[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, it's Philip here. This is the bear den where we talk about, among other things, bears, wildlife and the individuals and organisations making a difference for them.
In the last episode we were in South America learning about Andean bears and I said that we would be heading up to North America following this, but I didn't specify where.
We're actually heading a little further north than some may have expected and landing up in Canada where we will be focusing on Churchill, Manitoba, the polar bear capital of the world.
Joining me today is Elisa McCall, Director of Science at Polar Bears International.
This is a great organization, the only non profit with a sole focus on protecting polar bears and their sea ice habitat.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: I chat with Elisa all things polar
[00:00:46] Speaker A: bear, including their ecology, their love for
[00:00:49] Speaker B: blubber, what it's like living in polar
[00:00:51] Speaker A: bear country and how cool Arctic sea ice is figuratively. Elisa also talks about what it's like conducting research in the Arctic tundra, what the deal is with Grola bears. And we get an at the time live update from a polar bear tracker. Elisa is knowledgeable, open, warm and her
[00:01:10] Speaker B: love and passion for polar bears and
[00:01:12] Speaker A: her work shines through. It's a pleasure and a privilege to welcome her into the bear den.
And there's a ton of other things we get into, so I'll stop blubbering and let's get to it.
There is a place in the remote Northwoods of Minnesota, North America. It's located near the town of orr, population approximately 300.
Outside of this town is an area where normal rules are put to one side. It's a place where humans and wildlife meet. It's a special place, wholly unique and not without its controversies. This is the Vinscue Wildlife Sanctuary, run by the American Bear Association, ABA for short.
The ABA is dedicated to promoting a better understanding of black bears and all wildlife through education, observation and experience.
I'm your host, Philip Stubley and welcome to the Bear Den.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: Hi Alyssa. Firstly, could you introduce yourself and just tell us where you're speaking to us from?
[00:02:08] Speaker C: Sure. Hi, I'm Alyssa McCall, I'm the director of Science at Polar Bears International and I am living right now in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Oh, awesome. And what's life like in the Yukon? I mean, how's the winter just been?
I'm going to be very British. What's the weather like? It's like.
[00:02:26] Speaker C: Yeah, we had a record setting, brutal winter, but now that it's late April, the sun is staying in the sky for a long time. The snow is melting. We still have some on the ground. Yeah, the Winter we had weeks of minus 40, which was really hard.
And the dark is hard. But yeah, the spring and summer are beautiful. And it's. Whitehorse is known as the wilderness city.
We're just surrounded by the wilderness and there's animals everywhere. So it is a pretty cool place to live.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Oh, it sounds it. I mean, how much daylight do you get in the winter?
How many hours?
[00:03:01] Speaker C: Yeah, I think the peak. So around June 20th, 21st, I think it's something like 20 hours mostly there's really a bit of a few hours of dusk kind of, and then it's back. So we're not in the Arctic Circle, so it's not true. True 24 hour daylight, but it's, it's a lot of daylight. So I've got sleeping masks and blackout blinds, but I'll. I'll take it over the -40 for weeks on end.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: So, yeah, I feel you there.
So. So yeah. So what's your background? Like when. So have you always wanted to work with wildlife or is that, has that always been the goal?
[00:03:35] Speaker C: Yeah, it's hard. I think when I was a kid, like I just always loved animals, always. And I loved. I grew up in British Columbia in Canada, so kind of on the west part of Canada in the mountains, surrounded by trees. We had bears and I just, I really loved animals my whole life. But I knew I did not want to be a veterinarian. So I was like, huh, I don't know what I'm gonna do. And then when I was like around 11 or 12 or something, I was talking to this girl on my soccer team and she told me her dad was a wildlife biologist. And I was like, that's a job.
So that really piqued my interest.
I still wasn't sure though. I went to university.
I thought, oh, you know, maybe I'll try med school or something. But I was looking around at the people who were so passionate about medicine and everything, and I was like, you know, I'm just passionate about animals. So I went into the wildlife kind of stream. But for years I studied deer mice in the field. I put like little radio collars on deer mice, trapped deer mice to like weigh them and measure them.
I studied toads for a summer, worked on all these kind of small things in the grasslands. And I loved that. And that's kind of where I thought I would be.
And then my supervisor for that work had gone to school many years prior with this polar bear biologist, Andy Deroche. And so when I was looking for graduate school options, my supervisor, Carl said Will you reach out to Andy? And I was like, yeah, right. Like, why would he take me? Why would a polar bear person take me?
But I. Anyway, I'd send some feelers out. Nothing was really that interesting. So one day I was like, you know what? I'm just going to email Andy.
And I had a scholarship with me, which helped. And Andy had, that morning, just found out he got funding for this project. And I was the next student to email him because he gets a lot of emails. And so he just took me and I. I thought it was a joke at first, but it wasn't, so that was it. And ever since then, that was back in 2010. So I've been in the polar bear world. This will be my 16th year now.
And once I kind of started, of course, in polar bear conservation, it's just so. So. I mean, polar bears are amazing, but the whole conservation world and issues and just everything to do with them is. It's really hard to turn back from. So here I am.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: No, I bet. Yeah. Well, it's like we're saying, I mean, you don't know if you don't try. So just send an email. What's the worst that's gonna happen?
[00:05:57] Speaker C: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: So when.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: When did you actually first see a polar bear then?
[00:06:02] Speaker C: Yeah. So that would have been October of 2010 was. So I, at that point, I just read a bunch papers about polar bears, talked about them, and then Andy came to my office one day at the University of Alberta, and he said, hey, Polar Bears International needs some help doing outreach in Churchill.
Do you want to go? And I said, definitely, I want to go. I had done some. I'd worked at the B.C. wildlife park for a couple years and done some, like, wildlife outreach. And I always really love that part of things, too. So I was stoked. So I went up to Churchill. I get there, and the Polar Bears International team was small, and they're like, hey, who are you? Like, what are you doing here? Really friendly. But I was like, andy sent me. I'm a mouse biologist. Like, I don't know what I'm doing. But they were so nice. And they took me out on the tundra at night.
You go out on these tundra buggies? And I remember we fell asleep on a tundra buggy at night. And then when we woke up in the morning, my colleague, my eventual colleague, bj, he was showing me out the window. He said, do you see that kind of rock right there? And I was like, yeah. He's like, that's a polar bear. It's just sleeping, like, keep an eye on it. And I was like, okay. So I anyway, it was a polar bear. So eventually when it stood up, I was like, oh my God. And that, that was kind of like my deep dive into polar bears. I spent a week with Polar Bears International and then I started doing field work in 2011 and got to do a good number of field seasons as well with Andy and environment and Climate Change Canada. So. Yeah. But Polar Bears International is like my first introduction to seeing bears and talking about polar bears and they eventually became.
Yeah. My employer and my friends and colleagues.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: I was going to say polar bears are probably a little bit easier to spot and keep a track of than door mice.
[00:07:50] Speaker C: You know, they are in a way. But I will say it does take takes a minute to get your bear eye. We call them like bear eyes on because they are. They do weirdly camouflage. I can't tell you still to this day, people who've been doing this for decades will think they might see polar bear and it's a rock or vice versa.
