Canadian Arctic Wildlife Photography: Narwhal

A narwhal fluke (tail) rises out of the water directly in front of us as it dives under the ice edge to chase cod and other fish. Narwhals are not big whales, they rarely get over 15 feet long. We had to share the ice floe edge with numerous Inuit hunters who, as National Geographic documented, have an extremely inefficient method of hunting and killing them. In the nine days we were camped on the ice floe edge, I personally saw at least 9 narwhals get shot, yet only 2 were actually recovered. It is assumed that most of the others died and sank, never to be recovered. However, it's hard to say if today's methods using snow machines and rifles is much different in terms of efficiency than the tradtional Inuit hunting methods using dog teams and harpoons. I suspect that even back then the Inuit did not have a particularly high rate of recovering their kills.

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