polar bears

Jon Aars is a researcher with the Norwegian Polar Institute, Norway’s main institution for research, environmental monitoring and mapping of the polar regions. With the support of WWF, Aars studies polar bear populations on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. Read all of  his field notes from a Spring 2013 research expedition, and follow the bears […]

Jon Aars is a researcher with the Norwegian Polar Institute, Norway’s main institution for research, environmental monitoring and mapping of the polar regions. With the support of WWF, Aars studies polar bear populations on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. Read all of  his field notes from a Spring 2013 research expedition, and follow the bears […]

Jon Aars is a researcher with the Norwegian Polar Institute, Norway’s main institution for research, environmental monitoring and mapping of the polar regions. With the support of WWF, Aars studies polar bear populations on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. Read all of  his field notes from a Spring 2013 research expedition, and follow the bears […]

A recent genetic study of polar bears suggests that past changes in climate helped shape the bears we know today.

Femke Koopmans from WWF-Netherlands joined the Arctic Programme’s Geoff York to learn from the international community the best ways to prevent conflict between bears and people.

Despite temperatures well below freezing, Cape Kozhevnikov is bustling. The Umky Patrol is hard at work, using tractors and snowmobiles to transport frozen walrus carcasses and pile them outside town.

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.