They really blend in in a funny way. And when they're on the sea ice too, you need to, yeah. Kind of calibrate your eyes to like the polar bear color, the ice color. Like they blend in, but they don't. They're kind of buttery. Yeah, it's pretty funny. So now I'm better at spotting them now.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I found that weirdly, I was gonna say a comparison to me would be like orangutans, like, because they're weirdly they do sort of blend into the trees sometimes. I know it's like you'd think, oh, big orange hair, it should stand out. But because sometimes it's quite, it can be quite dark and then sometimes they're just sitting there, just don't see them. Yeah.
[00:08:40] Speaker C: Watching. Yeah, that's cool.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Oh, nice. So, well, I guess we will get to Polar Bears International in a minute, but I thought maybe we can have a little bit of a bite sized overview of polar bears. First of all, for the uninitiated stuff kind of maybe like what's a year in the life of an average polar bear? Like stuff like their habitat, diet, their characteristics and things like that.
[00:09:00] Speaker C: Sure. Yeah. You'll have to stop me if I go on too long talk about this for a while. But I think big picture, a few things, particularly like when I'm talking to classrooms and stuff that I really like to highlight about polar bears. And I think people listening to your podcast might know a lot about bears already. So we have eight species of bears. Polar bears are the biggest. They're the only marine bear or bear tied to the ocean. All the other bears are land bears, and they're considered the most carnal, carnivorous. But it's not really just the meat they're going for on the cs. It's seal blubber. That's their number one food. That's kind of how their bodies are powered. They've evolved to eat high amounts of seal blubber. Like, they actually have digestive adaptive traits compared to the grizzly bear. That allows them to process fat incredibly efficiently. And they are less good at eating carbohydrates and proteins compared to brown bears. So they really are, I like to call them blubber. Hunting ice bears, that's really what they are.
They can spend long periods of time on land if they need to, thanks to building up a lot of body fat from blubber, they can live off of that for a while. But ultimately they are an ice bear, which I think is very cool. And watching polar bears navigate ice as a habitat is insane. I will never get tired of it. Like, this is a habitat that is, if you think about a brown bear, like, still a difficult habitat. You know, you're walking through the woods all day or, you know, in the tundra and you're digging for stuff and finding food. Wherever polar bears are on, like a treadmill, the ice is moving beneath their feet. It's cracking, it's shifting.
They're having to navigate a lot with their sense of smell.
It's just a brutal way to live. There are storms on the ice.
It's. I don't know how a bear evolved to live out there, but it's very cool. So for an average year, it really, it does depend where the bear lives. So there are 20 different populations of polar bears around the world.
Five countries share polar bears. So Canada has two thirds of the world's polar bears. Then we have Alaska in the United States, Russia, Greenland and Norway. And in all these different regions, polar bears do have different, like, ice patterns, different pressures in terms of pollutants and diseases and humans.
So it can look different. So I'm going to speak to Hudson Bay polar bears. They're the most southern polar bears in the world. They're the ones I know the best. So I'll be most accurate with these polar bears.
So for these people, polar bears, they live in what we call the seasonal sea ice ecoregion. So we've also split, not to add more layers on it, but we've split the polar bear Full range into four different ecoregions to describe the different ice patterns. We've got archipelago divergent sea ice, convergence sea ice. And that just describes, yeah, patterns of ice broadly that the bears are navigating. Hudson Bay is the seasonal ice. This just means, like, the ice is seasonal. So we have ice in the winter, we do not have ice in the summer.
So these bears, in about every June or July, the ice on Hudson Bay starts to melt and break up. And these polar bears all. It's really cool to see them all make kind of different decisions, like, do they swim to land right away or do, do they get onto land right when the ice starts to break off or do they ride out? The last bits of ice are kind of in southern Hudson Bay. And some of the bears ride the ice out, keep hunting as long as they can. Then they get on land and they'll walk back up to the west side or east or wherever they want to be. Then they'll spend months on land. And for a lot of them, particularly ones that got nice and fat over the last year, they will just like hang out. And they're really lazy. Hopefully this time of year they're conserving energy. They do not have any form of hibernation like some other bears do, really.
So there, there's bears all over. And then in a perfect world, they'll just hang out and the ice will freeze up again on Hudson Bay in, around like it used to be late October, early November. Now it's more like mid late November. Sometimes it's December. But as soon as that ice freezes up, the bears move onto the ice and then they go hunting again for the year. The winter isn't great hunting, but they can still get seals once they hit the spring. March, April, May, June, when seals are pupping, that's the best time to be a polar bear. There's lots of abundant food. Seal babies are like little blubber popsicles. They're not very smart. They're all over the ice. The bears can eat a ton. They go into hyperphagia, so they're gorging. They can eat over 100 pounds of blubber at one sitting. They're gaining a ton of weight and then they can live off that weight for females. So they're going to mate about every three years.
They'll mate in the spring and they have what's called delayed implantation. So if they get a fertilized egg or zygote floating around, it's just going to float around and then that female is going to continue to get as fat as she possibly can. And only if her body reaches a certain threshold of having enough fat will that zygote implant in the fall, and then she's technically pregnant. And then in the fall, so she's come on to land. In the summer, she's hung out. If she's still fat enough, she'll go into a den that fall, she'll rest.
Her body does slow down a bit. Not technical hibernation, but that's like the one time polar bears do slow down a little bit. And then she'll give birth in about late December to 1 to 3 tiny, tiny, itty bitty cubs. She'll nurse them with the fattiest milk we find on land. It's like drinking whipped cream. So all those calories and that fat helps these little polar bear cubs grow incredibly fast. So that in just a couple months she's ready to leave the den with her cubs and walk back to the sea ice. Which for some of them, I don't know why they do this. Some of them den way inland. They can walk like a hundred kilometers back to the ice. Hopefully she hasn't denned that far away from the ice. Uh, but then she'll take her cubs to the ice. But it coincides with that spring seal pupping time. So mom hopefully has lots of easier food to eat. Um, she's taking care of her little cubs, she's avoiding males. And then she'll repeat that cycle every three years. So the cubs are with their mom about two and a half years, then they're on their own as sub adults and then they become adults when they're five years old. So that's like really quick and dirty. Broad overview of a polar bear's life. It's all based on blubber on sea ice.
Yeah.
What else should I add?
[00:15:13] Speaker B: No, no, it's really cool, baby. How many polar bears are there worldwide? Actually?
[00:15:18] Speaker C: Great question. So it's so hard to count polar bears.
Some populations have not really been studied at all. Others have very old estimates.
We think broadly there are maybe 25 to 26,000 polar bears across the whole Arctic. So they're not yet endangered.
They are considered vulnerable due to climate change risks and because we know we've lost some sea ice, but we, you know, we still have tens of thousands of polar bears, ideally. But we do hope that new technology in the coming years is going to help us get better counts of polar bears more places across the Arctic. Yeah.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: Is that sort of technology? Is. I keep reading about stuff like AI Facial Recognition for bears, for brown bears and things like that. Is that kind of. Is that where you'd be going with polar bears as well?
