Village of the Sea Bears

Churchill’s famed polar bear population is plunging

by Mark Kaufman(opens in a new tab)

Village of the Sea Bears

Churchill’s famed polar bear population is plunging

by Mark Kaufman(opens in a new tab)

CHURCHILL, Canada — Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

In the waning afternoon of Nov. 5, Manitoba conservation officers leapt from their pickup truck onto Kelsey Boulevard, the snow-blanketed main drag in the 900-person town of Churchill. They fired bursts of exploding “scare” cartridges from a shotgun, like fireworks blasted from a firearm, at an intruder. A polar bear had sauntered into Churchill.

After firing a few more shots (which don’t harm the bears), the officers jumped in their truck and raced down the road to ensure the startled bear didn’t lope up another street and into town. The event, however theatrical to a Churchill neophyte, is an almost mundane autumn happening here. During October and November each year, the ivory bears often stroll into Churchill, though usually when it’s dark. Shotgun pops go off through the night, like the humdrum of ambulance sirens echoing through Brooklyn at midnight.

Churchill’s pubs, hotels, and homes all sit in the dead middle of the polar bears’ fall realm. “This is polar bear country,” said Andrew Derocher, a veteran polar bear scientist at the University of Alberta who first arrived in Churchill to research bears 35 years ago.

Bears congregate in this nook along Canada’s vast Hudson Bay because it’s one of the first places for the sea to freeze or wind-pummeled ice to collect along the shores. And the hungry bears need sea ice to go hunting for unassuming, fat seals. Unlike other bears, polar bears are marine mammals. They may spend time on land, but at their heart, they are sea bears.

Today, though, the sea bears’ future around Churchill looks bleak. In Churchill and the surrounding area (called the Western Hudson Bay), the bears’ population is plunging. The last two decades have been particularly harsh. “The population has declined substantially since the late nineties by 30 percent,” said Evan Richardson, a research scientist for Environment and Climate Change Canada, a government agency. What was once a population of 1,200 bears is now 800, and falling.

Bob Al-Greene / Mashable

Even so, that’s still hundreds of bears concentrated in a relatively small area. Come fall, Churchill’s restaurants brim with visitors clad in heavy parkas — Chinese, Italians, Americans, and beyond — who have come to glimpse the spectacularly white bears. “Polar bears have an elegance,” said Freddy Gamble, who resides in New York City, but fell for Churchill’s bears decades ago, and has visited them a dozen times since. Long ago, the bears discovered Churchill froze first, she said. “They’ve known it for thousands of years.”

And as much as Churchill is a polar bear attraction, it is also invaluable to science. “It’s the most well-studied polar bear population in the world,” said Richardson.

"It’s the most well-studied polar bear population in the world."

Dedicated observation of the Churchill bears is how scientists know polar bears — including those well beyond Churchill whose populations are either falling, still stable, or relatively unknown — will almost certainly face longer and longer periods of fasting as sea ice diminishes. Churchill is a primary axle on which polar bear science turns. “Without decades of research, we wouldn’t have known how dependent bears are on sea ice,” stressed Steven Amstrup, the chief scientist for Polar Bears International(opens in a new tab), a conservation organization based in Churchill that actively researches polar bears. Amstrup previously led polar bear research for the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska for 30 years.

Amstrup has watched, with increasing dismay, the demise of sea ice, and consequently, polar bears. He knows it’s going to get worse. A relentlessly warming climate — 18 of the 19 warmest years on record(opens in a new tab) have occurred since 2000 — means the bears’ environment will continue to unravel, unabated. “There is no new normal until we stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations,” he said. “It’s the law of physics.”

Polar bears on Hudson Bay's sea ice.

Johnny Johnson / Getty Images

Churchill, a booming polar bear destination today, may very well lose most of its bears in the decades ahead, perhaps by mid-century. “That’s the storyline we’re heading into,” said Geoff York, Polar Bears International’s senior director of conservation and a former biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey's Polar Bear Project. After all, Earth’s heat-trapping atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are now rising at both historically and geologically unprecedented levels(opens in a new tab). Meanwhile, the 13 lowest Arctic sea extents on record have all occurred in the last 13 years(opens in a new tab). Sea ice in the Hudson Bay is melting earlier, and freezing later(opens in a new tab).

Today, Churchill’s bears spend about a month less on the ice than their grandparents did, in the 1980s. That’s a month longer they aren’t eating. So the bears get skinnier. They birth fewer bears. Their population drops.

“It’s depressing — I think about it a lot,” said Drew Hamilton, a professional bear viewing guide(opens in a new tab) and, come fall, a guide for the local company Discover Churchill(opens in a new tab).

Rapidly declining sea ice in the Arctic.

Zack Labe

Coexistence

Churchill — which is an integral Arctic seaport for shipping wheat, lentils, and other grains around the globe — seeks to coexist with polar bears. And for good reason.

“The world comes to see us and we’re proud of it,” Churchill Mayor Michael Spence said at a Polar Bears International event in early November. Though Spence, who also co-owns The Seaport Hotel on quaint Kelsey Boulevard, acknowledged a looming reality that’s not so good for business. “Climate change is upon us,” he admitted.

