Posted onMarch 15, 2023|Comments Off on Birthing season for harp seals in Labrador Sea just in time to feed hungry polar bears
The main birthing period for NW Atlantic harp seals has arrived. Local populations of ringed and bearded seal pups will soon follow but in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in eastern Canada, the pupping season for harp seals that is usually in progress by this time has likely been redirected north due to lack of suitable ice conditions. Sea ice off Labrador and Newfoundland is in good condition and this is where the vast majority of the global population go to give birth (ca. 7.6 million vs. 1.5 million in the White Sea and 434,000 in east Greenland).
Posted onMarch 12, 2023|Comments Off on Ice-entrapped dolphins in Newfoundland lucky not to have been eaten by polar bears
A small pod of white-beaked dolphins entrapped on Friday (10 March) by a sudden surge of ice along the northern Newfoundland coast were lucky to have been rescued by humans before polar bears could get to them. We know the bears are around, drawn south by the millions of harp seals giving birth to their pups in the area. In April 2014, something similar happened to white-beaked dolphins in Svalbard and they became a welcome meal for at least six polar bears (Aars et al. 2015).
UPDATE 20 March 2023: Another pod of white-beaked dolphins has perished from the ice over the weekend. More than 30 dolphins were trapped near the town of Carbonear, which is on Conception Bay (the next big bay southeast from Trinity Bay), according to CBC News. Given the ice conditions, this is almost certainly a different pod to the one reported on two weeks ago.
Dolphins getting stuck in sea ice is a fairly regular occurrence, said Ledwell. [Wayne Ledwell of Whale Release and Strandings]
“It’s been happening here forever,” he said, adding it’s not just a problem for dolphins. “It kills blue whale and humpback whales and whatever gets into it.”
Posted onSeptember 24, 2022|Comments Off on Map of Eastern Canada battered by Fiona’s hurricane-force winds and storm surges
Port aux Basques in SW Newfoundland has been particularly badly hit by Fiona, called ‘total devastation’. I know this region well from researching my latest science-based novel, UPHEAVAL, about a sea ice tsunami that hits Cape Breton Island and the Port aux Basques region in 2026 causing similar but more extensive damage. I discovered that many coastal areas in the Gulf of St. Lawrence are only 10m or so above sea level and since houses are often built close to shore, they are extremely vulnerable to high wave heights and storm surges.
Port aux Basques house falling into the sea, 24 September 2022. Rene Roy photo/Wreckhouse Press.
Some waves along Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore could build to be more than 10 metres, with waves along southern Newfoundland on Saturday morning reaching higher heights.“Waves over eastern portions of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Cabot Strait could be higher than 12 metres,” Environment Canada said.CBC News 24 September 2022.
I may post updates as more information comes in. See the map below to orient yourself regarding news reports.
Posted onApril 30, 2022|Comments Off on Explaining abundant polar bear sightings on the East Coast as an upshot of sea ice loss is absurd
Last week, a senior producer at CBC News, in order to concoct a timely story for ‘Earth Day’, attempted to explain the high number of sightings of polar bears this April in Newfoundland and Labrador, compared to the last two years, as a consequence of climate change and its handmaiden, loss of Arctic sea ice.
Title: ‘With an extinction threat looming, no wonder polar bears are at our door — and on the roof: there’s a grim reason why polar bears have been frequently showing up in coastal communities’. CBC News, 23 April 2022
The problem with this narrative is that the East Coast had much reduced sea ice in 2021 and virtually no polar bear sightings in Newfoundland and none in Labrador. There was more ice in 2020 than 2021 but also few bears. This year, ice extent was similar to 2020 for most of the region but polar bear sightings were up considerably.
In fact, the two years with the most sightings and problems with polar bears since 2008 were 2017 and 2018: in 2017, sea ice was exceptionally thick in April (although average in extent) and by June the sea ice was so thick and enduring that the Newfoundland fishing fleet couldn’t get out for spring openings; 2018 was another year of average sea ice extent and had even an even larger number of sightings than 2017, in Newfoundland especially (Crockford 2019:32). This suggests the sea ice vs. polar bear correlation on the East Coast since 2008 – if there even is one – may be the opposite of that stated in the CBC article: less ice usually means fewer bears onshore in Newfoundland and Labrador and more ice often means more bears.