[00:16:05] Speaker C: Maybe, yeah, I think we'd be really interested in. There's some maybe promising technology that could almost like use satellites to look at the sea ice and pick up polar bears. But it's really hard. Like that was tried before, didn't really work. But you know, it's been 10 years so let's try again. So that could potentially work like counting them from space almost like without having to bug them and in like little localized areas. Having a bit more ability to identify individuals would be helpful. Polar bears look more alike than a lot of other bears. They don't have special markings. They're not as physically diverse as even brown bears in the same group. You know, they really look quite uniform a lot of times. So we rely a lot on like weird scars or something to tell them apart, but that's not always possible. So that would be cool. We are you, you know this but it's, it's hard in wildlife biology because there's not a lot of money in wildlife. So the companies aren't super motivated to, to do a lot with wildlife. So we kind of get like, we're always a bit behind. I think as technology improves we're kind of playing catch up or a few years behind. I will say there is some technology companies have reached out and we're, there's maybe some promising collaborations in the future, but I don't know yet again, like we're not going to make them rich. So it's hard to, hard to say. But we're excited about all the things that are, you know, I will say one cool thing like genetics. Since I started, genetics has exploded and that's been incredible. So when I started it was still pretty new and now it's like unbelievable what we're learning thanks to genetics. So very cool.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: Well yeah, like you say, technology just keeps going on like 10 years. That's a lifetime almost, isn't it? In technological terms as well? I wondered, well, you've said they're quite uniform looking as well. Do polar bears interact as much? Because black bears, they actually do seem to spend quite a lot of time, a lot of resource sharing and things like that. Brown bears gather for the salmon runs. It's like, do polar bears have an equivalent?
[00:18:11] Speaker C: Yeah, we definitely would love to learn more about what goes on on the sea ice. Right now. All the tracking we have is Almost, well, not 100%. We do have some ear tags out on males and some fur tags. But most of our tracking over the years has been females. We can't collar male polar bears because they've got, like, these pylon heads with really thick necks and smaller skulls, so they'll pull collars right off. So we. And we know females generally would avoid other bears because of the babies, but we're curious about the males because there have been a few reported instances. At least one is still river in Hudson Bay where polar bears have learned. Because of the interesting kind of geography of the area. There's, like, these big rocks and the tidal area makes it so that the bears can kind of work together to grab small beluga whales occasionally. So it's interesting to see them kind of work together on that. And then we know in Churchill, Manitoba, during particularly the October season, so as the bears have, like, been on land for months, They've been spread out mostly.
And then as the temperatures cool down and we know the sea ice will be freezing in the next few weeks, the bears do congregate in a more concentrated manner along the coast of western Hudson Bay. And this is why Churchill has become so famous for viewing polar bears, because the bears are congregating, waiting for that ice, hanging out together. And that's really, in some of those areas.
At Cape Churchill, in the wildlife management area in Churchill, we do see groups of polar bears hanging out and playing.
They do something called sparring. So play fighting. They. We have seen them, like, occasionally they can get a seal that is not smart and gets stuck on land when the tide goes out, and they. They will kind of share it. Polar bears are much more.
This isn't a word, but much more sherry than like, tundra grizzly bears or something. There's also been interesting examples in kaktovik, Alaska, where the local native Alaskans, they'll get a bowhead whale, they'll pull it onto shore harvest, take what they need, and then the polar bears come in. It's kind of become like these famous pictures, I'm sure many people have seen, of the bears on the whale carcass. And you can have many polar bears hanging out together and, like, pretty nicely sharing the food. And then you can have one tundra grizzly come in and the polar bear scatter. Because, yeah, I think tundra grizzlies have a hard time because, like, they're territorial. Polar bears are not territorial, which makes a difference.
And there's just not a lot of food on the tundra. And I think polar bears are.
I don't know, they're just They're a bit more chill than grizzly bears.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: That's cool to hear. Well, I suppose it's also, it's a case of, yeah, food availability, there's plenty of it. And also it's, I guess, wasting energy fighting. Like that's just, you know, why can't we all get along?
[00:21:01] Speaker C: Yeah. And for a polar bear to, to get injured with its lifestyle, I mean any, any wildlife like doesn't want to get injured, of course. And polar bears really just seem to be averse to being like really hurt, which is smart. The males though, will really hurt each other when they're fighting for mates because mates are also hard to find. So they really will hurt each other aggressively then. But generally polar bears seem to not want to get into unnecessary fights anyway.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: That makes sense. And then I also, I just kind of thought polar bears, keystone species or apex predators, like how, what, how do they maintain their ecosystem? Kind of. What's the role they play?
[00:21:42] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, it's. So it's a timely question. There's been some really neat research that's come out recently about this. Andy derochet, who I mentioned before, his lab has been doing some work on that and they just published a paper a couple, maybe a couple months ago now.
But it looks at polar bears as these kind of ecosystem engineers and their role in the environment. And I can't remember the exact number, but it's huge. It's the amount of biomass that polar bears provide to the above ice ecosystem. So they're pulling seals up from the ocean, eating some of them. But they leave a lot behind when there's like when it's hunting season. Polar bears will even just strip the blubber off and leave all the meat behind of seals. Depends on how hungry they are. But by doing that too, they're adding so much food to the ecosystem. For foxes, like Arctic foxes will follow polar bears across the ice. Little scavengers. All these birds are eating this food.
So they really are a way to kind of connect the, I guess under ice, over ice as below sort of situation. They're this connector and what they. Yeah, the service they provide to this ecosystem is huge. And we always, particularly with like students in classrooms and that talk about polar bears as this umbrella species because they rely on the ice. And so when we protect polar bears, we're protecting the sea ice and everything like underneath. But the whole food web gets protected by using polar bears as this kind of icon. So they really are critical to the Arctic.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I love Arctic foxes as well. Love the mention of that incredible.
[00:23:14] Speaker C: Oh, my gosh. I know. I love them. The red foxes are really pushing them out of some areas, unfortunately.
An incredible species. Oh, and so cute. Which doesn't hurt. Yeah.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. It's funny because I feel like there's been a couple of like, kind of exciting new developments and like sort of polar bear research, what you mentioned with the seals there. But there was also.
There was that report about a polar bear mother adopting a cub for the first time. That was the first documentation of it. There are examples of cub adoption with black bears and other bear species. But this is like the first documented one with polar bears, right?
[00:23:48] Speaker C: Yeah, it was the first one we were able to at least see, I think. So the genetics, like I mentioned, with those exploding over the last little bit, I think it was something like in the genetic pedigree that's been built of polar bears captured over the last, like 40 years, like there's been thousands of captures and bears genetics analyzed. And I think in the data they could see about 13 cases of females who were with at least one cub that was not their own biologically. So we knew it happened occasionally, rarely.
