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Polar bear team update: Today on the tundra

Rhys and I awoke to a crystal clear dawn, a numbing -40C again, and the excitement of reconnecting with the female polar bear and her single cub that we had left at sunset yesterday evening. After one of cook Daryl’s splendid tundra breakfasts at Wat’chee lodge, we headed out in the tracked vehicles with top-notch photographers from around the world, and the ABC news crew.

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Driving on the Beaufort

Last Saturday, we drove on the Beaufort Sea. It was quite amazing. One doesn’t often think about driving on a frozen sea, looking over vast expanses of ice on one side and low headlands on the other. We spotted fish drying racks left on the shingle beaches from the summer and fall fishing seasons, covered in snow and blowing forlornly in the wind.

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It’s not too late to save polar bears: study

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.

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This amazing part of Manitoba

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.

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Heading for Cape Churchill

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 …

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What a day!

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.

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