Posted onApril 14, 2022|Comments Off on Newfoundland polar bear sighting updates and video
Here is a Youtube video of the incident I wrote about on Tuesday, of the bear that climbed up on an elderly woman’s house in St. Anthony last Sunday and then confronted her when she opened the door.
Statements from local officials included with a follow-up news report of the incident confirms that there were indeed no polar bear sightings along the Labrador coast in 2020 and 2021 and few (if any) along the Newfoundland coast: it wasn’t just a case of reports not making the news. In addition, it also appears that sea ice conditions this year brought an abundance of harp seal pups to the waters off southern Labrador and Newfoundland, which may mean that pregnant harp seals were giving birth further north for the past two years and the Davis Strait bears were simply staying with them.
Posted onApril 12, 2022|Comments Off on More fat polar bear sightings around homes on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula
Two recent incidents really remind me of the opening scene in my polar bear attack thriller, EATEN, and this time both were captured on film. They involved bears in good physical condition and luckily, no one has been hurt. There is still sea ice off the Northern Peninsula, which has brought the bears from the north.
On Sunday (10 April) in St. Anthony, a woman was alerted by her dog to what she though was someone on the front porch and found herself literally face to face with a polar bear when she opened the door; it then hopped up on her roof. The next day, in Goose Cove, a woman watched two bears (probably a female with a two year old male cub) explore the outside of a neighbour’s house and then walk across her driveway.
Posted onApril 10, 2022|Comments Off on Another polar bear on Fogo, this time on the south shore as sea ice surrounds the island
On Friday, 8 April, a polar bear was photographed on the south coast of Fogo Island, Newfoundland at a time when sea ice surrounded the offshore island. The bear, spotted near North Side Road near Stag Harbour, was non-threatening to the point of being totally chilled out, but attracted enough human attention to cause traffic congestion. Another sighting a little more than a week ago near Tilting on the east side of the island could possibly have involved the same bear.
Posted onApril 4, 2022|Comments Off on Polar bear attempted to break down front door of house in Newfoundland with people inside
A frightening incident just after midnight on Sunday left a woman and her daughter on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland shaken when a polar bear tried to break down their front door. Luckily for them, the bear was not starving and therefore not persistent: it soon stopped without doing much damage and neighbours were able to drive it away from the house. Again, the premise of my polar bear attack thriller, EATEN, is that the bear could have gotten into the house if it had really been motivated by hunger to do so. And what if that had happened and there were no neighbours to call for help?
There is still abundant ice around the northern Peninsula (see below), and gov’t officials are warning residents to be wary of other bears reported in the region. A CBC story on the incident quotes local wildlife officials as saying they “generally receive between 30 and 60 calls about polar bears annually. There have been 10 this year so far.” However, as I’ve pointed out previously, it appears this has only been true since 2012 or so: lots of bears visiting Newfoundland and Labrador in the spring is a relatively new phenomenon.
Posted onMarch 31, 2022|Comments Off on Newfoundland polar bear sighting two days ago: why my novel was set on Fogo Island in March
On 29 March, there was a sighting of a polar bear on Fogo Island near the community of Tilting that prompted an official warning to residents. Although this bear caused no problems so far, that hasn’t always been the case and it’s a useful reminder that this is why I set my polar bear attack thriller EATEN in this location, at this time of year. If you haven’t read it, or given it as a gift, now might be the perfect time! In Canada here and the UK here.
From a review of EATEN by polar bear-human interaction specialist Doug Clark (June 2016):
Susan Crockford has not only written a fun novel that gets readers thinking, she has probably done polar bear conservation a real service. Because of how politicized polar bears have become as symbols of climate change, fiction is the only arena where one can really present this kind of scenario right now.
Sea ice conditions off Newfoundland on 28 March:
Comments Off on Newfoundland polar bear sighting two days ago: why my novel was set on Fogo Island in March
Watch polar bear habitat reform in the Canadian Arctic: “last 10 days” Canadian Ice Service animation (works anytime) HERE.
See Quote archive for details.
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