In a polite but misleading article today in a BBC magazine (The polar bears are coming to town) about the relationship of polar bears and Inuit in Arviat, Western Hudson Bay, there is no mention of the on-going feud between Nunavut Inuit and Canadian polar bear scientists regarding invasive research.
Nor is there a mention of the fact that according to the most recent research, there has been no trend in sea ice conditions since 2001.
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Comments Off on BBC perspective on Arviat polar bears – those not included in the last mark-recapture study
Posted in Polar bear attacks, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Arviat, BBC, breakup, freeze-up, invasive research, Lunn, mark-recapture, Nunavut, polar bear, sea ice, Tyrrell, western hudson bay
This needs saying again: the latest study on Western Hudson Bay polar bears reveal the population has been stable since 2004 and there has been no significant trend in either breakup or freeze-up dates since 2001.
Environment Canada and the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group concur that the current size of the WHB subpopulation is about 1030 bears. Documents found online indicate a new version of the 2013 WHB mark-recapture report (Lunn et al. 2013) is now available (Lunn et al. 2014) and that a new population survey is planned for 2016. A 2013 story based on false information produced by The Guardian that is still in circulation should be retracted.
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Comments Off on Western Hudson Bay polar bear numbers are stable, no trend in ice breakup or freeze-up
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population
Tagged aerial survey, breakup, freeze-up, Goldenberg, Guardian, Lunn, numbers, polar bear, population size, sea ice, Stirling, survey, trend, western hudson bay
In The Arctic Journal, 7 October 2015: Unstable thinking about polar bear habitat [not my title choice]
This is a previously unpublished summary, written exclusively for The Arctic Journal, of my peer-reviewed, fully referenced essay on this topic that was published earlier this year by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in their “Briefing Paper” series (#16, June 8, 2015: The Arctic Fallacy: Sea Ice Stability and the Polar Bear), which includes a foreword by Dr. Matthew Cronin, Professor of Animal Genetics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Pdf here.
Here are the essential points, one by one:
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Comments Off on Sea ice is not a stable habitat for polar bears – summarized today in The Arctic Journal
Posted in Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Arctic Journal, decline, GWPF, habitat, IUCN, polar bear, population size, sea ice, spring, summer, thick spring ice
A cougar (aka puma/mountain lion) was captured in downtown Victoria yesterday (my home town), with all the drama given a polar bear attack. No polar bear alert program here, just cougar tracking hounds on standby and officers with guns and tranquilizer darts.
The Globe and Mail has video here.
Details and quotes below. CBC story was the only one to include a map, which I have put into polar bear perspective.
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Comments Off on Churchill has polar bears, Victoria has cougars
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged cougar, news, polar bear, predator, Victoria
The shore of Alaska is not very important to Southern Beaufort polar bears – most of them stay on the sea ice during the summer and early fall, where they may or may not continue eating. These results of on-going satellite tracking studies by USGS1 confirm results of previous studies.
Comments Off on Tracking polar bears – 3 out of 4 S. Beaufort bears on the ice during September 2015
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Alaska, Beaufort Sea, Eliasson, Kaktovik, polar bear, satellite collars, sea ice, Southern Beaufort, tracking, USGS
Recent accounts of an encounter with a curious polar bear female and her two older cubs in the Beaufort Sea on 16 September give contradictory details about the position of sea ice at the time. The same researcher told one reporter that the ship was 240 km from land, another that it was 240 km from the sea ice, and in another account (that he wrote himself), said the ship had been far from land and sea ice.
University of Victoria (Canada) chemical oceanographer Jay Cullen said on the expedition web site:
“After arriving on station and beginning work the crew noticed three polar bears in the water together which swam around to the ship when our water sampling system was nearly 3500 meters below the surface. The ship was located far from sea ice and land. Indeed, Arctic sea ice extent was the fourth lowest on record this year and there has been speculation that this imposes stress on polar bears which rely on the ice to hunt.” [my bold]
But the maps below show that at the time of the incident (taken from the expedition web site) and the NSIDC Masie sea ice map for 16 September 2015, the ship [the CCGS Amundsen, acting as a research vessel] was actually quite close to an isolated large patch of sea ice, although further from the edge of the main pack. A patch of sea ice plenty big enough for a polar bear to rest upon – no wonder the bears did not appear stressed.
