Breakfast at 0700 h, then out in the tracked vehicles again, trundling over 1-2 inches of fresh snow, towards the south end of Fletcher Lake at the edge of Wapusk National Park.
Read our previous updates here, here and here.
By Peter Ewins
Mayor Mike Spence and his tracking-expert brother Morris tell us joyfully that “this is the warmest day this year” – a mere 35 degrees C below zero, positively balmy! (it would be totally ‘barmy’ if we didn’t all have the top-grade cold weather clothing of course, and those fabulous Canada Goose expedition parkas!). Rhys and I have a little touch of mild frostbite on our fingertips, due to the work with the tripod, cameras and binoculars, but when you’re 100 metres away from these magnificent animals, you don’t seem to feel the cold that much! Continue reading →

By Peter Ewins
Rhys and I awoke to a crystal clear dawn, a numbing -40C again, and the excitement of reconnecting with the female polar bear and her single cub that we had left at sunset yesterday evening. After one of cook Daryl’s splendid tundra breakfasts at Wat’chee lodge, we headed out in the tracked vehicles with top-notch photographers from around the world, and the ABC news crew.
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By Peter Ewins
It’s 0530 and my WWF-US colleague Rhys Gerholdt and I are with an ABC News crew from New York, heading up to Wapusk National Park and the world’s largest concentration of maternity dens for polar bears.
The recent science papers have sparked heightened public interest and concern for the trends and future prospects of these most southerly of the world’s wild polar bears.
Over the next week. we will be based in Wat’chee lodge in the denning areas, and hope to see firsthand how these polar bear mums and their cubs are doing as they emerge from the deep snow dens. WWF has helped support these long-term studies of polar bears in west Hudson Bay, so we are eagerly following these results and the experts’ assessments of the prospects for bears in this region of rapidly retreating sea ice.
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The WWF Arctic Global Polar Bear specialist, Geoff York, is on a field trip in Churchill on the Hudson Bay, observing and blogging about polar bears. Below is the ninth blog from our ‘eyes and ears on the tundra’. Read more blogs by Geoff York.
By Geoff York
Our day starts early at Cape Churchill following a long day of travel and a late night getting the camp up and running. The temperature has dropped dramatically in the last few days and is now around -27 C with winds gusting up to 60 km/hr. This adds a wind chill factor of nearly -48 C (at -40, centigrade and Fahrenheit are the same). BJ Kirschhoffer, Director of Field Operations for PBI, and I still have a few things to take care of regarding the remote communications system at the Cape. If everything works as planned this morning, I have an 8 AM interview with Norwegian Public Radio. We head out in the dark on our Tundra Buggy to the Cape Tower, an old observation platform originally set up by Dr. Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service. BJ needs to connect a new battery pack to the repeater system and we’ll also deploy a small generator for recharging the system during the week. Continue reading →

The WWF Arctic Global Polar Bear specialist, Geoff York, is on a field trip in Churchill on the Hudson Bay, observing and blogging about polar bears. Below is the seventh blog from our ‘eyes and ears on the tundra’. Read more blogs by Geoff York.
By Geoff York
An exceptional two days of bear viewing in the Manitoba Wildlife management area. I’ll let the bears speak for themselves here:
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The WWF Arctic Global Polar Bear specialist, Geoff York, is on a field trip in Churchill on the Hudson Bay, observing and blogging about polar bears. Below is the sixth blog from our ‘eyes and ears on the tundra’. Read more blogs by Geoff York.
By Geoff York
It’s the first day out for our new group and I am amazed and happy to look out on the Bay at first light – ice is forming well out onto the tidal flats! This is a stark change from just five days ago when we flew over this same area during our coastal survey and saw only open water. The Wildlife Management Area just east of Churchill is unique and protected for this very reason – ice forms and is retained along this part of the coast early in the winter and remains late in the spring. This is also why so many polar bears remain, or migrate into this area in the late autumn as they await their opportunity to return to the sea ice. Continue reading →

The WWF Arctic Global Polar Bear specialist, Geoff York, is on a field trip in Churchill on the Hudson Bay, observing and blogging about polar bears. Below is the fifth blog from our ‘eyes and ears on the tundra’. Read more blogs by Geoff York.
By Geoff York
Today I’m joining a special group of visitors from Germany led by a colleague from their WWF home office.  WWF Germany, in partnership with Wick’s (the company many of us know as Vick’s), has become a funding partner of the WWF Global Arctic Program and our polar bear conservation efforts. We are all very lucky to be joining Frontiers North Adventures for their final trip of 2010, and the only trip that is permitted into Wapusk National Park and all the way to Cape Churchill.
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The WWF Arctic Global Polar Bear specialist, Geoff York, is on a field trip in Churchill on the Hudson Bay, observing and blogging about polar bears. Below is the fourth blog from our ‘eyes and ears on the tundra’. Read more blogs by Geoff York.
By Geoff York
A snowstorm at last and it looks like winter may ultimately be arriving. Flights are cancelled or delayed and it’s finally looking a lot more like the sub-arctic.

As sometimes happens when you are at the right place and at the right time, an opportunity arises that was unexpected. Continue reading →