, sales director of the Château Madelinot Hotel on the Magdalen Islands of Quebec (also known as the Îles de la Madeleine).
This is not the first time the seal season has been canceled – since 2010 there have been five winters with insufficient ice in the Gulf of St Lawrence due to unreasonably hot temperatures.
“It takes four months to build a good ice cover,” said Peter Galbraith, an oceanographer at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and an emergency climate specialist. ‘You need December, January, February and March to be cold. This is the ice season. A few days at -20C is not enough to form 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 for harps. They migrate to the Gulf of St Lawrence from the Canadian North Pole and Greenland in December, and give birth in late February to early March. As “ice-binding” animals, resin seals need ice as a platform to suckle their pups and suckle them for the first few weeks after weaning when the pups learn to swim and feed themselves.
Mike Hammill, head of the division for sea mammals and a pinniped, or seal, expert on the DFO, says: ‘The ice cream must be quality ice cream. Seals prefer that ice sheets be at least 30 cm thick and they should also be quite wide, about 36 meters. ”
If the ice is too thin and unstable, pups can die. “The ice is breaking up from the waves,” Hammill says. ‘Or you will come through a storm and the swells will beat the pieces of ice together and grind or break it. Some little ones can be crushed and others can be thrown into the water. If they are repeatedly pushed back into the water, they drown and drown. ”
In the eighties and nineties, tourists generated the “white coat seals”, as the newborns are called, just as much income as the annual seal hunt. ‘When I started in 1990 [seal tourism], made big cannons at the time, ”says Hammill.
But the situation is now a serious concern for the 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 observation season of the white coat would last four to five weeks. Now, two weeks is a bonus. “We normally get a few hundred people during the season, so it loses a lot of revenue,” says Mario Cyr, a filmmaker, photographer, diver and expedition leader for seals. “And it’s something we love to do, that’s incredibly beautiful to behold.”
Guests come from all over the world, year after year, to see and take down the little ones. “Château Madelinot and the Îles de la Madeleine offer a unique experience,” says Bérubé, “because the coast of the islands is the most important place to observe the largest resin seal nursery in the world and we have good access to it.”
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 more than 350 people who booked, and we had to try to explain to them what was happening. 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 noticed that there was always a two year cycle every time we had to cancel. Will it happen again in 2022? ”
Cyr, a born and bred Madelinot, says the loss of business is bad, but he is also sad about what happens to the seals. “Last year there were many more deaths in the harb probe than in previous years.” Due to the lack of ice last season, resin seals were forced to turn eastward back to the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. “Sometimes the mothers tour the golf course for five to six days and look for a place where there is enough ice to give birth,” says Cyr.
Prior to 2010, consistent ice cover on the islands was taken for granted. But after the past decade, we’re seriously wondering what’s going to happen, says Cyr.
Whitecoat observation 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 go through the season, the customers appreciate it 1,000 times. “
As for the future, Cyr says he and his colleagues are worried, but he knows that tourism in the Magdalen Islands will finally come to an end.
‘We have to keep in mind that seals always return to the place where they were born. If we skip a year, like now, nothing genetically changes for the seals. But if it goes on 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 have changed their migration route. So for every year we lose, it makes less who will return. It is the effects of climate change that are really visible. ”
In 50, or even 30 years from now, “it will probably be an even division of years with sea ice on the wave and years without sea ice, and 50 years later we will almost never be,” says Galbraith .
For the time being, Hammill claims that the harb probe population at 7.6 m is in good condition.
“It does not look good for them in the Gulf of St Lawrence, but we expect that there will be a change in distribution over time,” he says. “They will gradually disappear from the wave, so instead of a third of the harp seals being born there, all the young may be born off the Labrador coast.”
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