Churchill, Manitoba is proud of its management of problem polar bears and rightly so. But it took time and money to implement the solutions that allowed Churchill to function as it does today, and that should be a lesson for other Arctic communities that have only really started to have problems with polar bears in recent years.
For those who want to understand the problems facing other communities, including Arviat (formerly “Eskimo Point”), a town 260 km north of Churchill. Arviat has a population more than three times the size of Churchill and has been having significant problems with bears since about 2007. I’ve made an excerpt of an excellent paper written by Ian Stirling and colleagues that was published back in 1977 (Stirling et al. 1977).
It describes in detail the problems Churchill had with polar bears in the 1960s and 70s when bear numbers were on the rise — and the various steps that were taken to try and resolve them (even by the time the paper was written, not all of them had been adequately resolved, see Kearney 1989). It’s a fascinating read — see it here.
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