The Sea Canaries
by Caitlin Stall-Paquet
Captain Cécile Hauchecorne parked her Zodiac boat at the dock in L’Anse-Saint-Jean, a village of just over 1,200 on Québec’s Saguenay Fjord where granite-faced mountains plunge deep into frigid waters. After I stepped onto the vessel, she handed me a waterproof orange jacket and overalls, a beacon in the grey morning. We set out navigating through thick fog that made the steep hills look like mirages floating above brackish waters, freezing despite that summer’s unusual heat. The fog was in everything, dampening my hair and piercing through my layers. It snaked around the trunks of wispy pines jutting out from the rocky slopes, like Ashuaps, the local Innu people’s serpentine sea monster. According to legend, the giant beast winds through Lac Saint-Jean: the lake at one end of this 105-kilometre-long fjord.
The narrow waterway was dug around 11,000 years ago by the crushing weight of a receding glacier, leaving this jagged crack in the mountains, bookended by the mighty St. Lawrence River to the east and the 1,000-square-kilometre freshwater lake to the west. Famously shallow and prone to myths, you could mistake someone wandering far out into Lac Saint-Jean as walking on its surface. Tall tales thrive naturally in these parts, in the fjord’s cold saltwater that runs deep through the glacier-carved inlet with a warmer layer of fresh water up top. This divided flow creates separate worlds full of different species swimming above and below each other without contact, like planes in the sky. It’s easy to imagine monsters lurking in these depths with drop-offs plunging to 280 metres, beyond the sun’s reach. Every decade or so, a deep-water fishing line tugs harder than expected, making those holding onto the reel fight against the creature that’s taken their bait. In 2016, a woman hauled up a nine-foot, 234-year-old Greenland shark—flesh poisonous from the enzymes that help it live down in the dark—already dead from the pressure drop.
Many beasts draw people here. Hauchecorne told me about moving to Saguenay from France because its wildlife had captured her imagination. She had been unable to leave, like a willing Persephone sailing the underworld. Hauchecorne led me away from the lake, toward salt and Tadoussac, where people from around the world gather during the summertime to catch a glimpse of other seasonal visitors. My father had also taken me there: I was a kid who’d watched Free Willy too many times and yearned to see marine mammals. We had camped downriver on L’Isle-aux-Coudres, where I first experienced tides and walked barefoot along pebble beaches when the water was low, popping bloated seaweed under my toes as I fixed my eyes on the horizon.
Tadoussac is at the geographical confluence of the regions of Saguenay, Côte-Nord, and Charlevoix. There, the saltwater of the St. Lawrence estuary meets the brackish fjord, and huge amounts of krill attract whales looking to feast. The area is also home to a rare marine mammal that prefers fish to the tiny crustaceans. Belugas—much smaller than the humpback, fin, and blue whales that occasionally pass through—grow to about twelve feet long. They’re the only species to regularly swim over the twenty-metre underwater peak at the mouth of the narrow fjord. When I was here twenty-five years ago on a whale-watching ship with my father, he pointed to their white backs breaking through waves on the horizon.
The St. Lawrence is the world’s largest estuary, and its English description as a river does not do justice to its grandeur. The seaway is better suited to the Algonquin name Magtogoek, which means the way that walks—a reminder that it has always guided people—or the French moniker fleuve. The latter is a waterway that empties into the ocean, as the St. Lawrence does after travelling 1,197 kilometres from the Great Lakes to the frigid Atlantic. Slowing down as the fog thickens, Hauchecorne told me how captains who sail the fleuve are trained specifically on its waters because of the drastic tides, strong currents, underwater mountains, temperatures that can drop swiftly below freezing, and protected zones surrounded by boreal forests and rocky shores.
These rugged landscapes have etched deep lines in my mind, like receding glaciers have scarred the earth. They’re so alive in my imagination that I’ve been surprised by how English Canadians (from where the St. Lawrence begins, and westward) are often unaware of these landscapes, of the province’s close tie to saltwater. An editor once made a change in a text of mine, adding “since Québec is land-locked.” My heart sank down to the Greenland shark’s depths then. I wrote back that eighty percent of Québécois people live along the St. Lawrence, including the island of Montréal where I live and where the water is polluted, though still fresh.
As we pass Baie-Sainte-Marguerite, Hauchecorne explained why we kept our distance. At the tail end of the June-to-September season, female belugas use the cove’s calmer waters to help their newborns grow strong, away from competitive males. Boats have to keep a minimum distance of 400 metres from the whales because collisions can injure and sometimes kill the curious creatures. But increased risk of accidents isn’t the only harm our presence brings. The noise from our motors reverberates underwater, travelling four times faster below the surface than through the air. Our loud metallic clacking sounds like a beating drum, infiltrating pods whose ears are their eyes. Our noise puts them at our mercy, interrupts their communication and makes them vulnerable as we distort their connections to each other.
When Jacques Cartier first sailed through the gulf of the St. Lawrence and into the fleuve, he described thousands of ghostly white animals. Nineteenth-century fishermen mistakenly assumed belugas were responsible for declining cod populations (it was due to overfishing); they were granted the right to cull the belugas, bringing a population of over 10,000 down to about 1,800. Centuries after this decimation, in 1994, the Saguenay–St. Lawrence Marine Park was created. It is home to a year-round population of white whales, the world’s southernmost grouping of the arctic mammal.
