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Churchill-bound: polar bears, ice, tundra, and igloos

By Maggie Plummer

CHURCHILL, MANITOBA - Every November, polar bears move in on Cape Churchill, along the west coast of Hudson Bay.

The huge, hungry white bears, North America's largest predator, go there looking for the season's first ice so they can begin hunting for ringed seals - their most important food source.

They instinctively know that Cape Churchill has the first ice shelf of the year, due to river flows and prevailing winds.

As the famished bears gather around Churchill, waiting for the hunt, so do students from the Great Bear Foundation's annual Arctic Ecology Field Class - for a chance to view the amazing animals, build igloos, gaze in awe at northern lights, and walk along on the icy shores of Hudson Bay.

Most of the students travel to Churchill from Missoula and Pablo with course leader and renowned bear researcher Dr. Chuck Jonkel. Once there, they get to observe polar bears watching the sea, sniffing the winds, sleeping in kelp beds, or play-fighting as the animals wait to go out on the ice.

After the freeze-up, students can try to go on the ice and view the bears in their habitat. They also watch for caribou, fox, wolves, ptarmigan, arctic hare, and snowy owls; they peer down seal holes, if the ice is good enough; they learn about arctic plants and even pick berries under the snow.

This is not a typical tourist venture - not by a long shot.

The annual course, now in its 23rd year, takes off into the North Country on Saturday, Nov. 11. "Polar bears are the hook," says Jonkel, Great Bear Foundation founder and president, "but students in this class learn about much more than just bears."

He encourages them to go as travelers, not tourists. "As much as possible, we do not impact the bears, the land, or the people," he says. "This trip can give new life to the idea of being a traveler, being involved with the land and the people as you're going along, having a sense of belonging."

This is the kind of journey that more often than not changes lives, shapes vocations, and shifts attitudes.

"People fall in love with the North," says Salish Kootenai College's Frank Tyro, who has gone on the Churchill trip numerous times and is going again this year. "Eyes are opened...that this is not a disposable planet, that we need to think and care about our actions, like recycling."

There are people from all over the world on these trips, he notes, with an average of 30 students per trip. Over the years, a lot of people from the Flathead Reservation - probably between 30 and 40, Frank guesses - have made this trek north.

Course participants spend two days driving the 1,000 miles to The Pas, Manitoba, staying overnight in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. In The Pas, they board a northbound train that takes them another 600 miles up to Churchill, through parts of Canada that are roadless.

Along the way, they observe natural history outside the train windows and meet lots of local folks, including Cree trappers, fishermen, hunters, and their families. Jonkel likes to feed the whole train a smorgasbord of game meat, crackers, and cheese, according to Tyro.

"I think Chuck probably walks as lightly on the earth as anyone I've ever known," he commented during a recent interview. "He likes to gather and use food that would otherwise be wasted."

Few can keep up with the bear researcher, who is now 76 years old. A retired University of Montana Environmental Studies professor, Jonkel did pioneering polar bear research in the late 60s and early 70s for the Canadian Wildlife Service. He earned his doctorate in Wildlife Biology from the University of British Columbia and established Missoula's International Wildlife Film Festival to help create peer pressure among filmmakers to produce accurate wildlife films.

Jonkel's amazing expertise in all things Arctic is one of the main attractions for field course students.

The travelers stay at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, a comfortable place with dorm rooms, lounges, a dining room, and a bubble on the top of the building for watching bears and northern lights.

Everyone has to be very careful regarding bear safety while in Churchill, looking both ways before going out the door and taking wide corners around buildings and cars.

Tyro says he enjoys meeting different people every time he goes. "Also, the town is changing, the bears are changing, and the climate is changing," he said. "A lot more people are there to make money off tourists. There are new hotels and some re-purposing of old buildings, and bed and breakfasts. Some of the tour operators are trying to extend the season for their tundra buggies."

Often, regulations are not enforced, he said. Some of the tundra buggies are not made right or used properly, which results in damage to the remarkably fragile tundra.

Tyro cites an interesting example of the tundra's fragility: "The Churchill area, in the 1940s, was a World War II era military base. At one time 10,000 soldiers were stationed at a strategic air base there. They would use the polar bears for target practice. The bears were a 'nuisance.' Now, we still see tracks on the tundra from those military vehicles, from the 40s. They're still not healed. We also see craters in the tundra from artillery practice."

As for the polar bears, "we see more bears that are unafraid of people," he said. "We're part of the problem (by going up there), but if you educate people correctly...it kind of works both ways."

The good news, Tyro added, is that last year they closed the Churchill town dump. "Chuck had been pushing for that for years," he said. "They used to have dump bears. Sometimes the dump was burning and there would be bears with their hair singed, burned."

Another good change, according to him, is that more people are caring about the impact of those great big tundra buggies. "There's a study documenting bear behaviors changing around buggies and people," he said. "It's not too late."

Some worry that polar bears or "sea bears" are on dangerously thin ice.

Although not in immediate danger of extinction, polar bears are threatened by human encroachment on their habitat, poaching, and chemical contaminants in their prey.

Then there's the new threat of climate change, which affects the polar bear's habitat by reducing total ice cover, thinning the permanent ice pack, and changing the timing of freeze-up and breakup in more southern areas, such as Hudson Bay.

Researchers studying Hudson Bay's polar bears have found that the animals are coming ashore with less fat and are producing fewer cubs than they did 20 years ago. As temperatures increase, the sea ice melts earlier than it used to. For the polar bears, that means fewer chances to hunt seals and more time ashore - which in turn means the bears now have to fast for longer periods of time.

During their feeding season, polar bears usually kill a seal every five or six days. They can go for weeks without eating, since they have huge stomachs and can consume as much as 150 pounds of food at a time.

These amazing, powerful bears can range over 20,000 square miles. They seem custom-designed for both water travel and Arctic cold:
* they use their massive webbed front paws as paddles and their back feet as rudders, and have been observed more than 100 miles from the nearest shore;
* their outer fur, termed "guard hair," is clear and hollow, to trap the sun's heat and light;
* the guard-hairs are hard, smooth, and shed water;
* according to Tyro, polar bear hair "floats like a cork."
* they also have a dense layer of under-fur that traps a layer of air next to the skin, keeping the skin dry even when the bears swim in icy water;
* their skin is black to absorb heat from the sun;
* they have a thick layer of fat to keep them warm;
* polar bears can reach four feet tall or more at the shoulder, and can stand up to measure more than 10 feet tall;
* male polar bears weigh between 800 and 1600 pounds, while females usually weigh between 400 and 800 pounds;
* the largest recorded polar bear was a male more than 12 feet tall weighing over 2,200 pounds;
* the soles of their feet are almost completely covered in dense fur to insulate them from cold; and
* the parts of their feet not covered with fur are rough, like sandpaper, to help them negotiate the ice.

The Great Bear Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of bears and their habitat around the world, was created in 1981 to be a voice for the bears.

Dr. Jonkel feels that the most important message of his Arctic Ecology course is that ecosystem processes, like bears, don't recognize political boundaries. To protect them, he believes people must develop a spirit of what he calls "North Americanism."

The water we drink and the air we breathe cross national boundaries, he points out, and the actions taken by people in Montana directly impact the fate of the entire Arctic, including polar bears.

"Now that we are faced with threats like global warming, it is high time that North Americans start to cooperate," Jonkel said, "...before they lose much of what is valuable to them."