Bowhead whales are one of the few whales and the only baleen whale that reside exclusively in the Arctic and subarctic waters. They are highly adapted to the icy waters. Bowheads have insulating blubber up to 20 inches thick. Their heads are triangular shaped and hard which allows them to break through ice, even up to two feet thick. Bowhead whale numbers were once maybe 50,000 including about 10,000 to 23,000 in the Western Arctic. Those numbers were depleted down to below 3,000 in the 1920’s. The taking of whales was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1986 but an allowance was made for indigenous peoples to take some with a harvest quota which gets predetermined every five years. Today, the number of Bowhead whales is probably between 11,000 and 16,000 in the Western Arctic. Bowhead whales reproduce at a rate of 3 percent annually and the indigenous people’s harvest represents between .1 and .5 percent. In the case of Kaktovik, their current quota is three whales per year.

Bowhead whales are harvested between mid-August and mid-September each year. By the time that we got to Kaktovik, they had already harvested two whales this year. We had super weather, so they were out each day hunting for their third whale. We had hopes to see a whale get harvested and the whole process but no luck. The entire town gets involved in the whale harvest. The Inupiat Eskimos and other Native Alaskans have been harvesting whales for thousands of years. Bowhead whales can grow to 60 feet long and as much as 100 tons. That’s a lot of food for a subsistence culture.

On our first walk around town, it was obvious that we were in a whale harvesting area as you can see in the first photo. Whale bones were even in people’s yards, but only if they were really old whale bones.

We never got to see a whale harvest but I took a photo of a photo in the hotel. You can see this in the second picture. The whole process can take many days to complete.

People were not supposed to leave meat outside their homes to prevent the attraction of polar bears into town. I saw this notice (law) posted in the community center. Several people ignored this however. You can see this in the third and fourth photo. This is called muktuk which is the chewy outer skin and the succulent inner fat. I asked and our local guide said that at least one woman was very elderly and that she stuck with the old traditions of how things were done. The community seems to have some tolerance for such cases. This did, however, attract the bears. On our last day in Kaktovik, our guide and I visited the community center and then walked around town on the way home. Our host’s daughter came in later to tell us that we had walked right past a polar bear that had come into town and had snatched a piece of muktuk. I was only upset because I had missed the photo opportunity but it was probably for the best.

Once the whale harvest is finished and all the meat that can be removed has been removed, the carcass gets hauled to the “bone pile”. This is out at the far end of town on the end of the spit where the original military runway was built. You can see the bone pile in the last photo. The polar bears of course, finish off any meat or edible parts that get left on the carcass. Some people believe that this is one of the saving graces for the polar bears in Kaktovik. Since the sea ice is now melting away and the bears can’t as soon and as easily get out to it to hunt seals, this gives them some good food to fill the gap. Our local guide suggested that this is actually successful since so many of the bears in Kaktovik are having two or three cubs a year.