The Ice Bear: It’s In My Blood

Fact: I love polar bears. I have since I was a kid. And it’s not just because they are super cool with awesome adaptations to withstand their Arctic habitat, but of course that’s part of it! I had pictures and posters and books about them all over my room growing up. I think I was around 8 years old when I started hearing stories about the three years my dad lived in Churchill (as a boy with his parents & brother) and I was fascinated with the thought of a place, that in my estimation at the time, was the farthest north you could get, was so cold and covered in ice and yet somehow so full of life. Thus began my love affair with the great white bear.

My grandfather was in the military and he was stationed in Churchill from 1954 to 1957. What I heard about most from my grandmother was how cold it was and how the spring and summer seasons were too short for her liking. And while the ice slowly broke up and melted in the spring, you could hear cracks louder than thunder through the whole town. What my dad told me about were his explorations with his brother, looking everywhere for polar bears. He was unfortunate on one hand because he never saw any despite all his time spent outside. On the other hand, he was fortunate not to have ended up nose-to-nose with a bear while exploring the rocky outskirts of town. Many of the rocks are light in colour and it’s easy to mistake them for a slumbering bear; it’s equally as easy to mistake a slumbering bear for a rock and inadvertently end up too close! Still I was surprised to hear that in the ‘polar bear capital of the world’, where tens of thousands of visitors now travel every fall to see these huge carnivores, my dad and uncle never saw even one bear. What I realized later was that while the military was operating in Churchill, the town’s population was around 5,000 people. With all the activity and noisy military vehicles around it makes sense that bears mostly stayed out of town.




Aerial View of Fort Churchill in the 1950s © Lenore N

 



Hudson Bay Shoreline © Lenore N



Years after the military left, the scientists showed up. The southern-most polar bear populations are forced ashore in late spring/early summer when the ice breaks up and they live off their fat reserves until the ice forms again in mid to late fall and they can get back out on the ice to hunt seals. Because there was a town, an infrastructure in place, and above all, polar bears, it was – and still is - the perfect location to study them. To this day, there is more chronological data about Churchill’s polar bears (referred to as the western Hudson Bay sub-population) than any other sub-population in the world. Now of course, scientists are studying polar bears throughout their circumpolar range around the globe and they have become the iconic species for climate change because the Arctic is changing more rapidly than any other ecosystem on the planet.

What I’d like to stress here is that while polar bears are struggling with their changing habitat because of climate change, scientists still have hope that we can save certain sub-populations if we all make a concerted effort to reduce our energy consumption and our dependence on fossil fuels NOW. One organization doing amazing work on polar bear conservation is Polar Bears International (PBI) and I would encourage you to visit their website to find out about their work. In the coming weeks top bear scientists will even be broadcasting live from the tundra in specially equipped vehicles while wild bears roam at the edge of Hudson Bay waiting for the ice to freeze.  Check it out at http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/.

Churchill Wildlife Management Area © Lenore N

Because these bears are still a favourite of mine, this is only the first of my blogs about them. There are way too many stories and cool facts to write about at one time! And as I mentioned in my previous blog, I have had the amazing privilege to observe and work with wild polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba three times in my career. The experiences themselves were very special, but what made them even more special was being able to share my stories and pictures with my dad and grandparents 50 years after they lived there.