Polar bear habitat around Svalbard in the Barents Sea is currently slightly above average for 23 June 2017: this short post records what that amount of ice looks like according to the Norwegian Ice Service (NIS).
Compare to 2015 at the same date, the year that the last polar bear count was conducted for the Svalbard region, when many cubs were seen and the bears were reported in excellent condition:
Comments Off on Svalbard polar bear habitat higher than average – here’s what that looks like
Posted in Sea ice habitat
Tagged Barents Sea, habitat, polar bear, sea ice, Svalbard
There is still a huge swath of highly concentrated thick first year ice (>1.2m) over most of Hudson Bay this week (19 June 2017) and even in the NW quadrant (the closest proxy we have for Western Hudson Bay), the weekly graph shows levels are greater than 2016, when WHB bears came off the ice in good condition about mid-July. All of which indicates 2017 won’t be an early sea ice breakup year for WHB polar bears.
There is thick first year ice (>1.2m, dark green) in patches along the west coast in the north and south. Thick first year ice also extends into Hudson Strait and Baffin Bay, with some medium first year ice (0.7-1.2m thick, bright green) along the central and southern coasts of WHB. Note the red triangles incorporated into the thick ice of Hudson Strait in the chart above: those are icebergs from Greenland and/or Baffin Island glaciers. A similar phenomenon has been noted this year off northern Newfoundland, where very thick glacier ice became mixed with thick first year pack ice and were compacted against the shore by storm winds to create patches of sea ice 5-8 m thick.
Compare the above to what the ice looked like last year at this time (2016 20 June, below). There is more open water in the east this year (where few WHB bears would likely venture anyway) but less open water around Churchill and Wapusk National Park to the south than there was in 2016:
We won’t know for several more weeks if most WHB bears will come ashore at about the same time as last year (early to mid-July) or whether they will be in as good condition as they were last year (because winter conditions may not have been similar).
But so far, sea ice conditions are not looking as dire as the weekly “departure from normal” chart (below, 19 June 2017) might suggest (all that “less than normal” red and pink, oh no!!):
Comments Off on W Hudson Bay polar bears won’t have an early breakup year, according to sea ice charts
Posted in Conservation Status, Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged breakup, concentration, early breakup, extinction, habitat, ice charts, observations, polar bear, predictions, sea ice, survival, trends
Heavy sea ice off Newfoundland and southern Labrador has been an issue for months: it brought record-breaking numbers of polar bear visitors onshore in early March and April and since then has hampered the efforts of fisherman to get out to sea.
Let’s look back in time at how the ice built up, from early January to today, using ice maps and charts I’ve downloaded from the Canadian Ice Service and news reports published over the last few months.
The tour is illuminating because it shows the development of the thick ice over time and shows how strong winds from a May storm combined with an extensive iceberg field contributed to the current situation.
Bottom line: I can only conclude that climate change researcher David Barber was grandstanding today when he told the media that global warming is to blame for Newfoundland’s record thick sea ice conditions this year. I suspect that because Barber’s expensive research expedition was scuttled, he simply had to find a way to garner media attention for his project — and the media obliged. Read to the end and decide for yourself.
Comments Off on Heavy ice off East Coast 2017 caused by winds, cold temperatures, and icebergs
Posted in Advocacy, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Arctic ice, Barber, climate change, global warming, icebergs, multiyear ice, Newfoundland, sea ice, Strait of Belle Isle, thick sea ice, trapped in ice
Here are some suggestions, by myself and others. See the sidebar for my offerings, not forgetting “Polar Bears Have Big Feet” for the toddlers in your life, so they don’t feel left out when older kids get polar bear books to read over the summer: Facts & Myths for middle school ages, and Outstanding Survivors and/or EATEN (the polar bear attack thriller) for teens and adults. 
Titles from other authors that have a few mentions of polar bears amid great descriptions of life in the Arctic or Arctic exploration that would make good summer reading as well. Continue reading
Comments Off on Stock up on polar bear gift books and summer reading about the Arctic
Posted in Book review, Uncategorized
Tagged Arctic exploration, books, Facts and Myths, outstanding survivors, polar bear, preschool books, science, summer reading, thriller
The newest polar bear science paper making the rounds courtesy the US Geological Survey, is a perfect example of a statistically-significant result with no biological significance. While the results are rather lame, the paper is dangerous because it repeats the disingenuous claim (see Crockford 2017) that Southern Beaufort Sea polar bear numbers declined in recent years due to summer sea ice loss.
The USGS authors (Durner et al. 2017) know this harm-from-summer-ice-loss assertion is not true for the Southern Beaufort subpopulation but the more papers they can get into print that say so, the more likely it will be believed — and the less likely readers will check older literature that documents the recent decline in polar bear numbers was due to a three year period (2004-2006) when thick ice conditions in spring made seal hunting a challenge, a repeat of a well-known phenomenon (e.g. Stirling et al. 1980; Stirling 2002) unique to this region that has been documented since the 1960s.
The Durner paper (USGS press release “Increased Sea Ice Drift Puts Polar Bears on Faster Moving Treadmill” published online 6 June ahead of print) spins the research results as potentially significant bad news but in so doing reveals how desperate they have become to make the public and their biology colleagues believe that Southern Beaufort polar bears, among others, are being negatively affected by summer sea ice loss (as per Stirling and Derocher 2012).
