Geoff York's latest posts

Finally – a banner morning: clear, nearly calm, and should reach +5F by this afternoon. The team was joined by a second small helicopter late last night that will act as a spotter and may also haul extra fuel later in the season when the sea ice become too broken for the fixed wing to land. We meet at 8 AM for our briefing and plan to launch around half past ten. We will also have our fixed wing spotter/fuel plane today, so pilot coordination will be important.

Karyn, Michelle and I ready the gear and load up the helicopter. We’ll head northwest today and cover some new habitat to the southwest of Point Hope. The village of Point Hope is one of the oldest Inupiat sites in Alaska and is still a largely traditional village to this day. As such they live close to the land and the sea, relying on wildlife for healthy and affordable protein- including fish, caribou, seals, whale, and polar bear. Spring however is the time where focus turns to one single and very important species- the Bowhead whale.

Fourteen years. It’s difficult to believe that this will be my fourteenth consecutive year conducting polar bear captures in Alaska. From my first fall capture season in 1998, I always assume that each season and year will be my last such opportunity. Why? Because so few people have the opportunity to work out on the frozen seas, and fewer yet with an animal as magnificent as the polar bear. It is both an opportunity and a real honour and one I do not take for granted – every flight, every day, every year.

A new paper published in Nature magazine suggests that reductions in greenhouse gases would be effective in saving polar bear populations from the worst effects of climate change. The report says that the bears’ arctic sea ice habitat is most likely to decline in a linear fashion, showing a direct correlation between greenhouse gas levels, higher temperatures, and ice melting.

Our day starts early at Cape Churchill following a long day of travel and a late night getting the camp up and running. The temperature has dropped dramatically in the last few days and is now around -27 C with winds gusting up to 60 km/hr. This adds a wind chill factor of nearly -48 C (at -40, centigrade and Fahrenheit are the same). BJ Kirschhoffer, Director of Field Operations for PBI, and I still have a few things to take care of regarding the remote communications system at the Cape. If everything works as planned this morning, I have an 8 AM interview with Norwegian Public Radio. We head out in the dark on our Tundra Buggy to the Cape Tower, an old observation platform originally set up by Dr. Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service. BJ needs to connect a new battery pack to the repeater system and we’ll also deploy a small generator for recharging the system during the week.

Wagons ho! It’s moving day and the morning starts a good hour earlier. By 7 AM we are fed and aboard our tour buggies. It’s still dark as we head out on the tundra hoping for that perfect sunrise bear. And as luck would have it – we find him …

An exceptional two days of bear viewing in the Manitoba Wildlife management area. I’ll let the bears speak for themselves…

It’s the first day out for our new group and I am amazed and happy to look out on the Bay at first light – ice is forming well out onto the tidal flats! This is a stark change from just five days ago when we flew over this same area during our coastal survey and saw only open water. The Wildlife Management Area just east of Churchill is unique and protected for this very reason – ice forms and is retained along this part of the coast early in the winter and remains late in the spring. This is also why so many polar bears remain, or migrate into this area in the late autumn as they await their opportunity to return to the sea ice.

Today I’m joining a special group of visitors from Germany led by a colleague from their WWF home office. WWF Germany, in partnership with Wick’s (the company many of us know as Vick’s), has become a funding partner of the WWF Global Arctic Program and our polar bear conservation efforts. We are all very lucky to be joining Frontiers North Adventures for their final trip of 2010, and the only trip that is permitted into Wapusk National Park and all the way to Cape Churchill.

A snowstorm at last and it looks like winter may ultimately be arriving. Flights are cancelled or delayed and it’s finally looking a lot more like the sub-arctic. As sometimes happens when you are at the right place and at the right time, an opportunity arises that was unexpected.