Do you get as tired and depressed as I can after listening to the latest news reports which seem to to be getting worse with each passing day? Having heard enough about the unthinkable catastrophe quickly unfolding in the Ukraine, I was about to turn off my radio when I heard Matt Galloway, on CBC’s The Current, suggest we stay tuned for his next interview about a rare kind of whale recently sighted in the St. Lawrence River.

Since COVID arrived with its challenges two years ago and our changing climate has so far tested us with a winter like no other that we have ever seen, I have developed the ‘not so great’ habit of listening to the morning news over a larger than usual cup of coffee. I rationalise this by telling myself it’s better to hear about the catastrophe taking place in the Ukraine in the morning rather than seeing it on the late night news before going to bed.

Returning now to the narwhal sighting, for some inexplicable reason this was a story I felt I needed to hear more about. It’s not surprising that whales, birds and other wildlife are being seen outside their natural habitats these days as our climate changes. So what is so unusual about one baby narwhal sighting so far south when normally he hangs out in the far north of the Arctic? Hoping it might possibly be a good news story which could help shake off my doldrums, I grabbed a pen to make some notes because down deep I could finally feel a topic to write about for my next blog post.

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