These days, bears don’t have much business in the town proper. In 2006, Churchill closed its outdoor garbage dump and now stores all its trash inside the walls of a former military base. But previously, the bears loved coming to town. As the New York Times(opens in a new tab) reported back in 1971, “The garbage dumps at Churchill and nearby Fort Churchill, a military installation, have become happy hunting grounds for the Arctic bears.”

Still, Churchill is a bear’s world, and come autumn curious sea bears inevitably wander near or through Churchill, which abuts the shores of the Hudson Bay. But the provincial government strives to keep bears wild, and from coming face-to-face with humans. That means shooting loud, exploding cartridges at the animals and pursuing them with honking trucks. It’s called the Polar Bear Alert Program, and it’s staffed by government conservation officers. Most of the action happens in the fall.

“Nobody else in North America has a position like this,” said Brett Wlock, an officer with the Manitoba Conservation and Water Stewardship agency.

Wlock and his team are ready day and night, should anyone spot a large, white mammal roaming through the neighborhood. “We run the bear phone line 24 hours a day — people can call that line if they see a bear,” he said, noting they get hundreds of calls a year. “We push [the bear] away from the community.”

And sometimes, they must lock bears up.


Some bears, for reasons of their own, continually return to Churchill and repeatedly endure the blaring wrath of conservation officers. But Wlock and company don’t play that game for long. The troublesome bears are either trapped or subdued with tranquilizers and then hauled to a 28-cell holding facility, popularly dubbed the “polar bear jail.” Officers often keep the bears until the bay freezes so they can emancipate the hungry predators toward their true calling: the sea ice.

“They haze the bear onto the ice,” said the bear viewing guide Hamilton, who watched a release from a hilltop in mid-November (“Hazing” an animal means encouraging it to go somewhere, often with a loud noise).

Though officers like Wlock respond swiftly to any bear sightings — racing through town with red sirens and, when necessary, running swiftly on foot — Churchillians have long accepted that bears will inevitably sneak into the neighborhood, blending into the white streets and hummocky snowdrifts. 

"Don’t Walk. Get a ride.”

“Don’t Walk. Get a ride,” reads a laminated sign in front of Churchill Home Hardware. “STOP: “DON’T WALK IN THIS AREA,” warns another posted just beyond idyllic seaside benches at the edge of town. “Be bear aware: LOOK BEFORE EXITING BUILDING,” a placard advises at the Polar Bears International headquarters, on Kelsey Boulevard.

In Churchill’s airport terminal, comprised of one large room, a big rectangular billboard bolted to the wall tells visitors to never “Walk at night past 10:00.” A Churchillian artist, Mark Reynolds, sells his wares inside the terminal, including a parody of common Churchill signage which reads “KEEP CALM AND DO NOT WALK IN THIS AREA.”

Travelers staying at Churchill’s Polar Inn, like myself, can listen to the telltale pop of exploding cartridges that ring through Churchill’s frozen, nighttime air.

Snowmobile on Kelsey Boulevard

Mark Kaufman / Mashable

The Great Fast

In early November, the many polar bears outside of Churchill spent their days slumbering in the snow. Hours of snowfall blanketed their fur, as snow collects on a log. The bears weren’t active, because being active during a months-long famine, before the ice returns to the sea, is senseless. Just being alive burns energy. “The bears are losing two pounds per day,” said the University of Alberta’s Derocher. “This is a tough time of year.”

Derocher eyed a snoozing bear as we stopped in the tundra outside of Churchill aboard a large buggy — essentially a suped-up, jacked-up, school bus on five-and-a-half-foot tall wheels, able to navigate the rutted old military roads winding through the tundra beyond Churchill. The bear looked to be in good shape, he said. Many bears are well-endowed and filled out this fall, thanks to fair sea ice conditions earlier this year. The bears could munch seals deeper into the summer, before the ice melted.

It’s a positive season amid an unquestionable trend of bad years. “There will be good years, but it’s all part of a downward trend,” said Derocher, who tracks Churchill’s bears using GPS tags. The mounting bad years are a consequence of relatively simple math. Bears must consume a certain amount of energy before running out of fuel.


Anthony Pagano, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Conservation Research at San Diego Zoo Global, studies polar energetics, or how much energy the bears need to survive, grow, and reproduce. He’s found that bears in Alaska's Beaufort Sea during the spring, when they do most of their killing, need to eat more seals than previously thought. Every 10 days, the bears must catch one large adult seal, or three smaller seals, to survive and fuel their hunt. But to properly fatten up, meaning an impressive doubling in weight, Pagano thinks the bears must eat significantly more seals. Exactly how much is an area of his future research.

Hunting seals is an art. The bears sneak across the sea ice like cats, explained Derocher. The bears, some well over 1,300 pounds, are so stealthy that the seals below presumably don’t notice the ravenous bears lurking above. Even a slight creak might send the seals fleeing. The bears know the seals must come up for air, so they wait. When a whiskered seal surfaces, the bears pounce.

