“Over there, I see something!” someone yelled. On a lakeshore a few hundred yards away, across a thin sheet of ice, a yellowish blob lay in contrast to the new white snow. Glenn Hopfner, our driver, steered closer, and everyone reached for their binoculars and cameras.
Collectively, we gasped. A mother polar bear, rocked back on her haunches, head tilted skyward and eyes closed, was nursing a cub. It was like a Renaissance painting: the Madonna of the Tundra.
“I can’t tell you how lucky you are,” Hopfner marveled. “In 700 trips I’ve made out here, I’ve seen this eight times.”It was our second day tracking polar bears in the tundra off Hudson Bay, in the far reaches of northern Canada. We had 27 sightings the first day out. Polartec-ed up to our eyeballs, long-lens cameras and spotting scopes at the ready, we trundled along in trailer-like buggies set atop tall tires that put us out of reach of curious 1,000-pound bears.
There are only a few places on the planet where humans can see polar bears in their environment. During the last weeks of autumn — usually from the middle of October to early November — no place on Earth has more polar bears than Churchill. It is here that hundreds of bears, stranded by melting pack ice, spend the warmer months (relatively speaking), waiting for temperatures to drop and the ice to form again so they can start hunting and fatten up for the colder months.
Our group of about 20, organized by Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, had met up in Winnipeg two nights earlier then headed north aboard a prop plane.
Warm soup and sandwiches served us during the long hours on the trails outside town. The buggies, while heated, grew frigid whenever a window was opened.
But while it was cold for us humans, the snow and freezing temperatures were late — an bad omen for a species that has come to symbolize the potential impact of climate change.
The bears feast on ringed seals, which live in the Arctic waters year round, but the bears must have pack ice to serve as their hunting platforms. As the arctic ice retreats, the bears must swim longer distances to find food.
Bears weren’t the only creatures on the agenda. We took time to search out arctic hares, so still and white only the dark tips of their ears gave them away.
We saw an arctic fox, white like the hare. Birds included owls, auks, the plump willow ptarmigan and even a gyrfalcon.
But the bears stole the show. How could they not?
Ecology Tourism Lake Manitoba Narrows
www.fishlakemanitobamarrows.com