But this one, this last fall in Churchill, yeah, we had this colored mom and she was kind of around the town of Churchill. She had two cubs with her. And we, whenever we see a collared bear, which is where there's only a hat, you know, a handful of females get collared every year in this region. So we let environment and climate change Canada know. They, along with the University of Alberta, run that coloring program. So we just were like, hey, heads up. There's this colored bear, like, who do you think it is? And they went back to their records because they go out every September to study the bears and they were able to say, oh, it's this bear.
And anyway, they had seen her like earlier that year with one cub and now she had two cubs. And then they were able to confirm that, yeah, one of the cubs was not her own. Biologically, we don't have the genetics of that cub, so we don't know who it might belong to or what happened to its mom or anything. But I will say that female, the mom at the time was five.
So it's very young, about as young as you can get for a polar bear mom.
So that. That could have helped. She could have been like, sure, like, come along. Like, I don't know my hang out.
[00:25:27] Speaker B: Gotta do this anyway, you know.
[00:25:29] Speaker C: Yeah. Like, let's figure it out together. So young mom.
Yeah, it like, how incredible for a polar bear. Like little cub like that, there's really no chance of survival on the ice by yourself. You can't, the seals are bigger than you. Like you're, you're hooped. But to be able to attached to this family like that and actually have a chance at survival, it's really special. So you can see we have a polar bear tracker online and she's on there.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: What's the latest on it?
[00:26:00] Speaker C: Yeah, actually, let me check. She's been like traveling really well. Like of course we can't see that she still has both cubs with her. We just see her collar locations. But I will tell you she is a high priority for us to see if the researchers see her coming back this next year. What is. Okay, I'm gonna find her now. She's X33 991 number 12 on the. Where I'm gonna. Yeah, she's, she's very catchy name.
She needs a new name. Yeah. So she's just kind of off the coast of Wapusk national park right now. So she's hung out like in the western part of the bay. She's been moving great. She's moved over 1900 kilometers. So yeah, I mean hope they're doing great.
[00:26:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. How far can a polar bear move in like a day?
[00:26:46] Speaker C: So that's a good question. I actually should reach out to someone to find out the daily rate. But I also can say they are the most mobile four legged animal that we know of. Like the amount the distance they move is incredible, particularly in certain parts of the world. And this is aided by the sea ice moving as well. But they move massive distances.
But again it can depend on where they live. So in James Bay, which is like the little bit off of Hudson Bay, if people don't know Canada very well, there's like Hudson Bay in the middle and James Bay is like the little kind of jet out bay that comes off of Hudson Bay. There's polar bears in James Bay and they've got like the smallest home ranges of any polar bears in the world. And they barely have to go anywhere to get a lot of food. And they move hardly at all compared to other bears. And then if we go look at Norway with some like the Baron Sea polar bears, their home ranges will be over half a million square kilometers, like bigger than some states in America. You know like they will move huge distances within a year to find food. So if they need to they can go and they can also swim huge distances if they need to as well. That takes a lot of energy but they can do it.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: No. I bet. Oh, wow. Yeah. Like, that's quite a migratory route.
[00:27:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:27:58] Speaker B: It's like, wow.
[00:27:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: You hear stories like some black bears going a couple hundred miles and you think that's a lot, but wow.
Let's talk about Polar Bears International now. So what did Polar Bears International do, basically? What's the story?
[00:28:14] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So basically our vision is to just keep polar bears in the Arctic for a long time.
We're actually currently working on our new mission statement, so I need to memorize the new one for when it comes up, but that's the gist of it. We're working to keep polar bears in the Arctic into the future. And by doing that, we're also helping people, but we're focused on polar bears and sea ice and.
And we are working to do that through different pillars of work. So that includes education and outreach, science and coexistence and policy, and then good communications broadly are all the different things we work on. So we for. On the research side, we do do our own research, but we also just support a lot of other research as well that goes on across the north. So we are supporting the University of Alberta. We support environment and climate change, Canada's work. We work with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. We work with the Norwegian Polar Institute. We do work with different zoos and aquariums as part of our Arctic Ambassador network. Zoos and aquariums reach more people every year than all sporting events combined. So they're a huge audience for outreach and communications and education.
But they also, many of them want to give back to conservation and are doing really good work. So we work with them to help them support polar bear research in the wild so that they can bring those stories back to their audiences at their zoos as well. We've got some main focuses are we use technology, we have camera systems, some are linked with AI, some are not. To help detect polar bears when they're coming into an area.
We support. Yeah. Genetics work, learning more about the physiology of bears, how bears use their habitat, modeling what happens in the future with polar bears under different scenarios. Kind of like if it's important to polar bear conservation, we want to support it, or at least we know someone who's working on it and we want to help them talk about it at least.
And then the coexistence piece for us is huge and only because becoming more important. So as a, as an organization that's saying, hey, let's keep polar bears in the wild, we love polar bears. We feel like we then have this moral obligation to the communities that have to increasingly live with polar bears, the world's largest land predator. Because polar bears are spending more time on land, in more places, they are interacting with humans more, they can be dangerous.
And the humans that have to live with polar bears are maybe not so impressed by polar bears than those that live like in Australia or something, you know, which is completely fair. So we want to also be supporting people in the way that they want to be supported. And many of these communities are indigenous and have these very long histories with polar bears. They don't need us coming and telling them about polar bears. They need us coming in and giving them like tools that we can afford to give them to. Things like bear spray, cracker shells, electric fences and just like safety materials. We can help send in people that can train trainers on deterring polar bears. So scaring polar bears away, we helped with communities. We developed a safer polar bear trap to trap a polar bear. And you can move the trap with vehicles or a helicopter to safely get the bear out. Kind of just adding a few steps, a few non lethal steps before the lethal step. And sometimes that has to happen. Sometimes these communities have to dispatch a polar bear if it's like a real threat to life and property. So working more with people across the north, partnering with different research institutes and at different levels is yeah, really what we're focusing a lot on. And it's, it's good. I mean the international work is, it's really interesting and the international relations do play into to some of the work for sure. But polar bears are kind of this combining force in a way with all the different countries working together on them.
[00:32:15] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean collaboration is key, I always think.
[00:32:18] Speaker C: Oh yeah, oh, we wouldn't be doing anything. Our team is relatively small. Like we've got a strong team but we're not big. So we're not a big organization. So we're, we like to say we really punch above our weight, but that's because we are really good collaborators with excellent people across the world. So yeah, it's a lot of fun.
[00:32:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And I was like, say, well like minded individuals coming together, making a difference. Yeah, love it.
[00:32:40] Speaker C: Oh yeah, A lot of good stuff happening there. Yeah.
[00:32:43] Speaker B: So I do want to talk more about the coexistence angle, but I thought we'll sort of focus this a little bit more on the research side of things because I guess before you started focusing more on the education and such, you spent multiple seasons in the field kind of researching polar bears. I wanted to Hear some stories about that. I mean, like, what's it like working in Arctic conditions? I mean any individual polar bears that kind of stood out to you and like kind of some of the fun stuff you worked on and learned?
[00:33:10] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Polar bear fieldwork is, it's interesting, it's different, it's definitely. There is an inherent danger in it every day. So it's something that people take really seriously.
