Baby Beluga

Quite by accident, I may have been one of the few people to see Kavna alive at the Vancouver Aquarium. Kavna was the whale from the song, “Baby Beluga,” by Raffi, a famous children’s singer.

The family and I had gone to the Aquarium on B.C. Day along with a few other thousand people, and we went to go and see the whale show at around 3:30 p.m.. The show was cancelled, however, and the area around the upper viewing area was cordoned and guarded by two female staff members who politely answered questions from my mother-in-law. With nothing else to do and the show cancelled, we hung around the area eating ice cream. Eventually I noticed a group of people coming out of the restricted area, where I first noticed a third whale, Kavna, was being kept in a separate tank. There were maybe a dozen people in total, but I assumed they were a part of some kind of a “swim with the whales” program. It was fairly crowded, and there hadn’t been any mention that the whale was sick up until that point. Looking back, they seemed distressed. One man came out and sat in the bleachers and emptied water out of his boots. Another was shivering in a towel while being held steady by a pair of workers. Then the two remaining belugas came up to the tank and curiously poked their noses out of the water to look and hung around the area for a while. Previously, they’d been swimming around as whales do. They had been on their backs quite a bit swimming upside down, getting exercise, with no one directing them.

The whale had died around the same time we were there, give or take a half hour.

The beluga herself was 46-50 years old, which is more than twenty years the average life expectancy of a beluga in the wild. The same beluga had been there at the Aquarium my entire life, and I’d seen her every second year or so, perhaps fifteen times in total.

We left at around 5 p.m., oblivious that one of the aquarium’s oldest and inarguably most famous residents had died while we were there. One would imagine news like that would send a shockwave through the entire staff, but it was impossible to tell from any of their expressions or demeanour that they knew anything was amiss. I can’t even think of a parallel in the human world where something like that could happen and people not know, or let on that they knew.