Polar Bear Blog - Incredible Shrinking Polar Bears - August 30, 2006

I am not sure why but I really get irked when I read news articles about the latest scientific disaster to hit polar bears. There are always announcements that the ice cap is melting, they have less time to hunt seals, they are drowning, they are being over-hunted, they are turning to cannibalism, they are turning into hermaphrodites. And now their genitals are getting smaller. Great.

I really respect polar bears, they scare the living daylights out of me and really decrease the amount of REM sleep I get around this time of year but I still respect them. Every new study and new article just feels like a friend has been kicked while he is down.

I mean, give the bears a break - not from pollution or climate change (we should have done that twenty years ago...ten years ago...March 2nd...) - but from pity. Will somebody please write a story about polar bears doing something majestic instead of simply more demeaning science?

We talk about how we created climate change and climate change is killing polar bears and how we have to save them - but that does not translate politically, we will save them as long as it does not really inconvenience our day-to-day life. It does seems a little twisted.

But, in the big picture, what are we saving? Polar bears emerged as their own species about 200,000 years ago. That is a long time in terms of weather patterns, ice ages and individual lifespans but a very short time in terms of evolution. Maybe the polar bear's time has simply come and it will die off or slowly return to a more grizzly lifestyle. Or maybe the grolar or pizzly is not an alarming death knell but the beginning of an amazing jump in evolution.

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Polar Bear Blog - Is it Bear Season Yet? - August 23, 2006

Another polar bear visitor came back this morning, around 5:00am this time. You know there have been a lot of bear encounters when you wake up to your dogs barking and howling, your girlfriend grabbing the shotgun, running out the door saying, 'Are there cracker shells or slugs in the gun?' and your equally sluggish response is 'Umm... slugs.' and then you just drift back to sleep amidst the howling, honking, barking and blasting.

But, it is 6am now and I am up and enjoying the sunrise and some very very good coffee (Kicking Horse Organic Coffee Co.). Thinking about how all things polar bear have changed this summer. A few reasons for this:

- Changes with Churchill's garbage - Many polar bears are just not too sure where to go now that it is gone. I would say that 8-10 polar bears pretty much lived and hid in the willows behind the dump up until its closure last year. Yesterday, we watched one bear just sitting on a gravel ridge where the garbage dump used to be, kind of willing it to come back.

Conversely, there has been garbage sitting at Churchill's new recycling/waste transfer station for almost ten months now and it is pretty stinky. While town employees are continuing to one-up the polar bears, it is a challenge. When polar bears broke the garage bay doors, the town put up iron, barred gates to keep them out. Of course, some bears crawled under the gates. Once the town fixed that, the bears simply started chewing and clawing their way through the walls and ceiling instead. After that, the town flattened some scrap metal and bolted it to the exterior walls. The bears are now thinking about their next plan of action...

- Changes in the Polar Bear Alert program - With the closure of the dump and opening of the Recycling Centre closer to town, the Polar Bear Alert has centred its activities around the community. Some of the old trap and polar bear snare areas, including polar bear alley and the old dump site, are no longer used. Now, provided a polar bear does not venture within five miles of town, he probably will not be relocated or captured.

- Changes in the climate - Break-up of Hudson Bay was fairly early this year, meaning more time for polar bears to arrive and hang out in Churchill. This is not as much of a problem as a late freeze since more and more bears gather along the Cape and then head to town after tourism season shuts down in mid-November. This is pretty rare, however, as the date of freeze-up is pretty reliable, usually occurring November 15th or so. Of course, with the first hints of frost in the air this morning, it might be a little early this year...hard to say.

Originally written for www.polarbearalley.com this morning... since then I have had a nap and some watermelon.

Polar Bear Blog - Is it Bear Season Yet? - August 23, 2006

Another polar bear visitor came back this morning, around 5:00am this time. You know there have been a lot of bear encounters when you wake up to your dogs barking and howling, your girlfriend grabbing the shotgun, running out the door saying, 'Are there cracker shells or slugs in the gun?' and your equally sluggish response is 'Umm... slugs.' and then you just drift back to sleep amidst the howling, honking, barking and blasting.

But, it is 6am now and I am up and enjoying the sunrise and some very very good coffee (Kicking Horse Organic Coffee Co.). Thinking about how all things polar bear have changed this summer. A few reasons for this:

- Changes with Churchill's garbage - Many polar bears are just not too sure where to go now that it is gone. I would say that 8-10 polar bears pretty much lived and hid in the willows behind the dump up until its closure last year. Yesterday, we watched one bear just sitting on a gravel ridge where the garbage dump used to be, kind of willing it to come back.

