Tag Archives: US Fish & Wildlife

Furor over a tweet from the Moscow polar bear forum

Posted on December 10, 2013 | Comments Off on Furor over a tweet from the Moscow polar bear forum

The ousting of WWF and their cohorts from meetings to which they had initially been invited is the real story (so far) coming out of the International Forum on Conservation of Polar Bears (December 3-6, Moscow). However, that incident never made the mainstream media, so few people will ever know it happened.

What the public did hear about was the uproar over a tweet.

On the last day of the meeting, Canada’s Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq drove home, in less than 140 characters and a photo, the point she and her contingent had been trying to make at the meeting.

Aglukkaq tweet_Dec 5 2013
A twitter storm erupted that got really nasty — and the media picked up on it. Within hours, newspapers across Canada had themselves a story.

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Ten out of ten polar bears being tracked this summer in the Beaufort Sea are on the ice

Posted on August 29, 2013 | Comments Off on Ten out of ten polar bears being tracked this summer in the Beaufort Sea are on the ice

PB_male on ice_Regehr USFWS_March 2010_labeledTracking Beaufort Sea polar bears over the summer — what can it tell us about how important the position of summer sea ice relative to the shoreline in this region is to these bears? Do Beaufort Sea bears get stranded on shore like the polar bears in Davis Strait and Hudson Bay?

Polar bear biologist Eric Regehr (with the US Fish & Wildlife Service, or FWS) has a team working with US Geological Survey researchers (USGS) in the southern Beaufort tracking where adult female polar bears go throughout the year. This is part of on-going research in the Beaufort and Chukchi Sea (see previous post here; see also Fish & Wildlife 2009; Polar Bear News 2010 and 2013; Rode and Regehr 2010, pdfs below; and just out, the “accepted” version of the Rode et al. paper discussed here, and announced in my last post here).

The researchers have been posting a summary map at the end of each month on the USGS website showing the tracks of the females they fitted with radio collars the previous spring — for 2013, and back to 2010. They can’t put collars on male bears because their necks are larger around than their heads, so a collar would just slip off.

I’ve posted the July 2013 track map below, which shows all ten bears out on the ice, and the previous month (June 2013) to compare it to (the August map should be out shortly). I’ve included a few maps from 2012 to allow you to compare this year’s results to the situation last summer.

The August tracks should be available after the Labour Day weekend – check back next week to see where the bears have been this month. I’ll post the map here or you can go to the USGS website directly. [UPDATE Sept 4, 2013: The August map is up, posted here.]

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Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat

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Good news about Chukchi Sea polar bears whispered by US Fish & Wildlife Service

Posted on August 29, 2013 | Comments Off on Good news about Chukchi Sea polar bears whispered by US Fish & Wildlife Service

Just out: the “accepted” version of the Rode et al. paper discussed here last month — detailing just how well polar bears in the Chukchi Sea subpopulation are doing, despite recent declines in sea ice.

However, what was decidedly odd was how I found out about it.

Yesterday (Aug 28), while looking for something else, I found a “press release” tweeted by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) employee Geoff York, who is now also a full voting member of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG).

Chukchi bears press release tweet_Geoff York Aug 28 2013

The announcement that York tweeted is listed as “alaska.fws.gov/external/newsroom/pdf/cs_polar_bear_article.pdf” and I found a stand-alone copy of the pdf with that title on Google.

However, FWS has so far (Aug. 29, 7:00 am PT) not mentioned this item on their [central] website, their twitter account, or their Facebook page (pdf here, with its original title). The “press release” has no date and is not on FWS letterhead but is authored by “Eric V. Regehr, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.” [I guess FWS employees can issue their own press releases?] UPDATE: Found it finally in the “FWS Alaska region” (Alaska FWS, posted Aug. 22, 2013, which included the Eric Regehr summary tweeted by York), via a news report at SitNews dated Aug. 27. Mystery solved]

Also odd that so far, no one except Geoff York himself seems to have picked it up (nothing so far on WWF website or Facebook page, Polar Bears International pages, or at ScienceDaily. [Update: see news report at SitNews dated Aug. 27. Still odd that the FWS report has been sitting there quietly since the 22nd (Thursday of last week)]

Not exactly how I’d choose to spread good news, but perhaps that’s the point.

Nevertheless, not too much new in the paper itself [contact me if you’d like a copy] – no population size estimate, for example – other than what I included in the summary provided last month (based on a March presentation by lead author Karyn Rode), except this: spring litter sizes [1.90 in 2007 and 2.17 in 2009 on Wrangel Island] were “are among the highest reported for 18 of 19 polar bear populations” and were similar to litter sizes 20 years earlier.

I guess the picture of the Chukchi female with a litter of triplet yearling cubs included without mention in the 2010 Rode and Regehr report (pdf here, copied below, discussed previously here) was significant after all.

Rode and Regehr 2010_Chukchi_report2010_Fig1_triplets_labelled

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Polar bear spin reaches epic proportions at Bangkok CITES meeting

Posted on March 10, 2013 | Comments Off on Polar bear spin reaches epic proportions at Bangkok CITES meeting

As I mentioned here in an update to my March 7th post, Damian Carrington at the Guardian Environment blog had this telling quote about the CITES deliberations that took place prior to the vote to ban polar bear trade (by uplisting its status from Appendix II to Appendix I):

As the debate raged, national delegates from other countries got confused by the strident but conflicting claims. “Where is the truth? Is it true that the polar bear is declining. Is it true that trade is increasing? We need to know,” said the Egyptian delegate.[my bold]

Indeed. Was there “truth” in the presentations heard by delegates? By that I mean, honest presentations of facts so that delegates could make up their own minds, or facts loaded with spin to sway the decision one way or another? I wasn’t there so I can’t say. But we can get some impression of what might have been said from two press releases statements issued after the vote failed by two parties that were actively promoting acceptance of the US-led proposal.[Update: Humane Society Press Release is here] Continue reading

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Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population, Sea ice habitat

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Why is the US pushing to ban polar bear trade? Polar bears have been saved

Posted on February 4, 2013 | Comments Off on Why is the US pushing to ban polar bear trade? Polar bears have been saved

One of the items on the agenda at the upcoming 16th meeting of the signatories to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in Bangkok Thailand (3-14 March, 2013) is a proposal to upgrade the polar bear from Appendix II to Appendix I status – prepared by the US Fish & Wildlife Service. The suggested change is based on what is claimed to be “a marked decline in the population size in the wild, which has been inferred or projected on the basis of a decrease in area of habitat and a decrease in quality of habitat.” If this proposition is adopted by CITES, it would be illegal to trade legally harvested polar bear parts of any kind.

The US tried this maneuver at the last CITES meeting in 2010 and it failed rather miserably. I see little reason to believe it will pass this year, even though the US is actively campaigning and has motivated activists worldwide to pressure other countries to vote in their favour (see “Activists push for international ban on legal trade in polar bear items” which discusses the absurdity of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) not supporting the CITES proposal because they want to keep the focus on model-predicted future “threats” of global warming, see Clark et al. 2012, abstract below).

But here’s the question I have for all the folks involved in this CITES petition and other similar proposals to upgrade the conservation status of the polar bear to a “threatened” or “endangered” level: why is all this time, money and effort going toward ever-more restrictive regulations for a species that has clearly been saved but about which we still know so little?

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