Five years ago, you know, we lost a polar bear biologist and a helicopter pilot, an engineer in, while they were doing polar bear work because it is just that dangerous. A lot of polar bear work has to happen in helicopters because it's how we access the bears. Again, they're out on the sea ice, they don't want to be near people.
So the sort of market capture work that happens, that involves the helicopters, that, that work is so critical for collecting the data that we really rely on to track long term changes in populations in western Hudson Bay particularly. That's the best studied polar bear population in the world. We have over 40 years of data and it's thanks to that data that we were first able to link changes in the population to climate change. And we know that that population has declined about 50% since the 1980s too, thanks to that data. And that data gives us information on polar bear sizes, cubs, genetics, pollutants, diets, like everything. So it is critical, but we're only doing that really a few weeks a year. It's. This isn't like ongoing all the time.
We're also meanwhile trying to find other options of biopsy. Darting has also really grown in the last decade and that's where also from a helicopter. But you can shoot a biopsy dart at a polar bear and it takes just a little punch of skin, fat and hair out and the dart falls off, the bear runs away and you can retrieve the dart and get that genetic information out, which is also very helpful. Yeah, when you're actually going out to do like markers, recapture fieldwork. So I've worked in the Beaufort scene in Hudson Bay, safety is paramount. So you don't fly at all unless the weather's good. So you're working closely with your pilot on that. First you wake up every morning, check the weather. Weather is everything.
If you go out, you are wearing a lot of layers.
You are bringing a personal backpack full of safety gear. Your helicopter is also packed with extra safety gear in case you have to overnight on the sea ice. There's food, there are emergency beacons, there are satellite phones, there are like those solar blankets or whatever. That can keep you warm out there. You have also, like, you have shotguns, you've got cracker shells, you have slugs just in case. And then you have all your research gear.
So the helicopter, the weight imbalance is a pretty big deal.
Then what happens then, too, particularly in western Hudson Bay. What would happen is I would go out with, so the lead researcher at the time, Nick, and then our pilot, and it would be me in the back. We'd load up the helicopter, go. We'd find a polar bear circling in the sky. Someone sees a polar bear land the helicopter, and Nick would move to the back and get the dart ready. And often they would kick me out of the helicopter because you have to make it as light as possible for more maneuverability.
So I would get kicked out on the land with polar bears around with a gun and my backpack and a radio and be like, goodbye.
And so that was fun. I really lied to my mom for a couple years about this. I didn't tell her how it went down. She would have had a heart attack.
But it was always good. Like, they always, you know, everyone's looking out for each other, is always safe.
Then the helicopter goes, darts the bear. I have also been in the chopper when they are darting, and it's very, like, nauseating, honestly, because it's a lot
[00:36:50] Speaker B: of like, well, yeah, it's got to be a crack shot for that sort of stuff.
[00:36:53] Speaker C: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm not the shooter, luckily for everyone.
But, yeah, I just kind of like, buckle up. And the pilots are generally excellent.
But, yeah, you dart the bear once the bear has been darted. So we use a type of drug called Telozole or Zoloteal.
And it's very predictable in how it works on a bear. So for a couple minutes, the bear will be running or walking, and then it'll slow down, and then it will sit down, and then its front legs will go down, and then it will shake its head back and forth and then put its head down.
So very predictable. And once that happens, you can land the helicopter, wait for the bear to really kind of be sleeping, and then go check on it and check its temperature, make it comfortable.
And then as quickly as we can, we measure, take fur samples, write down who it is. So if they've been captured before, they'll have a number in their ear tag or in their lip and. Or in their lip if they're a new bear. Then we will tag them with those things and write down who they are. And then everything gets added into this polar bear. Bible, which we have in the field and then of course put into databases when we get home. So.
Yeah. And then while we're working on the bear, like it's really key to always have someone like looking around. I have a kind of a bear monitor in a way. Like you're all focused on working but you have to keep your eyes up because polar bears are very curious and very sneaky. So even if they see like, oh my buddy, something weird's happening to my friend over here, like what's going on, you think that would like scare them away, but it just piques their curiosity so they're like, they can come in and they move weirdly fast. Like if you watch a polar bear walk, you're like, oh, it's just a normal bear walking. But man, the distance they cover quickly and quietly is wild. So they can come out of nowhere. You might have to scare one away. That's happened before.
You got to keep your wits about you. My favorite, one of my favorite times was one of the first times I was working out with polar bears and it was in the springtime. So it was on the ice. Some work is done on land and some is done on the ice. So it was on the ice and it was the kind of mom and cub season where they look at the families and we had a family we were working on and they're doing great. And then we looked up and on the horizon on the ice was a mom and two brand new little cubs as well. And seeing these like itty bitty cubs navigating again, this brutal habitat, this ice scape that's like cracking and shifting and cold and windy and they're just following their mom on the distance. We all stopped and watched them for a few minutes. It feels like you're on another planet.
It's unbelievable. So that was one of my favorite moments ever. That was on my early, earliest moments too.
But also some of the cool stuff especially we would work in areas in the fall where the kind of bigger males hang out and some of these big, big males that have the old like gnarly scars there. I mean to be beside these massive animals is.
It's just, it's tremendous. I don't know, it's so.
They're always awe inspiring. I think, like no one that works with. I think bears generally are just so. Humans just love bears. Like they're so cool.
[00:40:10] Speaker B: Yeah, they're very charismatic.
[00:40:12] Speaker C: They're so charismatic and they're interesting and intelligent and beautiful and then when you get to be right beside them like that it's just like, wow, this world is amazing. I'm just so grateful I have this opportunity. And then it also, when I do work with animals like that now with bears, it just makes me feel like, okay, now I owe you so much. Like, you've given us this information now we owe you so much to try to do the best we can for you and your future too. So. Yeah, it's really.
It's really neat and stressful and fun and all the things.
[00:40:47] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, the more, you know, the more you appreciate, I think, you know, the animals we share the world with.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: Yeah, it's.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: I've only ever. I mean, I've only ever seen a polar bear in a zoo setting. And even then it was, it was very odd. Like when it was swimming past the glass, like I was standing by and I, I was like, just comparing. It's like, paw. And I was like, that paw is bigger than my head. Yeah.
I think it's, again, it's something you can't really appreciate until you actually just see it up close.
[00:41:16] Speaker C: Agreed. Yeah.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: And like you say, awe inspiring it.
[00:41:20] Speaker C: They are. Yeah. Got the size of them, but you get, you get that big by eating blubber. I guess so.
[00:41:25] Speaker B: Well, yeah.
So talking of sort of big bears and whatnot, so something that I feel like captured people's imagination definitely interests me are grola bears, or pizzleys, I think some people call them. And I'm sure you probably guessed a lot about them, because I feel like it's one of those where there's a big deal made about them. These like, hybrid animals are kind of something different. You know, people are interested in like ligers and all that kind of thing. But I'm just like, so what? Could you kind of just talk us through what is a growler bear? And how many of them are there actually like, that we kind of know about.