Conversely, there has been garbage sitting at Churchill's new recycling/waste transfer station for almost ten months now and it is pretty stinky. While town employees are continuing to one-up the polar bears, it is a challenge. When polar bears broke the garage bay doors, the town put up iron, barred gates to keep them out. Of course, some bears crawled under the gates. Once the town fixed that, the bears simply started chewing and clawing their way through the walls and ceiling instead. After that, the town flattened some scrap metal and bolted it to the exterior walls. The bears are now thinking about their next plan of action...

- Changes in the Polar Bear Alert program - With the closure of the dump and opening of the Recycling Centre closer to town, the Polar Bear Alert has centred its activities around the community. Some of the old trap and polar bear snare areas, including polar bear alley and the old dump site, are no longer used. Now, provided a polar bear does not venture within five miles of town, he probably will not be relocated or captured.

- Changes in the climate - Break-up of Hudson Bay was fairly early this year, meaning more time for polar bears to arrive and hang out in Churchill. This is not as much of a problem as a late freeze since more and more bears gather along the Cape and then head to town after tourism season shuts down in mid-November. This is pretty rare, however, as the date of freeze-up is pretty reliable, usually occurring November 15th or so. Of course, with the first hints of frost in the air this morning, it might be a little early this year...hard to say.

Polar Bear Blog - My Brief and Tumultuous Career as a Travel Writer - August 21, 2006

So, I just finished a ten-day argument with editors at UpHere Magazine about my 'Confessions of a Buggy Driver' article. You see, I have a slight problem with authority and especially authority that changes my creative ejaculations. I take it personally.

Things were going quite well until I received the latest rewrite and then replied by email that I was going to fly to Yellowknife and punch one of their employees in the face if the article ran unchanged. Usually, I am quite a reasonable guy but there is something about someone rewriting or redrawing or remixing something you created that is akin to putting the moves on your girlfriend while you are in the same room (they have not slept with her but you still feel violated and enraged at the same time and kind of have to do something about it).

But, I suppose that despite my prima donna fantasies, this happens to all writers and it is merely a part of the game and it will end up fine in the end with no one noticing other than me.

Mmmm... self-publishing...

Polar Bear Blog - Men and Women - August 20, 2006

Well, I was going to write about the polar bear that came by at 4:04am this morning and firing cracker shells and running around in my skivvies chasing him but there are greater issues at play these days. And of course what could be greater than male/female relationships - the blessing and scourge of the planet all at the same time.

Where did this all come from? Well, first of all, men and women should never ever try to work together. We are different. Our friends, Chad and Nancy, are up here right now and it is a blast. It is also great to meet someone else who is just as much of a disaster as we are and realize that 99% of everyone are disasters as well.

Me and Chad finished the veranda today and it looks awesome. Standing on the second level is vundah-bah-hah-hah-hah (as my ancestors in the Wunderbar commercials would say). Any elevation in the arctic is spectacular, a view of one lake becomes a view of fifteen, eight feet up.
Anyway, things went incredibly well with Chad and myself; men communicate well together and work well together - one becomes the boss but is willing to listen to the other's opinion. In a nutshell, veranda was completed along with a couple glasses of whiskey in about an hour or two. The women were out berry picking, it was all very primal.

However, we had to relocate the satellite internet receiver after completing the veranda. We did that after the women returned and made the mistake of asking for help. Not saying that women are not capable and wonderful people, but we have very different ways of working. Women are verbal and men are physical. That means, while we are doing things, women are talking about the way we should be doing them even if we are doing them that way already that aggrevates men and then women get upset that we are not validating their opinions and then men respond by drinking more and eating charred meat.

So, we ended up having a forty minute debate (and it was extremely civil now that I think of it) of the differences between men and women. All I can say, is that Discovery Channel reality TV should just set up here, they would be entertained.

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Polar Bear Blog - Top Predator - August 17, 2006

This is the summer of bear! I love it! They are all over the place.

We have a couple friends up from Winnipeg for the weekend and after an awesome supper of whitefish and wildrice, we headed out for a walk to the Ithaca, our local shipwreck.

The Ithaca ran aground in September 1960 and has been rusting away ever since. Actually, it was probably rusting away for a time before it ran aground but that is another story.

So, you can walk out to the Ithaca at low-tide, a nice little stroll on the tidal flats. However, I highly recommend carrying a gun as polar bear often sleep in the hull on sunny days or wander along the edge of the water.

