We never entered Isabella Bay. Instead, our expedition ship cruised past the entrance, looking into a huge sweep of Arctic coastline on the northeastern side of Baffin Island. There was no sea kayaking here and no close approach into the bay itself, and there was a very good reason for that.
Isabella Bay, known in Inuktitut as Niginganiq, is now one of the most important protected areas for bowhead whales in the Canadian Arctic. The bay has become a crucial sanctuary for animals using these waters to feed, rest and gather during the Arctic summer and autumn. Protection here is taken seriously. Both Canadian authorities and Inuit have supported measures designed to reduce disturbance and help bowhead populations recover after centuries of exploitation. Hunting does not take place within this protected area, and larger vessels such as ours are not simply free to sail into the bay.
So our experience of Isabella Bay was from outside. In many ways, that felt appropriate. We could look into the bay, understand why it mattered and then leave the whales the space that had deliberately been protected for them. Behind the entrance rose the bare mountains and tundra of Baffin Island, while beyond us stretched the enormous waters of Baffin Bay. Somewhere inside that landscape were animals that may rank among the oldest mammals alive anywhere on Earth.
The bowhead whale is one of the great specialists of the Arctic. Adults can reach around 18 metres in length and weigh perhaps 75 to 100 tonnes. Even among the world’s great whales they are enormous animals, but their most obvious feature is the head. A bowhead’s huge, arched skull can account for roughly a third of the animal’s entire body length. It gives the whale its English name and represents an extraordinary adaptation to life amongst sea ice.
Bowheads have no dorsal fin, which makes sense for an animal regularly travelling beneath ice. They are wrapped in an exceptionally thick layer of blubber, sometimes more than 40 centimetres deep, protecting them from water temperatures that would rapidly overwhelm an unprotected human. Their enormous skull can even help them break through relatively thin ice to create breathing holes. But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about a bowhead whale is not its size or even its ability to survive in such extreme conditions. It is how long it can live.
Bowheads are believed to be the longest-lived mammals on Earth, with some individuals thought capable of surviving for more than 200 years. When travelling through the Canadian Arctic, that produces a remarkable sense of perspective. Sir John Franklin sailed into these waters aboard Erebus and Terror in 1845, and it is at least conceivable that a bowhead alive in the Canadian Arctic today could already have been swimming beneath Arctic sea ice when Franklin disappeared. A whale surfacing in Baffin Bay could potentially pre-date almost every modern piece of Arctic history we associate with the region.
Scientists first gained some remarkable clues to bowhead longevity through objects discovered inside the whales themselves. Old stone and ivory harpoon points, belonging to technologies that had disappeared from use many decades earlier, were occasionally found embedded in animals taken during modern Inuit subsistence hunts. Later scientific work, including studies of proteins within bowhead eye lenses, added further evidence that some individuals can live for close to two centuries. That gives every bowhead an extraordinary connection with the past.
The whales gather around Isabella Bay because the geography of the area creates particularly productive feeding conditions. The underwater landscape includes deep water relatively close to shore, while currents and tidal movements help concentrate the tiny marine organisms upon which bowheads depend. That seems almost ridiculous when you consider the size of the whale. An animal weighing perhaps 80 tonnes survives largely by eating creatures only millimetres long.
Bowheads are baleen whales. Instead of teeth, they possess long plates of baleen hanging from the upper jaw. The whale swims through dense concentrations of zooplankton with its mouth open, allowing water to flow between those plates while tiny animals are trapped. Much of the diet consists of copepods and other small invertebrates. Bowheads possess the longest baleen of any whale, with individual plates potentially reaching around four metres in length. The enormous head therefore makes much more sense: it supports one of the biggest filtration systems in the animal kingdom.
Isabella Bay can become especially important during late summer and autumn, when bowheads from the Eastern Canada–West Greenland population gather in productive feeding waters. That concentration of animals is one of the reasons the area eventually received formal protection. The Ninginganiq National Wildlife Area was established in 2010 and protects roughly 336,000 hectares of land and sea, making it Canada’s largest National Wildlife Area. The Inuktitut name Niginganiq is often translated as “the place where fog sits”, which seems wonderfully appropriate for this section of Arctic coastline.
It is easy to imagine a bowhead surfacing through cold grey water beneath a layer of mist, breathing explosively before disappearing again. But Isabella Bay is not simply an important wildlife site. It is also part of an Inuit cultural landscape. Inuit have travelled through, hunted within and understood these waters for generations.
Bowhead whales have enormous cultural significance across much of the Canadian Arctic. A bowhead has never simply been an animal to observe from a distance. Traditionally, successful whaling required detailed knowledge of weather, sea ice, currents and animal behaviour, as well as enormous cooperation within a community. When whales are taken today as part of carefully regulated Inuit subsistence hunts elsewhere in the Arctic, the meat and maktaaq can be shared widely. The relationship stretches back thousands of years, and archaeological sites across the Arctic include houses where enormous bowhead bones were incorporated into the structure itself.
