13 | August | 2024 | polarbearscience

The 1980s and early 1990s are said to have been the “good old days” for sea ice conditions and polar bears in Western Hudson Bay, with all tagged bears usually ashore by mid-to-late August. Then an abrupt step-change in sea ice breakup dates brought polar bears to shore an average of two weeks earlier in the late 1990s. From then until 2019, the only significant outlier to all tagged bears being ashore by about late July was 2009, which was such an unusually cold year that the last bears came ashore about August 20.

That pattern changed in 2020, when the last bears came off the ice as late as they had in 2009, on August 21. Something similar happened in 2022, when the last bears came off a small remnant of ice even later, about August 26. And this year, the bears may be moving ashore even later: there is even more ice remaining off WH and much of it is thick compacted ice that hasn’t melted much over the last few weeks, which means bears have been as late onshore as the 1980s for three out of the last five years.

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A man was killed last week (August 8) by two polar bears on a small island off the east coast of Baffin Island in Nunavut, multiple reports have confirmed — although precious few details have been provided, other than that one of the bears was killed immediately afterward. The name of the victim (an employee of a government radar site) has not been released, and no information on the condition of the bears or the circumstances of the attack have been provided. Major news outlets have had to pad their stories with details from previous attacks and other filler.

A Svalbard sow and half-grown male cub that’s as big as she is.

However, an attack by two bears sounds suspiciously like the sow and half-grown cub involved in another fatal attack in 2018 in Foxe Basin, even though adult females with cubs are one of the least common perpetrators of serious attacks on people.

Why are officials not saying if this was yet another fatal assault by an adult female with a cub, even five days after the attack? Perhaps because they think it makes the bears “look bad” and strengthens the Nunavut case for recently including equal numbers of females and males in their hunting quotas? Time will tell.

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