Last night, we had just returned from our walk, taking one last look at the Ithaca before jumping into the truck. Just in time for the sun to dip out of the clouds and highlight a lone polar bear heading towards the shipwreck. The incredible thing was that he was sniffing the ground and following our tracks almost to a tee, even places where we doubled back to avoid tidal streams, he doubled back in the hopes of a quick meal.

We watched him meander all the way to the ship and then pace back and forth trying to figure out where our scent or where his prey ended up. We would have waited until he found our trail back to the truck but tea and ginger snaps and the woodstove were waiting back at Camp Nanuq.

I have seen this before, as soon as the sun gets low enough in the sky and the first chill of dusk sets in, polar bears begin to stir and go for an evening stroll or hopefully an evening hunt. Even if the wind is too strong for them to catch your scent or even if they cannot actually see where you are, they are still capable of finding your trail on the ground. Once they do, their 'Terminator'-like determination sets in and they will follow it to the bitter end.

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Polar Bear Blog - Cloudberries - August 6, 2006

Heading out east to check our cloudberry patch. Our new york hikers are very excited about helping us gather our 'winter stores' and I am very excited about a new batch of berry smoothies this weekend!

Cloudberries are also called baked apple berries and, naturally, they taste a fair bit like baked apples. They grow two or three inches high and produce one fruit that kind of looks like a big, orange raspberry when it is ripe. We will probably grab some wild strawberries, tundra bilberries, crowberries and dewberries while we are out.

A warm spring burnt the snow cover off the tundra and the vegetation got a huge headstart, so all the berries are ready about a month early. Of course, so are the geese, and, as usual, it is a race to get to the berries before they have travelled through our local flocks of Canada and snow geese, leaving big purple splatters across the tundra.

Polar Bear Blog - Scat Cats - August 3, 2006

Actually, it is a scat dog. Quinoa, a Dutch sheperd, is a polar bear poop sniffing dog that has just returned from Wapusk National Park along with a few other weary and mildly smelly researchers.

The crew from LaPerouse Bay is back in Churchill for another week or so, coming off another season at Nester Two - a research camp built on the edge of Wapusk National Park. Led by Robert (Rocky) Rockwell, their main focus is on snow geese and vegetation and snow geese degradation of vegetation and other things that rhyme but this year another project has been added.

The reason Quinoa is a sh*t sniffing dog is because researchers Linda Gormezano and Rocky Rockwell are collecting polar bear scat and hair samples in an effort to study the western Hudson Bay polar bear population through DNA analysis. Samples will be taken back to the American Museum of Natural History and a genetic map of our bears will be made, including where they go in the summer, who they hang out with and what they are eating, etc.

This is a big study that is going to both pave the way for non-intrusive research methods, hopefully replacing the current helicopter mark and recapture studies, and will change the way we think about polar bears in general. For instance, I bet the myth that polar bears 'fast' in the summer and that they are solitary beings, spending much of their time wandering along, will be substantially altered.

There is going to be big news from Churchill's polar bears over these next couple years and not just the usual climate change doom and gloom. The rest of the world is finally going to find out what some of us already know; that polar bears are actually a social being with complex social structure, or as a non-science-type like me would call it, culture.

More about polar bears, research and snow geese tomorrow, provided Quinoa doesn't tear my throat out... he is the ultimate protein after all.

www.polarbearalley.com

Polar Bear Blog - Moody Manitoba Tuesday - August 1, 2006

Nothing good comes from an east wind. For two days, you could see clouds building out on the bay before they finally arrived, bringing a marathon downpour that made it feel like we jumped straight from July to September.

Today, it is still raining and still windy and still gloomy. A good day for northerners to stay inside and drink coffee and more coffee.

So that's what I was doing when a nice surprise swam by the cabin. A couple days ago, I wrote about the Pacific Loon, my favourite bird, and about their territorial instincts. Well, I should have included that they are territorial in breeding season and while protecting their nesting lake. However, later in summer, they occasionally gather in small groups, possibly in preparation for the commute back to the Pacific Coast, maybe as far as Baja. Kind of like a going away party.

Three years ago, we saw a group of eight or nine loons, swimming, diving and splashing together. There were still displays of dominance and many 'territorial' chases but without the vicious consequences. Today, I looked out the window and saw twelve Pacific Loons swimming by, maybe two metres (six feet) from my front yard, their steel gray heads somehow gleaming in the mist.

I hope they come back for a party tonite or communal feeding or whatever it is but it really is the display of a lifetime. Actually, the second display of a lifetime but I am not complaining.

www.polarbearalley.com