polar bears

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.

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…