Sunday, June 15, 2008

Look Out Be...luga!

Three and a quarter hours is how long it used to take for the Red Arrow bus to travel between the two different cities my parents lived in for a short time while I was growing up (a process, incidentally, in which I have quite a ways to go before anyone would consider it complete).

So… Mom in one place, Dad in another. On weekends my brother and sister and I would settle in for round trip passage on the coach line service so we could go visit our father who was three and a quarter hours away (btw, Happy Father's Day goes out to good 'ol Dad today).

Eventually Dad returned to our city and those delightful bus trips came to an end. It's been quite some time since "3 and a quarter hours" held any significance for me, but I couldn't help but be reminded of it last Tuesday.

That was the day I watched and waited for 3 hours and 17 minutes as a pregnant beluga whale named Qila (pronounced: KEE-lah) endured labour and then, finally, gave birth to bouncing baby girl at the Vancouver Aquarium! Qila's labour began at 1:11pm and finished at 4:28pm.

Ever witness a beluga whale birth? There's lots of words I could use to describe this rare, amazing event. But maybe I'll just leave it at that... rare and amazing. You can add more words of your own which I'm sure you'll have no problem doing once you see for yourself what I'm talking about...

...here's a 69 second video of the beluga whale birth, as it happened here in Vancouver on Tuesday, June 10, 2008:

Quite the sight, doncha think?!

As you can hear from the audio, the beluga baby's birth elicited a boisterous response of cheers and applause from the people who saw the birth happen. There was about 250 people who watched from both the underwater viewing gallery and up outside at water surface level. They were just simply in the right place at the right time (if you like these sorts of things, that is).

After the calf swam to the surface to take its very first breath, members of the Aquarium's veterinary and animal care teams went in the beluga pool, wearing wet suits, and quickly lined the perimeter of the animal habitat to help the little gaffer avoid swimming into a solid surface.

But the newborn beluga quickly got the hang of her environment and then everyone removed themselves, teeth chattering, from the beluga pool.

The baby beluga whale has yet to be named although she's probably the most unforgettable thing I'll see this summer in Vancouver.

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