The happy chirping of the playful great white beluga whale jumps into an environment and economy that is melting sea ice from warmer waters, starving polar bears and changing the entire food chain.

Loud and curious herds of belugas are clicking, clucking and swaying here.

At any given moment during the summer on the Churchill River, which flows into Hudson Bay, as many as 4,000 belugas can be up and down the waterway, surrounding vessels of all sizes.

“It’s hard to find a place where you don’t see them,” said Valeria Vergara, a senior whale biologist at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

“The social butterflies of the whale world — you can see that at Churchill,” Vergara said.

The town of Churchill, Maine, is counting on it to keep going.

Many of the local communities, driven out of economic depression by polar bear tourism, face the prospect of declining bear numbers due to climate change.

They’re counting on the beluga, another great white beast, to save and attract summer tourists — if even the marine mammals can survive the changes in this Arctic gateway.

There is something healing about belugas. Just ask Erin Green.

Green was attacked by a polar bear in 2013. She didn’t want to go into details about the attack, but Mayor Mike Spence said she was mauled by a bear that held her in its jaws.

A neighbor hit the bear with a shovel, and a third person used a truck to scare off the bear, which was later found and killed.

Years later, Greene said contact with the affable whale helped her overcome post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now she goes out on the water with them, paddleboards, and sings with the whales. She also rents paddle boards to tourists, so they can do the same.

Green, who is not a native of Churchill but came to work in the tourism industry, tried yoga, which eventually led to paddle boarding in Hawaii.

She felt a little better, so she thought she’d bring him back to Churchill, where there’s not just water, but belugas.

And it helped her heal “going through the various stages of dealing with the trauma.”

But it’s not just her, she said. When she brings her clients in the water inches from the whales, they feel better, too.

“I’ve never seen an animal, except maybe a dog, bring so much and such a capacity for joy to people,” Green said.

“Everybody’s smiling when they come out of the water. … Everybody’s just experiencing joy, and it’s the whales that provide that.”

He said that the beluga whale is different from other animals.

“Whales are really choosing to hang out with you. They want to play,” Green said. “That’s really what sets them apart from other animals. They’re very gentle. They have no desire to hurt humans.”

It doesn’t hurt that whales have gotten to know Green, whale expert Vergara says, which is true.

Sings the Green Whale, incl Yellow Submarine The Beatles and Will Ferrell Eurovision Song Husavik (my hometown) With the lyric, “Where whales can live because they’re gentle people.”

Vergara said the song is close to reality.

“They really have traits that are similar to human culture, so we can really empathize with them,” Vergara said.

“They form communities and networks. They cooperate and help raise each other’s young. They are incredibly vocal. They are probably the most vocally active or One of the vocal mammals.”

Unlike humpback whales, belugas’ vocalizations are not rhythmic and patterned songs, he said.

“You don’t really think, ‘Oh, I’m listening to a song.’ You think ‘I am in a forest full of birds’.

It’s a cacophony of clicks and whistles, but it’s not random. Vergara said it’s like falling into a raucous festival.

“You can’t help but wonder what it is that they’re communicating with each other,” she said.

“They absolutely depend on sound to maintain these complex societies.”

Research shows that individual belugas have a distinct call that they use in communication, much like a name, Vergara said. It takes a few years for young whales to learn their parents’ names and their own.

But whales that are related or move together have similar calls or names, like last names, he said.

Vergara said belugas get the nickname “canary of the sea” because of their vocalizations, but it could also apply like a canary in a coal mine, warning the environment of more danger. is

Sea ice is shrinking across the Arctic, including Hudson Bay. This may be the largest beluga population in the world, but scientists are a bit worried.

“The disappearing snow is affecting them,” Vergara said. “We don’t know how they will react to changes in water temperature, changes in food availability, changes in regular prey availability.”

The change in ice is part of an overall change in the base of the food chain: the plankton. When those tiny creatures change, it means “a complete change in the prey base of belugas,” Vergara said.

Pierre Richard, a beluga expert at the Churchill Northern Studies Center and author of three whale books, said Arctic cod, a high-fat fish that is key to the beluga’s diet, is in decline.

“It’s an open question whether belugas can adopt,” he said.

Richard said that in the Beaufort Sea, belugas aren’t as fat as they once were, but scientists don’t know about them in Hudson Bay.

Another problem is killer whales that come more into Hudson Bay hunting belugas, and less sea ice means fewer places for belugas to hide, he and University of Washington marine mammal scientist Kristen Ledery said. .

“Whether belugas in Hudson Bay are exposed to these ecosystem changes is not at all clear,” Richard said.

Beluga whales, unlike polar bears, are not listed as endangered or vulnerable as a species, although there is a population of them in Alaska.

There are 200,000 belugas worldwide and the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists them as a species of “least concern,” so Vergara was asked why the focus wasn’t on animals more at risk. Concentrate.

“I would say that the threat to animal cultures can happen much faster than the extinction of an entire species,” Vergara said.

If subpopulations of belugas are wiped out, their cultures are also wiped out.

“It’s like losing a human language or a human culture,” Vergara said. “We must take care.”