CBC The Nature of Things - Call of the Baby Beluga (2016)

Call of the Baby Beluga

A young beluga is stranded on the shores of the St. Lawrence… and it’s alive! A team of scientists decides to try and rescue it… This is how the Call of the Baby Beluga begins, a story that will take you to the belugas in the heart of the St. Lawrence Estuary. The group spent months in the company of research teams tracking belugas in their habitat. The end result of these hundreds of hours of filming is captivating, and relates the story of this small and threatened population of white whales and the efforts that researchers have been making for decades to protect them. The story becomes grim as European whalers then settlers killed thousands of belugas for leather and oil. Then, in the 1920s, the government put a bounty on belugas because fishermen mistakenly believed the whales were destroying fisheries. Commercial hunting continued until 1959, and sport hunting lasted another two decades. Then, out of the decimation of the killing, the whales were suddenly embraced by humans when we learned of their intelligence and social lives.

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