Durner, G.M., Douglas, D.C., Albeke, S.E., Whiteman, J.P., Amstrup, S.C., Richardson, E., Wilson, R.R. and Ben-David, M. 2017. Increased Arctic sea ice drift alters adult female polar bear movements and energetics. Global Change Biology. DOI: 10.1111/gcb.13746 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.13746/abstract [paywalled]
In fact, the Durner et al. paper does not document any harm to polar bears from the proposed ‘treadmill’ effect of more rapidly moving ice for the period 1999-2013 compared to 1987-1998, but instead uses models to suggest bears might have to eat one to three more seals per year to compensate for the extra energy needed to walk against the moving ice. That’s right: perhaps only 1 more seal per year out of the 50 or so they would usually consume (see Stirling and Øritsland 1995). In my opinion, that’s a pretty lame result for what one of the co-authors described as an immense amount of work.
News outlets have essentially used the USGS press release as a click-bait lede for another round of Trump-bashing with respect to the Paris climate change agreement, see here and here: the stories are hardly about polar bears at all. And predictably, polar bear activist and co-author Steven Amstrup (paid spokesperson for Polar Bears International, famous for their “Save Our Sea Ice” campaign) appears to be using the same approach: an up-coming call-in talk radio program at NPR’s Anchorage affiliate KSKA for Tuesday 13 June at 10:00 (Alaska time, see “Talk of Alaska”) is being billed as a discussion of “polar bears, climate change, and the Paris Accord” (h/t AK geologist). Continue reading
Comments Off on USGS ‘treadmill’ paper repeats bogus claim that ice loss harmed polar bears
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Alaska, Amstrup, Durner, endangered, energy, loss of summer ice, moving sea ice, polar bear, population decline, sea ice, seals, Southern Beaufort, spring feeding, summer sea ice, thick spring ice, threatened, treadmill, USGS
Relative to recent years and potential impacts on polar bear health and survival in Canada, there is nothing alarming in the pattern or speed of sea ice breakup for 2017, either over Hudson Bay, the southern Beaufort, or the eastern high Arctic.
Last year at this time (see map below), there was more open water in Hudson Bay and in the Southern Beaufort yet the polar bears came ashore in fine shape that summer and there was no hue-and-cry of dying bears anywhere. Breakup this year is on track to be about 3 weeks earlier than it was in the 1980s, as it has been since at least 2001, a conclusion reached by polar bear specialists (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017; Lunn et al. 2016), who examined sea ice breakup to 2015.
Here are critical words to remember (more details here) from biologist Martin Obbard and colleagues (2016:29) on the relationship between body condition and sea ice for Southern Hudson Bay (SH) polar bears, which apply equally well to bears in other regions:
“Date of freeze-up had a stronger influence on subsequent body condition than date of break-up in our study. Though models with date of freeze-up were supported over models with other ice covariates, we acknowledge that lower variability in freeze-up dates than in ice duration or break-up dates could have influenced the model selection process. Nevertheless, we suggest that a stronger effect of date of freeze-up may be because even though break-up has advanced by up to 3-4 weeks in portions of Hudson Bay it still occurs no earlier than late June or early July so does not yet interfere with opportunities to feed on neonate ringed seal pups that are born in March-April in eastern Hudson Bay (Chambellant 2010). Therefore, losing days or weeks of hunting opportunities during June and July deprives polar bears of the opportunity to feed on adult seals, but does not deprive them of the critical spring period (Watts and Hansen 1987) when they are truly hyperphagic. No doubt, the loss of hunting opportunities to kill adult seals has a negative effect on body condition, but it appears that for bears in SH a forced extension of the fast in late fall has a greater negative effect on subsequent body condition.” [my bold]
In other words, by mid-June at least (maybe earlier), polar bears have largely finished their intensive feeding that’s so critical to their survival over the rest of the year.
That’s why the latest count of SH polar bears (Obbard et al. 2015) showed a stable population (and see this recent post on WHB polar population estimates). But freeze-up was late last year and that’s what will make the difference to polar bears over the coming year.
Comments Off on Breakup of sea ice on track in Canada as critical feeding period for polar bears ends
Posted in Conservation Status, Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged baffin bay, breakup, feeding, freeze-up, Hudson Bay, hunting, Kane Basin, polar bear, sea ice, snow cover, Southern Beaufort, spring feeding, trends
A dead polar bear was found on the shore of northeastern Newfoundland yesterday but the cause of death has not yet been determined.
From the local Telegram (5 June 2017):
“[Ann] Peddle of Bristol’s Hope was out for her morning walk when she came across the carcass of a polar bear that had washed ashore. The carcass had drifted between the rocks near the wharf in Bristol’s Hope, according to Peddle.
Peddle took some quick photos of the bear to post to social media before contacting the wildlife department at around 8:30 a.m.”
Ann Peddle took the photo below, which was printed with the above story:
See the map below for the location of Bristol’s Hope in NE Newfoundland, along the west shore of Conception Bay (see map at end of post for the names of the bays):
Was this a death by drowning or some other, more likely cause?
Continue reading
Comments Off on Dead polar bear washed ashore in NE Newfoundland, cause of death unknown
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged ashore, Bristol's Hope, Conception Bay, death, drowning, injury, Newfoundland, polar bear, sea ice, starvation, swimming, walking
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