Europeans came much later, and their impact was devastating. From the seventeenth century onwards, European and American commercial whalers increasingly targeted bowhead whales because they were extremely valuable animals. A bowhead carries huge quantities of blubber that could be rendered into whale oil, while the exceptionally long baleen, historically known as whalebone, was another valuable commodity. Before plastics existed, baleen was used for an extraordinary range of products, from corsets and umbrella ribs to carriage springs and other manufactured items requiring a combination of strength and flexibility.
By the nineteenth century commercial whalers were penetrating increasingly far into Baffin Bay and the Canadian Arctic. Thousands of bowheads were killed and the population collapsed. That history is one reason Isabella Bay feels so important today. This is not simply somewhere whales happen to occur. It is part of their recovery.
After large-scale commercial whaling ended, bowhead populations slowly began increasing again. The Eastern Canada–West Greenland population is now once again counted in thousands rather than the tiny remnant that survived the height of commercial exploitation. That recovery has depended partly on giving whales the time and space they need, and Isabella Bay provides exactly that.
What impressed me most about our visit was the fact that we were effectively prevented from having the more intimate wildlife experience we might normally hope for. We were not going to paddle into the bay, and our ship was not going to sail through it. The whales came first.
There is something encouraging about that. Adventure tourism often talks about wilderness, access and getting closer to wildlife, but sometimes good conservation means accepting that we should not go somewhere. The fact that this spectacular Arctic bay remains restricted to vessels such as ours is not a disappointment. It is a success. It means somebody has decided that the animals using it are more important than our desire to get closer.
That decision has been shaped by both conservation science and Inuit knowledge and priorities. The agreement not to hunt bowheads within the protected area is particularly significant given the deep cultural importance of the animal. It represents a deliberate choice to protect a place where whales can feed and recover.
The wider waters around eastern Baffin Island are incredibly rich in wildlife. Narwhal move through the region, as do ringed and bearded seals. Walrus occur in parts of the surrounding area and polar bears travel extensively along the coastline and across the sea ice. Seabirds connect the marine ecosystem to the land, with northern fulmars sweeping across Baffin Bay while black guillemots, Brünnich’s guillemots, eiders, gulls and other Arctic species feed in the surrounding waters.
Everything ultimately depends upon the productivity of the sea. Phytoplankton captures the energy of the Arctic summer sun, zooplankton feeds upon the phytoplankton, fish and other marine animals feed on the plankton, and then come seabirds, seals and whales. Even the enormous bowhead depends upon that microscopic world. It is one of the wonderful contradictions of Arctic ecology: some of the largest animals on Earth survive because vast numbers of some of the smallest animals in the ocean gather in the right place at the right time.
As our ship cruised past the entrance to Isabella Bay, there was no historic monument to visit and no landing site to explore. There was no abandoned expedition hut, no cairn and no grave from the age of Arctic exploration. The story here was different. It was about an ecosystem that has functioned for thousands of years and an animal that is almost impossibly well adapted to it.
Bowheads were feeding around Baffin Island long before Europeans began drawing these coastlines onto maps. They were here before Franklin. They survived the arrival of commercial whalers and a period when human exploitation reduced their population dramatically. Now they are returning in greater numbers.
That made simply looking into Isabella Bay feel surprisingly powerful. Of course I would have loved to paddle there and imagine sitting almost silently in a sea kayak, listening for the explosive breath of a bowhead somewhere across the water. But the fact we could not do that is really the point.
Isabella Bay has been set aside for the whales. We were visitors to the edge of it. Sometimes responsible wildlife tourism means getting closer. Sometimes it means stopping at the boundary, looking in and allowing one of the Arctic’s greatest animals to have the place to itself.
Why not take the opportunity to read our other blogs about Nunavut and the Canadian arctic;
- Beechey Island: Polar Bears, Franklin and Three Graves Beside the Sea
- Kayaking with Arctic Wildlife: Staying Safe Around Polar Bears, Walrus and Whales
- Croker Bay: Paddling Beneath the Glaciers of Devon Island
- Dundas Harbour: Ghosts in the Fog on Devon Island
- Duart Bay: Sea Kayaking into a Scottish Corner of Baffin Island
- Qikiqtarjuaq: Gateway to the Wild Mountains of Baffin Island
- Port Leopold: Paddling Through the Search for Franklin
- Prince Leopold Island: Paddling Beneath a City of Seabirds
- Radstock Bay: Paddling Through a Thousand Years of Arctic History