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.