It was a good year for polar bear habitat in the southern portions of Eastern Canada this spring – surprisingly, much better than it was in 1968 through 1970. And since spring conditions are what really matter to polar bears, this is good news indeed.
Environment Canada’s Canadian Ice Service recently published a nice little summary that has some rather eye-opening graphs. These describe the conditions for polar bears in the southern Davis Strait subpopulation – the one whose population size increased so dramatically between 1974 and 2007 despite lower-than-average ice extent in some years, even while their body condition declined (see here and here).
[Fitting post for the second anniversary of this blog, I think – more below1]
Note that I’ve added a “Blog Archive” page that lists all of my posts, easier to browse now that there are more than 200 of them.
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![Figure 1. How do polar bears look so clean most of the time when they get this bloody on a regular basis? They wash up! [This picture is not from Stirling’s paper].](https://i0.wp.com/polarbearscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/pbear_withcubs_feeding.jpg)
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