No Bowhead Sightings Yet For Alaskan Whalers. Some Blame Climate Change

The bowhead whale hunt is an essential cultural and subsistence tradition for the Inupiat of Alaska's North Slope. It dates back at least 1,500 years, and annual harvests can supply families with hundreds of pounds of meat.

"It is the way of our life, and it's why we are who we are," said Deano Olemaun, a top official at the North Slope Borough.

Each fall, captains from Alaska's northernmost community, Utqiaġvik, drive their powerboats 10 to 20 miles offshore to hunt whales. Usually by this point in the season, successful crews have towed dead bowheads back to town, divided up the meat and shared it with friends and family, who eat it through the winter until the whales return on their spring migration. But this year, a month into the fall hunt in Utqiaġvik, the bowheads still haven't shown up....

"This is a very important food source to us, and we have nothing to date," said Eugene Brower, a retired whaling captain with a son who's been hunting bowheads "constantly," without success.

"We're being heavily impacted up this way," Brower said. "This is the first time we ever encountered a season with no whales being sighted."...

One thing that's clear to Brower, the retired whaler, is that unless things turn around, there won't be a lot of whale meat stored away in Utqiaġvik this winter.

"Whatever muktuk you've got, whale meat, that's going to be scarce," he said. "It's going to be a commodity that's going to be hard to get."