[00:41:59] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. This is kind of a fun topic. So all the ones we've known of in the wild would probably technically be considered gorilla bear. So often with hybrids, the. The dad's kind of name goes first. And the ones we know of had a grizzly dad, polar mom. So grola bears, there have been pistolies in zoos, I believe, but you can call it whatever people know you're talking about. So, yeah, I'll say gorilla bear. So, yeah, there was a big deal made about them about 10 years ago because there were growler bears found in the Canadian high Arctic. And it was kind of like, whoa. There seemed to be like, you Know more than one for sure, A handful of them. And what's going on?
Anyway, some stuff came out in the genetics work and we finally can like paint the picture of what truly happened. So thanks to genetics, we know now that once upon a time there was a female polar bear in high Arctic and she were unsure if she had an interesting preference or she was just open to what was available at the time. But two times in her life, she mated with different brown bear males and so she had two different litters of half and half cubs. So Grola bears, those grolar bears, then some of them also. So this is, I think, the most interesting thing. They were fertile. So often in the hybrid world, when you mate different species, the resulting offspring cannot have babies. So a mule is an example. Horse and donkey have a mule, the mule can't have babies. Gorilla bears can have babies. Which goes to show how closely related brown bears and polar bears are. So she had at least one of her daughters remaded with a brown bear. So still that brown. Is it a preference? Is it availability? We don't know. And then had a 3/4 brown, 1/4 polar litter.
So altogether, I believe there were maybe eight bears involved in this, eight Grola bears. As far as we know, all of those have since been removed from the population in one way. Or this is not a great bear.
So it can sound like, oh, this might be the solution to climate change. Like this grolar bear, like take a polar bear, add some like grizzly traits to it, you have a bear that's resilient to, you know, whatever goes on out there. No, it's actually went the opposite way, unfortunately. So brown bears are so well adapted to be land bears and polar bears are so well adapted to be ice bears that when you put those bears together, you get, I don't know, maybe like a little emo bear that like hates its life and doesn't know where it belongs. Like these bears were this half and half where, like the feet weren't really suited to land or ice. Like, polar bears have these really furred feet and particular claws. And the Grohler bear kind of had like a less furred foot, but not like a full grizzly foot.
Their coloring was kind of off. They had these dark circles and kind of more of a creamy coat.
And then what's maybe most against them, and this is anecdotal, but I think it does play into it, is we were hearing from people that live in the northeast communities that were like experiencing these hybrids as highly aggressive. Like these bears are breaking into Cabins.
They apparently at least one or two of them were more aggressive maybe than normal polar bears. And that could have been the grizzly trade. Or again, just like maybe it's hungry. I don't know what it. Its digestive system would have looked like because grizzly bears and polar bears digest food differently. So like what is this bear? What's going on? I mean, we don't know.
But anyway, there was a handful of them. They were all eventually that we know have taken out of the population in that case.
However, there have probably always been cases of these species mating across the Arctic. Well, in areas where brown bears are in isolated cases is having a gorilla bear. Whether that go to bear is successful or not, we don't know. But we'll probably see it again in the future. I've heard another, you know, rumor or two that there. There's an. A couple out there still and there. There likely is like we will see this continue to happen. The bears do overlap in some cases. They clearly are closely related enough to mate.
There's already, you know, genetic. A little bit of genetic mixing we can see in the histories of these bears, but we are never going to see, see like a ton of grolar bears or it will never become its own species. Polar bears are not going to evolve back into brown bears.
It's just like this really interesting case of like genetics and mating and how.
Yeah, it really highlights like how important adaptations are to certain habitats. We like to talk about the gorilla bear with kids. It's a great example of how like the polar bear is highly specialized and the brown bear is more generalized and like what that means. There's all these. You could really dig into that. But yeah, it's. It's fascinating though. Some of the pictures are funny and crazy.
[00:46:59] Speaker B: I bet. Yeah, it's like. Yeah, it is interesting that you say like different communities of bears have different adaptations. And it's a bit. It's a bit of a tangent, but it's a. You made me think of. I think there was a report about. There's bears, I think Italy where they've evolved to be sort of less aggressive and smaller in. In that area. It's like brown bears. It's just. And yeah, it completely goes against slightly what you imagine about bears.
[00:47:25] Speaker C: Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, the genetics. So I think we're going to be learning so much about polar bears and all sorts of stuff, you know, in the coming years. It's incredible what we can get at with that.
[00:47:37] Speaker B: Yeah. But well, speaking of learning things, you did mention indigenous sort of people and how obviously they've lived side polar bears for thousands of years. And I kind of thought it'd be interesting to kind of know some of the things that we can learn from them. You know, like you say, it's like it's not on us to come in and tell them how to do things. They've been doing it just fine, I guess.
[00:47:58] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's. It's such an important part of this work and a lot of work and something that historically, like, well, at least decades ago was really not being done well. There's a lot of mistrust because of misunderstood steps that researchers took in the past.
Kind of this whole idea of colonialism has not done any favors to these indigenous communities. And so right now it's so important that we're listening to what they have to say, to what they know, to what they want.
They know so much. We have so much to learn from them. So it's been a growing area of our work, particularly in the Hudson Bay region. Right now, there's this really wonderful project. One of our postdocs, Dr. Martina Jakub Chik Palohemo. I think if I'm saying her last name correctly, she's working on the social science project.
So generally, the Inuit know I would. I would think it's fair to say they know the most about polar bears. They've lived right with polar bears for forever. Martina is working with Cree communities in northern Ontario, and Creek communities have also have this very long history with polar bears in Hudson Bay.
But they historically might not have seen polar bears as often because the bears, when they came onto land, kind of stayed away or weren't as hungry. But now these Creek communities are seeing more and more bears, and so Martina is working with them to understand what they know, what they're seeing, what's changing. How can we talk to the youth about the importance of this species and how to interact with them? And basically, what do people want to share? What do they know?
It's so interesting, I think too, being at polar bear meetings, particularly in Canada, it's so important to have indigenous representation because you're talking to the people that are actually seeing the bears and have the stories that inform and can complement the science. So it's some of what the indigenous people have been saying, in particular the Inuit have been saying about, like, seeing more bears or like how they see patterns changing. We can then, you know, the scientists and their science cap can go look at the data and be like, okay, does this match and it helps us interpret what we're seeing.
And I think things can often be woven together. Like it doesn't have to be one or the other or even a blending. Like it's a kind of this breeding that we can do of the knowledge and it can really complement each other. And having both the together makes us stronger conservationists, I think, in the long run. So especially as the world continues to change, having good relationships and respecting the people that are on the front lines of this is so critical. And listening we can have all the ideas we want.
I can sit in my office here with no polar bears anywhere near me and look at all these like research papers and come up with my own ideas. But if that, it's not actually, some of these things aren't actually working for the people who live with polar bears, then it's not going to go anywhere. So, yeah, we've been really fortunate to build some bridges. We continue to try to build bridges where we can and just again, to be in that support role in a lot of those sorts of things, particularly coexistence and just doing things like that we can do. Like, hey, can we buy you a garbage bin? Because that's going to help. And it doesn't, it doesn't need to be fancy, but we can help do that. We can help ship you supplies.
We can.