Despite protection, beluga populations have not bounced back. A combination of accidents, microplastics, agricultural run-off, and noise pollution is invisibly fighting against them—and winning. Scientists working in the St. Lawrence have long been sounding the alarm about the disruptive effects of underwater noise on the fleuve’s mammals. In 2021, Yvan Simard at the Université du Québec à Rimouski released an atlas of ocean soundscapes to map acoustic refuges for species that communicate with sonar, in an attempt to keep these areas quieter. As a major shipping route for centuries, boats have multiplied on these waters, in step with our ever-rising demand. Though tourists on half-day cruises with their noses pressed against glass in anticipation aren’t entirely safe for whales, our insatiable material thirst represents a greater danger.
Just before we reached Tadoussac, Hauchecorne suddenly slowed to five knots, pointing to white shapes on the horizon. My heart swelled like when I was a kid, as three curious belugas swam towards us. All we could do was be still so they would not follow our boat. My throat tightened as we waited for them to pass. “It’s always touching,” the captain said, smiling at the sight of my damp eyes. I tried to hold on to the feeling, like that of the swelling waves. I tried to consider its power and examine it under a mental microscope before remembering I needed to listen to it to understand the tears pushing up. In her documentary about the fleuve, Des Rives, eco-educator Billie-Jazz Marcuzzo-Roy recalls her parents playing whale songs when she was little: she had that same urge to cry when listening to them. She posits this happens because it sounds like they’re telling us about their decline, which is tied to our own.
After the belugas passed, Hauchecorne brought up another hot topic of maritime conversation. Whales larger than belugas made their way into the fjord during the summer for the first time in decades. The reigning hypothesis is that changes in water temperatures affected krill populations, throwing off the giants, luring them into tighter spots to find food. This shift reminded me of a young humpback whale that swam all the way to Montréal's freshwater port in 2020 only to die trying to get back to salt. Some thought the calf had gotten separated from its mother hundreds of kilometres up the river because their communication was interrupted.
Many of the captains, sailors, scientists, and people who tune their lives to the fleuve’s rhythms are pushing for the creation of quiet corridors in sensitive areas, partially thanks to evolved monitoring equipment like hydrophones that allow listeners to hear life underwater, stepping out of their perception and into the depths where they can hear human dominance. After Hauchecorne dropped me off at the Tadoussac marina, she headed back into the fog. Watching her disappear, I was left thinking about the belugas whose communication we drown out, leaving them to hope their pod will still be there once our noise subsides. Walking up the hill towards the town’s red roofs, the colour of lighthouses, it started to sink in: these animals have evolved around us. Rather than vocalizing louder in the presence of heavy boat traffic, echolocating belugas go quiet. I wondered if we also silence ourselves in our cacophony, drowning out our depths.
Despite living in an entirely different realm, belugas mirror us. There is kinship in our skeletons. Their neck vertebrae aren’t fused, so they can turn their heads up towards us inquisitively, breaking through the watery divide. We can move our necks to look back down, amazed that they have not yet learned to fear us. They form social networks and communities: one male pod in the region has even adopted a narwhal lost from the Arctic into its group—the only known instance of this cohabitation. Belugas speak to one another in a range of vocalizations we can’t yet grasp, a variety that has earned them the nickname “sea canaries.” Researchers once heard a captive beluga imitate human speech, spontaneously rather than after being painstakingly taught like a parrot. For better or for worse, they love our music and are drawn to us when we sing, as if it were a siren’s song.
Since I first saw them in the wild as a kid, whales have been showing up in my dreams. I’m often out in open waters, fearing what lurks below. But the whales quickly become soothing. If I fall into the waves among them, their backs keep me above the surface. Months after my trip to Tadoussac, I was going through old boxes I had kept from my father’s house after he died of cancer in 2017. I dug through our intermingled mementos, decades mixed: photos of my high school friends smoking joints, a scrapbook of my father’s 1970s trip to India, intricately folded handwritten letters from my best friend written while bored in math class, pictures of my dad in bell-bottom jeans at his sister’s wedding, birthday cards where he marvelled at how fast I was growing up, and a few blank postcards. One of them was of a sunset on the fleuve, its calm waters broken by the rounded backs of humpback whales and the words Les Grandes Dames du Saint-Laurent. I pinned the card above my desk.
I’ve met my father in dreams of water, sitting on large dunes lapped by rising waves coming in, turning tidal. Shadows of gigantic, gentle mammals appear in them as they crest. I look up at the card as I string words together like nautical knots and feel that familiar swell, the lump in my throat. I can almost sense the movement of the waves, the exhilaration when the first shape of a back appears, a glimpse of much more below. If I close my eyes, my father is right behind me as I hold onto the rails of the boat, as he points to the horizon.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Creator photo by Alexi Hobbs
Caitlin Stall-Paquet is a Montreal-based writer, editor, translator, and occasional forest dweller who loves making annual trips to maritime Quebec. Her work has been published in The Walrus, Elle Canada, the Globe and Mail, CBC, Yolk Literary Journal, BESIDE, Hazlitt, The Narwhal, and Chatelaine. @caitlinstallp on Instagram and Twitter.