By CAROL MEYLAN Special to the Palisadian-Post At the end of a summer spent watching countless Netflix adventure DVDs, my son Gavin Kelly, a fifth grader at Corpus Christi School, and I started daydreaming about taking our own adventure trip. We didn’t want to wait until the following summer to go on an expedition, so I proposed that we take a mother/son ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ trip in the fall to visit polar bears in their natural habitat. I researched a variety of possibilities for viewing polar bears in Arctic regions and settled on Churchill, Manitoba, the self-proclaimed ‘polar bear capital of the world.’ With a few misgivings about Gavin missing school for a week, I convinced myself that this trip would be highly educational and enriching for him. What I didn’t realize was the trip would be just as educational and awe-inspiring for me. Churchill is located on the Hudson Bay at the 60th parallel. Normally a town of 800 residents, its population swells to 2,000 during October and November, the polar bear season. Churchill is a remote location, with no roads connecting it to lower Manitoba. Transportation to Churchill requires a 36-hour train ride or a two-hour charter flight from Manitoba. While some tourists do take the train, Gavin and I opted for the charter flight. We were amazed to see a few dogs in the passenger section of our flight. Apparently Churchill is too small to support a permanent veterinarian, so sick dogs must be flown down to Manitoba to receive medical attention. The five-day tundra tour of Churchill included presentations about Inuit culture, dog sledding with mushers, and two full days of polar bear viewing from a ‘tundra buggy’ in the Wapusk National Park. The term tundra buggy is an enormous Jeep-like vehicle built on a fire engine chassis. Gavin wasn’t even as tall as the tires! Gavin and I felt like we were part of a ‘Star Wars’ adventure when we looked upon four or five other strange vehicles out on the desolate tundra. Our buggy driver, a retired San Francisco and Vancouver Zoo keeper, invited Gavin, the only child in the group, to drive the bus. I was impressed when he turned over the wheel and the pedals to Gavin. As the buggy came close to the edge of the ice, Gavin joked that he hoped all the other passengers could swim. We learned from our interpretive guide, Jerry Anderson, a retired Canadian Mounted Police officer, that school buses were used on the first tours within Wapusk National Park. After one tourist, an American CEO, had his arm mauled by a polar bear while leaning out of the bus window with his Hasselblad to get the perfect shot, the tour buses were redesigned to ensure polar bears wouldn’t have any more opportunities to personally connect with humans. In addition to witnessing the magnificent polar bears searching for food on the frozen tundra, we saw snow owls, arctic foxes and ptarmigans. The polar bears, with their long necks, small ears and large claws, were highly entertaining, whether they were sparring with a fellow bear, chewing on caribou antlers (the caribou having already been devoured), lifting up the earth to find kelp, or simply resting in the snow. We witnessed a protective mother bear hustle away her two cubs as a hungry male bear encroached on her territory (starving adults will eat cubs). Despite the bears’ large size (adult males can weigh more than 800 lbs.) and lumbering, cuddly appearance, they are strong and fearless, and can move very quickly. They have an acute sense of smell and excellent hearing and eyesight. By October, when the ice begins to freeze on the Hudson Bay, the bears are nearing starvation, having eaten only kelp, fish and small animals since awaking from hibernation. They need the ice as a platform from which they hunt for ringed seals, their primary food source. Polar bears can detect seal breathing holes, covered by layers of snow and ice, up to a kilometer away. Our tour group of 24 was fortunate to have a San Diego Zoo polar bear expert representing Polar Bears International (PBI), a conservation, research and education foundation, join us on the tundra buggy to educate us about the habits of polar bears and the impact of pollution and climate change on the bears’ feeding, breeding and ultimate survival. The Canadian polar bear population of 15,000 accounts for approximately half of the world polar bear population. The primary predator of the polar bears has historically been the human hunter, but today hunters kill fewer than 1,000 bears a year. The greater risk to the polar bears now comes from chemical contaminants in their prey and climate change. According to the Canadian Wildlife Service, global warming is affecting the polar bears’ habitat by reducing the total ice coverage in the Arctic and changing the timing of the freezing and breakup of ice in southerly areas, such as the Hudson Bay. Our Polar Bears International naturalist warned us that for every increase of two degrees in the earth’s warming, the freeze-up of the ice is delayed by one week, impacting the bears’ ability to hunt for seals. With the bears at near starvation condition by October, a delay of seal hunting for even a few weeks will cause scores of bears to weaken and die. Even now, biologists believe that starvation is the leading cause of death for sub-adult polar bears (bears under six years old). Gavin and I left the below freezing temperatures of Churchill to return to the glorious warm Indian summer in Pacific Palisades. We continue to share stories about the polar bears and the Inuit culture of the Hudson Bay region. Palisades High School students may want to participate in PBI’s Leadership Camp, an intensive weeklong program in which students from many countries live out on the tundra and work with research scientists. We encourage students and adults interested in the conservation of polar bears to contact www.polarbearsinternational.org.
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