One actually kind of fun project we've had is kind of co creating different educational pamphlets and posters and coloring books for kids. So we have different versions of these coloring books about polar bear safety. And each version the art has, it represents like the community that it's targeted and it's got the clothes that are appropriate, the landscape, the playground, and it talks to kids in a way that's relevant to that community about how you can stay safe around polar bears. So that's been really fun and we want to do more of that and use more like local art and things like that in those. So just those sorts of things, I think, and just elevating indigenous voices when we have the chance to is really important as well.
[00:52:11] Speaker B: Yeah, no, definitely, like you say, making it relevant to the people that are there, that's. That's key.
[00:52:15] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, because you can come in and be like, here's all these safety tips. But yeah, it has to, there has to be some like, cultural relevancy to, to what's going on or else. Yeah, it's just not going to work. And that's true for any humans, you know, so, yeah, it makes sense.
[00:52:31] Speaker B: Yeah, so you're also lead of the The Churchill Polar Bear Smart Working Group.
So I guess this ties in nice, like nicely with some of the stuff you've been talking about. What is it that you do there? Is that sort of helping, like managing issues of waste storage and food attractants and education as well?
[00:52:49] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great question. So I will say I'm very new to being the facilitator. So I have been kind of involved on the periphery at meetings for a handful of years now. But they need a new facilitator and people might be asking, well, why are you facilitating? You don't live in Churchill. Which is a very good point. In a perfect world, we would have someone from Churchill be the facilitator. But these, these folks are so busy running their own businesses. And so as soon as, if anyone did want to do it from Churchill, we'd be like, absolutely, you go, we'll just support.
But right now no one really has the time so I can step in and help.
And again, I'm, I am truly a facilitator. Like I'm not there to, to tell these stakeholders what they need or whatever, but just there to run meetings and gather information. So on the Churchill Bears Smart Working working group. Yeah, there's a variety of stakeholders from different levels of government, tourism operator companies, just local people that have a stake in what happens. We really look at, yeah, the importance of polar bears to the town of Churchill. It's called the polar bear capital of the world for a reason. We want to keep the polar bears safe and healthy, which in turn supports the economy being healthy.
So these things really go hand in hand. And there's a lot of, of balancing how tourism happens or kind of polar bear coexistence happens in the town of Churchill within the provincial regulation. So for example, bear viewing has come up. The province sets the bare viewing limits and then the Church of Bear Smart Working group can kind of weigh in on how that works for people on the ground who are running these tourism groups, you know, and these different tourism operators that are doing different types of tourism.
How this fits in? One thing that I was able to help more closely with, with the working group was a series of safety videos. So we do have a website, ChurchillBearsmart CA. And on ChurchillBearsmart CA, you can see the safety videos we worked with, with the town. So the videos were co scripted with the working group. We used a lot of locals in the videos. It was super fun.
And the idea was to have tourists watch these videos before they come to town. So that they have an idea of how to be bear aware and respectful to the bears. And we've had really good reception. It's been super fun. So yeah, our next meeting is in a couple weeks actually.
And one interesting thing, and we don't have to get into it because it's not directly bear related, but there are talks of a lot of development coming maybe to Churchill, Manitoba. There's a deep water port there which might have an important importance or an important role to play maybe in Arctic sovereignty even in Canada. So Churchill could potentially change a lot in the next five years. And what does that look like for polar bears? What does that look like for polar bear tourism for the locals that make their living off things related to polar bear? So we'll be talking a lot about that sort of stuff as well.
But yeah, it's good to be a good listener and note taker and facilitator. I'm not there to share my own opinions much, but yeah, they're mostly in line with Churchill anyway. So there, there's a lot of really, really knowledgeable people that are like working with polar bears more than I am directly and taking people to view polar bears and they're so polar bear safe and have just a really good sense of what the bears need. So yeah, it's been really great.
[00:56:20] Speaker B: Oh cool. Well, yeah, it sounds like it's all, it's all connected, right? So yeah, well, you did talk about. I'll put a link in the show notes for the Churchill Bear Working Group website, but I'm going to be quite basic. And so I know that there was a TED Talk video that you did that I did watch as well in preparation for this. And I am going to ask the question of the, the title of it, which is what do you do when there's a polar bear in your backyard?
[00:56:46] Speaker C: Oh, that's so funny. Can I say that TED talk is already. I did it three years ago and it's, there's already outdated information and they're like really?
[00:56:54] Speaker B: That was now it's gonna follow you everywhere now.
[00:56:58] Speaker C: I mean it's not like wrong at the time it was correct. You know, so they're 19. Polar bear populations are now 20. And one interesting thing about that, I talk in that talk about how Churchill has this indoor garbage dump and how helpful it's been to polar bears. Well, the next year it burned down and so now Churchill's back to having this open air garbage dump. We are supporting them and putting up, we've put up an electric fence around it. We're helping monitor it. But it's, it's been tough. The polar bears are getting into the garbage again and it's like it's been hard to get the funding necessary to build new.
A new landfill, like an indoor landfill and a composter. That is also what the working group is working on as well, trying to get some of that. So that's interesting. But yeah, so when there's a polar bear in your backyard, there are, you know, it's. They're very similar to other bears. So if you're just looking into bear safety, there's nothing too much different with polar bears.
Number one probably would be waste management. Just don't have garbage out, don't have food out. Have it not be accessible to bears. Bears like smells and so if you can not have smelly stuff around, that's great. We would recommend, you know, if you are out and about staying in groups, not going out at particularly at dusk or dawn by yourself.
Those are. Can be kind of hot spot times for bears moving around. We always, particularly in Churchill, even if we're just walking around. Well, I will say too, we drive more than usual in Churchill. Like here, you know, it's nothing to walk a few blocks in Churchill if you're going out for dinner or something, even though it might be three blocks away, you might choose to drive even though you know it's not great for the environment and you might feel like some exercise. But maybe it's a better option to, to take a car just in case. But when we are walking around, we always have something on us. So a lot of us always have a whistle on us.
We carry marine flares. Those are a pretty slick little bear safe option. So those are just like. They're these sticks and you flick the top off and like fire shoots out. It's like a mini flame.
But the sound, the sound and then the light is enough. If you had to like kind of wave it in front of a bear, it might be enough to get the bear to back off. We know bears have backed off with as much as a cell phone flashlight as well. So flashing lights, bears don't like that. Generally there's like little personal alarms you can buy these days for pretty cheap. That they're like 135 or 140 decibels, which we know bears don't really like that level of sound. It's quite loud with strobe lights too. So you can buy Those for like 20 bucks on Amazon or something and have that as an option if we're really Going a little more out of town or something. Definitely have bear spray. It is very effective even on polar bears. Even when it can be windy, it is effective. So I know multiple people that have used it on polar bears with success.
So that's a big one. And then if we're really like out, out, out, out, then we would have a shotgun with cracker shells loaded first so to make the banging sound and then eventually a slug at the back if absolutely needed. But polar bears are, they are deterable. I don't know, that's probably not a word but. And scare them away often.
