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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Tag Archives: WWF
Driving on the Beaufort
By Sue Herbert
Last Saturday, we drove on the Beaufort Sea. It was quite amazing. One doesn’t often think about driving on a frozen sea, looking over vast expanses of ice on one side and low headlands on the other. We spotted fish drying racks left on the shingle beaches from the summer and fall fishing seasons, covered in snow and blowing forlornly in the wind.
The ice road to Tuktoyaktuk had recently reopened after a blizzard of massive proportions (at least from a southern perspective) hit the Delta the previous weekend, and left us stranded halfway up the Dempster highway waiting for it to reopen. After two nights in Dawson, we wended over the glorious Richardson Mountains in a long convoy of trucks, finally reaching Inuvik.
Vehicle's GPS - (C) Sue Herbert/WWF-Canada
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Update from polar bear team: Train to Chesney
By Peter Ewins
Read our first update here.
This is Churchill train station (also the Parks Canada main office), where we took the 8 p.m. train south to Chesney.
(c) Peter Ewins/WWF-Canada
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Heading north as polar bears emerge from snow dens
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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RACER – The Quest to Identify Important Arctic Places in a Changing Climate
Mush! The only race in town this past week was the Yukon Quest, a grueling dog sled endurance race of 1,000 miles from Whitehorse to Fairbanks. Our WWF team, however, was in Alaska for a different kind of expedition – consulting with some of the world’s leading interdisciplinary science and social science researchers on Arctic climate change.
Co-authored by Hussein Alidina, Peter Ewins and James Snider
Enter the world of RACER – a project of WWF’s Global Arctic Programme that seeks to identify important places in the Arctic in the face of rapid climate change. RACER stands for (deep breath) Rapid Assessment of features and areas for Circumarctic Ecosystem Resilience in the 21st Century.
For the past 18 months, a RACER team of WWF staff from Norway, Russia, USA and Canada have been reviewing key papers, consulting with experts, commissioning analyses, holding workshops, compiling digital maps and crunching data – all to develop the analyses that will identify some of the key places that will remain important for the well-being of arctic ecosystems and human communities as we experience climate change. Continue reading
It’s not too late to save polar bears: study
By Clive Tesar
A new paper published in Nature magazine suggests that reductions in greenhouse gases would be effective in saving polar bear populations from the worst effects of climate change. The report says that the bears’ arctic sea ice habitat is most likely to decline in a linear fashion, showing a direct correlation between greenhouse gas levels, higher temperatures, and ice melting.
Some previous studies had suggested that there might be a tipping point in the arctic sea ice, leading it to suddenly disappear once a certain level of greenhouse gases and temperature rise had been reached. One of the report authors, Steve Amstrup of Polar Bears International says the new conclusion means there is still hope for polar bears. Continue reading
This amazing part of Manitoba
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
Heading for Cape Churchill
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 eighth blog from our ‘eyes and ears on the tundra’. Read more blogs by Geoff York.
By Geoff York
Wagons ho! It’s moving day and the morning starts a good hour earlier. By 7 AM we are fed and aboard our tour buggies. It’s still dark as we head out on the tundra hoping for that perfect sunrise bear. And as luck would have it – we find him …
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A picture’s worth a thousand words…
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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What a day!
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