“They’re pretty much crushing the seal’s brain,” said Derocher, matter-of-factly.


The bears devour the seals’ blubber, often leaving splayed out guts and innards on the white ice, which is sprayed in crimson, like a scene from the horror flick Halloween.

But however skilled the bears are in their delicate balance upon the ice, they’re losing to vanishing hunting grounds. “They’re having to wait longer periods to access that foraging platform,” said Pagano. With a month’s less time on the ice, some bears will be threatened with starvation, he said.

It’s not as if malnourished bears immediately drop dead. It’s a slower death of the greater population. “When they get skinnier, the first thing they give up is reproduction,” said research scientist Richardson.

An ever-lengthening fast has hit other polar bear populations hard. Polar bears in the waters above Alaska must journey hundreds of miles further to find sea ice. In the 2000s, bear populations in the southern Beaufort Sea plummeted by a whopping 40 percent(opens in a new tab); two of 80 known cubs survived. A few decades ago, in early November, Polar Bear International’s Amstrup saw a different world up there. “You could see the ice right off-shore,” he stressed. “Now it’s hundreds of miles off shore. The changes are just phenomenal.”

I asked the 69-year-old Amstrup if he ever imagined, back in the 1970s, such dramatic sea ice loss by 2019. “I would have said you were crazy,” he said.

Now, it’s reality.

Of course, vanishing sea ice won’t hit every polar bear population the same way, at the same time. Some bear populations, like those in northern Greenland and areas above Russia that scientists have little consistent information about, may have sea ice and robust bear populations for much longer. “It won’t be one nice, clean story,” said York, Polar Bears International’s director of conservation.

Rather, the loss of polar bear feeding grounds will mirror the unfolding story of Earth’s disrupted climate. As the greater planet warms, certain places will see more immediate consequences of a relentlessly heating atmosphere, like surging wildfires in California(opens in a new tab), protracted drought in the Southwest(opens in a new tab), and rapidly melting ice sheets Greenland(opens in a new tab). Climate change won’t be perfectly “clean.” The climate will relentlessly warm, though some years may not be as warm as others, and the chilly winter season, to climate deniers’ sophomoric delight, will inevitably return, each and every year.

"It won’t be one nice, clean story."

Polar bear scientists aren’t arguing that wild polar bears are going to go extinct, this century at least. The question is, how many will be left? And will Churchill have any at all? “We will have polar bears to the end of the century, but where they’re going to be is the million-dollar question,” said Derocher.

One Arctic asylum might be Wrangel Island, a rocky outpost north of Russia, thousands of miles from Churchill. York recently spent a month on the island, counting bears. Even though the waters there have also seen historic losses of sea ice, the whales are bountiful, and their dead wash up on shore for hungry bears to eat.

“It’s a hotspot for whale carcass,” said York, noting that scientists spotted some 200 polar bears feasting on a single washed-up carcass(opens in a new tab) in 2017. “We know one bowhead whale is around 1,400 seals — that’s a lot of food.”

In a continually warming world, perhaps a wild polar bear population on Wrangel will be buffeted by dead whales. Or maybe the higher, colder Arctic islands will generally become refuges for robust populations of polar bears, while bears vanish from the warmer fringes of their habitat — places like Churchill. In a dark way, bears confined to these frigid, isolated Arctic islands would be fitting. “It was the last place woolly mammoths roamed the Earth,” noted York.

Polar bears on the tundra.

Kt Miller / polarbearsinternational.org

There’s little doubt Churchill will be a different place in the decades ahead. But that doesn’t mean tourism here will be dead. Not nearly. It will still likely be a good place to see polar bears, but maybe not always in the same concentrations as previous years. Overall, of course, there are fewer bears. And, critically, today’s bears have lost the incentives of their now dead parents — who once feasted on the dump — to come into or near town.

But you’ll almost certainly still see many more Churchill bears than you would spy megafauna in other popular destinations like Yellowstone, Denali, or Banff. “You’ll be lucky to see one grizzly there and you’ll be thrilled,” said York. “Here if people see four or five bears they’ll be disappointed,” he said.

Then there are Churchill’s belugas. Though lesser known than the polar bears, during summer tens of thousands of belugas flood the waters off Churchill. “You could come here and see 3,000,” said York.

Churchill, an island village in the subarctic wilderness where ghostly emerald northern lights illuminate the skies, will have its intrigues for years to come. But will it be a bear’s world, so abundant in large beasts that strolling even a block at night in early November is considered foolish?

I left the Tundra Inn Dining Room and Pub after dark, with an almost comically short jaunt home. It would've taken under a minute. But Hamilton, the bear viewing guide, insisted on giving me a lift. I hopped in the 4-Runner he uses to bring photography-savvy visitors to see bears sleeping, sauntering, or migrating through the white tundra outside of Churchill. Sharp gusts whipped snow through the 1 degree Fahrenheit air. He turned right onto Kelsey Boulevard.

“They’re around,” he said.

  • Reporter

    Mark Kaufman

  • Editors

    Nandita Raghuram and Brittany Levine Beckman

  • Top and bottom photos

    Drew Hamilton

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