And the polar bear biologist Cullen consulted (Dr. Andrew Derocher) implied by his response that the bear was indeed far from sea ice. Reminds me of the swimming polar bear off the Hibernia oil platform off Newfoundland March 2015, which turned out to be not far from ice at all. See what you think.
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Comments Off on Beaufort Sea swimming polar bears far from land but not very far from sea ice
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Amundsen, Beaufort Sea, body condition, curious, Derocher, Jay Cullen, open water, polar bear, sea ice, swimming
Activist polar explorer Børge Ousland’s told National Geographic that more polar bear encounters on land are due to reduced sea ice – without any reference to population changes over that time or revealing when or where these observations were made.
More vague anecdotal observations and opinions posing as scientific evidence.
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Comments Off on Activist explorer blames more polar bear encounters since 1985 on reduced sea ice
Posted in Advocacy, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged activist, climate change, encounters, explorer, glaciers, Ice Legacy, Kara Sea, National Geographic, polar bear, population size, problem bears, sea ice, Severnaya Zemlya
This was kind of fun – featuring the Churchill polar bear guiding trials and tribulations of PolarBearAlley’s Kelsey Eliasson, Dennis Compayre, Brian Ladoon, which premiered Tuesday 22 September in Canada and the US. Supposedly, you can watch online episodes that have aired already (wouldn’t work for me).
This is a ‘reality’ TV series, not a documentary. It won’t be to everyone’s taste. But by focusing on independent polar bear guides, you see the bears in their element (and the goings-on in the town) without the constant lectures about global warming and predictions that the bears are all going to die that are, I understand, a feature of Tundra Buggy tours operated by the largest outfit, Frontiers North, due to its partnership with Polar Bears International, a strongly activist organization that many polar bear biologists belong (including Steven Amstrup, Ian Stirling, Andrew Derocher, former WWF employee Geoff York).
So far, anyway – perhaps the lectures are to come? YouTube Trailer below.
UPDATED 29 September 2015: OLN has posted the first episode on Youtube, copied below.
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Comments Off on Polar Bear Town – Churchill bear stories on TV without gloom and doom propaganda
Posted in Book review, Life History
Tagged Churchill, Compayre, Eliasson, guides, Ladoon, polar bear, review, tundra buggy, TV
At the seasonal minimum 2015, the Arctic Basin was still almost full of sea ice, down only 0.3 mkm2 below the maximum it could ever be.
Remember that spending the summer in the Arctic Basin for most polar bears is just like sitting on the western shore of Hudson Bay – they are all waiting for the refreeze. In either location, they might find something to eat, they might not.
Below are NSIDC MASIE sea ice maps for 10 April 2015 (as big as it gets, basin filled) vs. 17 September 2015: Continue reading
Comments Off on Summer refuge for polar bears in Arctic Basin only 0.3 mkm2 below its possible maximum
Posted in Conservation Status, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Arctic basin, Beaufort, body condition, Chukchi, mimimum, polar bear, Refuge, summer
Conditions this year (2015) in the Barents Sea were excellent according to the polar bear researchers who work there (“Polar bears were as fat as pigs”).
A new survey just completed for a population count showed the bears were are in excellent condition – except the injured ones, of course, which some news organizations are promoting as evidence of harm from global warming-induced sea ice changes because an activist photographer – not scientists – said so.
Comments Off on Barents Sea polar bears in excellent condition say Norwegian biologists
Posted in Advocacy, Population, Sea ice habitat
Tagged Aars, advocacy, Andersen, arctic sea ice, Barents Sea, body condition, climate change, emaciated, fat, global warming, good news, injured, Langenberger, old, photographer, pigs, polar bear, sick, Svalbard, viral, York
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