The remote and isolated Shamattawa First Nation in Manitoba was threatened last weekend by a large male polar bear in good condition prowling around but the bear was eventually captured near the dump and released near the coast without incident. No one blamed this wandering bear on climate change.
Another bear visited the community in August 2010, also without incident. See map for location and news report excerpts below.
Continue readingComments Off on Polar bear in good condition visits small Cree community 130km from coast of W. Hudson Bay
Posted in Polar bear attacks
Tagged inland, maternity den, polar bear, problem bear, threat, wandering, western hudson bay
Back in 2017, we famously had National Geographic falsely blaming a starving polar bear on climate change but since then we have been inundated (relatively speaking) with stories of ‘wandering’ bears sighted far from Arctic coastlines. These wandering bears are oddities to be sure but are not in any way an indicator of melting Arctic sea ice or lost habitat, as The Times (UK) has claimed in this latest example (Polar bear treks 1,500 miles south as Arctic hunting zone melts away).
Similar to three other recent examples, from 2019 – in Alaska in winter, in Chukotka in early spring, and Siberia in late spring – this month’s example cannot rationally be blamed on lack of sea ice. This year’s bear took at least eight weeks to travel from the Lena River Delta area of the Laptev Sea to a small village in Yakusk, Russia where it was captured on 11 May, shown below on the map of the route it took included in the story at The Daily Mail (11 May).
Comments Off on Wandering polar bears are the new starving polar bears, falsely blamed on climate change
Posted in Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat
Tagged climate change, competition, inland, melting ice, polar bear, sea ice, Siberia, sighting, young bears
A thin polar bear has wandered more than 1000km south of the Kara Sea into the Siberian town of Norilsk, which has happened at least once before in the 1970s. It is reminiscent of a similar incident this past winter in Alaska and there is no reason to blame this on lack of sea ice.
From the Siberian Times earlier today (17 June 2019) comes the report that a bear that did not get enough to eat this spring (due to any number of reasons, including competition from larger, stronger bears) and went looking for easier food sources. No mention is made that this incident should be blamed on global warming.
Update 18 June 2019: Lack of any evidence that this incident was due to lack of sea ice didn’t stop Reuters from implying this was indeed the case, a theme picked up by the UK Telegraph, the BBC, and The Guardian.
Quotes and video from the story below. Continue reading
Comments Off on Skinny polar bear far inland in Siberia not due to sea ice loss but a rare normal event
Posted in Life History, Polar bear attacks, Sea ice habitat
Tagged climate change, inland, internet, Norilsk, polar bear, sea ice, Siberia, skinny, starving polar bears
An interesting report from Labrador this morning: video footage of a fat polar bear running down an isolated 2-lane highway in southern Labrador.
Yet another reminder that there is still a lot of sea ice off that coast, which is home to the Davis Strait polar bear subpopulation.
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Comments Off on Labrador polar bear not lost or in danger – just running down a rural highway
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Davis Strait, highway, inland, Labrador, polar bear, sea ice, sighting, video
A paper published last week in the journal Science, written by a team of biologists and atmospheric scientists, expounds on a possible dire future for a range of Arctic animals. It’s called, “Ecological consequences of sea-ice decline” and surprisingly, polar bears are discussed only briefly.
However, with the inclusion of one short sentence, the paper manages to perpetuate misinformation on grizzly/polar bear hybridization that first appeared in a commentary essay three years ago in Nature (Kelly et al. 2010)1. The Post et al. 2013 missive contains this astonishing statement (repeated by a Canadian Press news report):
“Hybridization between polar bears and grizzly bears may be the result of increasing inland presence of polar bears as a result of a prolonged ice-free season.”
Lead author of the paper, Professor of Biology Eric Post, is quoted extensively in the press release issued by his employer (Penn State University, pdf here). In it, Post re-states the above sentence in simpler terms, removing any doubt of its intended interpretation:
“… polar and grizzly bears already have been observed to have hybridized because polar bears now are spending more time on land, where they have contact with grizzlies.”
Both statements are patently false. All recent hybridization events documented (2006-2013) occurred because a few male grizzlies traveled over the sea ice into polar bear territory and found themselves a polar bear female to impregnate (see news items here and here, Fig. 1 below). These events did not occur on land during the ice-free season (which is late summer/early fall), but on the sea ice in spring (March-May).
Grizzlies have been documented wandering over the sea ice of the western Arctic since at least 1885 (Doupe et al. 2007; Fig. 2, below) and the presence in this region of hybrid grizzly/polar bear offspring is not an indicator of declining summer sea ice, whether due to global warming or natural causes, or some combination thereof.
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Comments Off on Biologists spreading misinformation: hybridization with grizzlies not due to polar bears moving inland
Posted in Advocacy, Hybridization, Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged advocacy, Arctic melting pot, Brendan Kelly, Eric Post, grizzly bears, grizzly polar bear, hybridization, inland, misdirection, misinformation, polar bears, prolonged ice-free season, sea ice, sea ice decline, sea ice loss, spring ice, Stirling, summer ice minimum
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