Polar bears

This is the last day Natalia and I will be flying with the team before we head back to Anchorage, so we are happy to see blue skies in the morning. After breakfast, we prep for the day and pack up the helicopters.

We see track after track all morning, but all of them appear to be old. We flew northwest today, in search of larger male bears. They have definitely been spending a lot of time here, but we have yet to sight a bear.

In early April, WWF’s Bering and Arctic Sea program officer, Elisabeth Kruger, traveled to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service field office in the Arctic to assist with interpretation for our Moscow colleague, Natalia Illarionova.

In these blog posts, Elisabeth describes her experiences on the Arctic slope and the work that the FWS does to help us understand the Chukchi Sea polar bear population.

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.

Peter Ewins and Rhys Gerholdt of WWF Canada are with an ABC News crew from New York in Wapusk National Park, observing the world’s largest concentration of maternity dens for polar bears.

They shot this lovely footage of a polar bear cub, and another of a polar bear and her offspring, during the trip, showing how one mum and her cub behave as they emerge from a den, and a baby bear playing at the mouth of a den.

Morris had found another set of tracks of a female with single cub (the commonest litter size this year – clear evidence of the continuing declines in mean numbers of cubs emerging from the maternity dens). But on the way there, we came across tracks of a female and THREE cubs!

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.

We’re now in the middle of nowhere, 40km south of Churchill, to be met by the caterpillar vehicles. Then, an hour crunching over the tundra into the actual lodge, perched atop an esker, overlooking one of the main polar bear denning areas.

It’s 0530 and my WWF-US colleague Rhys Gerholdt and I are with an ABC News crew from New York, heading up to Wapusk National Park and the world’s largest concentration of maternity dens for polar bears, writes Peter Ewins of WWF Canada.