Monthly Archives: July 2021

Polar bear habitat update for end July 2021 compared to previous years

Posted on July 29, 2021 | Comments Off

Here’s a trip down memory lane for Arctic sea ice at the end of July, which as far as I can see provides no evidence that a very low sea ice disaster is in the cards for polar bears this year.

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Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat

Tagged Arctic, breakup, catastrophe, Hudson Bay, ice-free, polar bear, sea ice, tracking

A literary review of my polar bear attack thriller, with all the condescending attitude you’d expect

Posted on July 27, 2021 | Comments Off

For your amusement, I present a book review of Eaten from an Austrian academic specializing in contemporary literature by the name of Michael Fuchs. I came across his book chapter last week, buried deep within Google offerings, while looking for something else. I laughed all the way through it.

Here is the abstract:

“This chapter draws on Margaret Atwood’s vision of Canada as a Gothic space, examining how contemporary texts continue to invoke imagery of human and animal as antagonists competing for the same space. Fuchs analyzes a corpus of three “bear horror” fictions, the horror film Backcountry (2014) and two novels, The Bear (2014) by Claire Cameron and Susan J. Crockford’s near-future polar bear-themed Eaten (2015). It argues that animal predation on humans provides a powerful symbolic vehicle for bridging the human–animal divide, as it overrides the theory of human exceptionalism, offering a critical view of the entanglement of humans and nonhumans in the Anthropocene.”

A friend that I shared the essay with commented:

“My favourite sentence (new word of the day, class, please use “diegetic” in a sentence):

“These constant slippages between ontological levels puzzle the reader in ways similar to how Anna is confused by the goings-on in the diegetic reality.” [pg. 263]

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Posted in Advocacy, Book review, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat

Tagged advocacy, climate change, Eaten, literature, novel, polar bear, review, thriller

Western Hudson Bay polar bears: still some out on the sea ice, some causing trouble

Posted on July 22, 2021 | Comments Off

As of Monday (19 July), more polar bears had come ashore near Churchill and on the shores of Wakusp National Park but some are still out on the bay. The pattern of ice breakup this year means most bears will come ashore well south of Churchill and make their way north over the summer and fall. There have been two Churchill ‘problem’ bear reports so far but not one for this week, so I’ll go ahead and post without it.

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Posted in Life History, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat

Tagged breakup, Churchill, Hudson Bay, polar bear, predictions, problem bears, sea ice, western hudson bay

As much Beaufort Sea polar bear habitat at mid-July 2021 as there was in 1982

Posted on July 18, 2021 | Comments Off

Beaufort Sea ice coverage is about average for this time of year, again failing to decline in lock-step with other Arctic regions. Will there be lots of fat bears onshore like there was in 2019? Only time will tell.

Healthy polar bear male at Kaktovik, Alaska on the Southern Beaufort Sea, September 2019, Ed Boudreau photo, with permission.

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Posted in Population, Sea ice habitat

Tagged Alaska, extinction, polar bears, sea ice, Southern Beaufort, survey

Polar bears have begun to come ashore on Western Hudson Bay

Posted on July 9, 2021 | Comments Off

So far, the first evidence I’ve seen of a bear ashore in Western Hudson Bay was one photographed near Churchill Manitoba on 28 June (below).

However, by 5 July, the first of six collared females from Andrew Derocher’s WH study (below) had also come ashore, as did others along the shore of Wapusk National Park. This is not ‘early’ – just earlier than the last few years. Like last year, however, there is still a fair amount of sea ice left on the bay and some bears seem to be choosing to stay out longer on what ‘experts’ describe as unsuitable habitat. As you can see on his bear tracker map, Derocher uses a filter that shows only ice >50% concentration because he and his buddies have decided that bears so dislike anything less that they immediately head to shore as soon as ice levels fall below this threshold.

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Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat

Tagged Churchill, polar bear, predictions, sea ice, Wapusk National Park, western hudson bay

Constant dire predictions have been an attempt to counter effective criticism of polar bears as AGW icon says outgoing PGSG chair

Posted on July 3, 2021 | Comments Off

In an unexpected statement, Dag Vongraven (the out-going Chairman of the Polar Bear Specialist Group) suggests that much of the incessant dire warnings of doom about the future of polar bears from PBSG members has been a counter-measure to offset the effective efforts by myself and others to expose the flawed rhetoric this group promotes.

You may remember Vongraven, who in 2014 famously sent me an email alerting me to a PBSG statement that later came back to bite them (in part because it was included in a CBC documentary called The Politics of Polar Bears later that year, see below):

It is important to realize that this range [i.e. their polar bear population estimate] never has been an estimate of total abundance in a scientific sense, but simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.

Will this be another? You be the judge.

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Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat

Tagged contradictions, facts, global warming, PBSG, polar bear, politics of polar bears, predictions, sceptic, Svalbard, Vongraven

Barents Sea polar bears thriving despite huge summer ice loss: spring research results are in

Posted on July 1, 2021 | Comments Off

After being locked out last year, fieldwork monitoring polar bears in the Svalbard region of the Barents Sea resumed this spring. The results show that despite having to deal with the most extreme loss of summer sea ice in the entire Arctic, polar bears in this region continue to thrive. These facts show no hint of that impending catastrophic decline in population size we keep hearing is just around the corner. No tipping point here.