But that said, you know, they have killed people who are doing their best to scare polar bears away. So it is important we always know where each other is. We have a cell phone or a way to communicate with our colleagues. We have multiple different kind of bear safe tools. So. And just being aware, aware of your surroundings, looking around all the time, knowing they're sneaky.
All those sorts of kind of classic bear bear tips really.
And, and fight back. If you do get attacked by a bear, fight back, don't be prey. There's that stupid saying. If it's. What is it? If it's black, fight back. If it's brown, lay down.
[01:00:44] Speaker B: That's the one.
[01:00:45] Speaker C: Garbage. Fight back. If it's any bear, fight back. Bears aren't used to prey fighting back that much. Even brown bears don't lay down unless you were like actually almost dead. Don't play dead unless it's like really, you can't really fight back anymore. Hit the face, go for the eyes, the nose, the ears. Like just do as much as you can, cover the back of your head. They can't really get grip on your head even though that's what they'll go for.
So yeah, don't. Just don't act like prey too. And you, you've got, you got a chance anyway. And. And y' all we. There was an attack in Churchill in 2013 and all the commotion and noise it caused had people come out of their houses and help scare the bear away. Like hit the bear with rakes and stuff and got the bear out of there. So yeah, don't be afraid to make a scene also, I guess.
[01:01:32] Speaker B: Well sometimes you gotta. Are there many sort of negative sort of human bear attacks often or.
[01:01:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I wouldn't. Luckily for polar bears, I wouldn't say many. I think a lot of that's due to the nature of the bears. Like again, they want to be out on the ice, they don't want to be around people There are certain times of the year in certain areas where they are on land, but. And that is increasing.
Luckily, it's still pretty rare, but it. We have a sense that it is increasing to an extent. So it's something we definitely want to get ahead of as much as we can and again, support people and also just be gathering information, like, what are you seeing? Like, what are you dealing with? Where are they coming from? Like, when do you see them? What did they do, how aggressive were they? That sort of stuff. So, yeah, still relatively rare, particularly compared to brown bears, but it is top of mind for us all the time.
[01:02:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
And I feel like this is one of these facts that you hear people say, and is it actually true that. Do people, like, leave cars and, like, building doors unlocked around town? Say there is a polar bear and you just need to get away and you can run in? Is that a thing?
[01:02:43] Speaker C: It is kind of a thing, yeah. Not everyone keeps their doors unlocked, like, in their houses. Some. Many do, many don't. Some of that's also just like living in the North.
There's just, like a level of trust in your small community as well.
Many vehicles are left unlocked. It's not. There is a myth that it's like the rule in Churchill that you're not allowed to lock your car. And, like, that's not true.
Most people do leave their cars unlocked, I would say. But also that's not necessarily for polar bears. It's also because there's no roads in a ride at Churchill. There's nowhere to go. So, like, if you're gonna steal someone's car, you're gonna find it a few blocks over or down at, like, the research center or something. Like, you know, there's nowhere to really take it.
So that plays into it as well. But yeah, if. If I was walking in Churchill and I saw a bear and there was a vehicle right next to me, I would try the door and would be likely to have success in being able to hide in the car. So, yeah, good to know.
[01:03:37] Speaker B: Well, on that subject, like, what are some of the kind of myths, misconceptions about polar bears or things that people believe that you find yourself addressing?
[01:03:44] Speaker C: Yeah, I think one would be that they're just like pure manhunters. You hear this thing like, polar bears are the only animal that actively hunts humans. And like, that's not true. There are predatory polar bears out there, just like there are predatory bears of other species out there, but they're not, like, they're not born and wishing for human blood or anything. Like that. But most polar bears don't want anything to do with you. So it's not like this inherent trait. Some are more aggressive than others.
And you do have to always assume that you're with an aggressive bear. But they're not inherently trying to eat you all the time. They'd much rather eat seal blubber. I think another myth is just, or just like a misunderstanding is that the bears that they could just like eat fish or they can eat on land, or they can just like evolve to live on land forever, no problem. And I think it really just, it just comes down to the polar bear's biology and like this really is bear that's powered mostly by fat and there's not that much fat on land that a polar bear needs. So they, they can, they definitely eat terrestrial foods. In Norway, they're eating more reindeer than ever because those reindeer are very fatty. And so that's been a pretty good short term spot for them.
A dead whale is like Cha ching to a polar bear. Like they love a dead whale. And there's even research that shows that dead whales have been an important food source for them in the past. And to get through warming periods, they'll eat berries, they'll eat eggs, they'll eat garbage. They're bears. But ultimately this is a bear that needs fat and a bear that has evolved again for this life on ice. And really that's what they need. So we're kind of pushing their limits of how long they can spend on land in some areas. And they can go a long time in some regions for sure.
But to have a polar bear, you need to have Arctic sea ice. So those are kind of probably be my main two things like come to mind.
[01:05:33] Speaker B: Man, that's fair. Is it, is it Blue Planet or Planet Earth? I feel that had. There's all, all that foot. It's one of those BBC docks that has all that footage, I think of polar bears eating whale carcass.
Can't remember off the top of my head,
[01:05:47] Speaker C: maybe.
[01:05:48] Speaker B: Frozen planet. Yeah. So many planets.
[01:05:52] Speaker C: All their footage is phenomenal. I. Yeah, very cool, ma'. Am.
[01:05:58] Speaker B: So where and how can people see wild polar bears safely and responsibly?
[01:06:03] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, definitely the most famous place is Churchill, Manitoba. There are different tour operators, different types of tours you can go on. We work really close with Frontiers North Adventures, just like from our partnership history.
They're great. But there's other great ones as well. Depending on what type of tour, what time of year you're coming. But you're pretty much Guaranteed to see you are in a certain window of time. There are polar bears around here at this, at this point. So, yeah, that's super fun.
I know. Kaktovic, Alaska had some tourism. It kind of slowed down. Maybe they're revamping it a little bit.
You can, you know, go to Norway, do some cruises around Svalbard and see polar bear from a distance and also just enjoy the other wildlife and fjords and glaciers and all that. You don't get as close to, to the polar bears, but they're around sometimes. Usually. And then I, I think in the next five to 10 years, we will see more smaller polar bear tourism operators pop up in certain areas, particularly across Canada, because now the bears are on land, more people realize it's a source of money.
They can bring people out on a quad or something. I'm just. So this is also where, when we're working with communities.
One thing I should mention too, in the coexistence work, one of our biggest priorities is supporting community exchanges.
So again, we can go in and be like, oh, xyz, like, big deal. But if we actually can bring different community members together and have them share information about what's working for them in their own communities, that's going to be more impactful and powerful to hear from a community that lives up the coast from, from you about what's working for them or not. And we can just help be conveners and facilitators of that. So that's really, yeah, a big part of what we're working on as well. I can't. Where was I? Where did it?
[01:07:54] Speaker B: Well, I don't know. I can listen all day. Don't worry.
What was it? What was it? It's interesting when you say about like all these, like smaller tour operators popping up, it's. It's basically so the polar bears kind of. They get kind of slightly habituated to people coming along and watching and they just kind of don't care.
[01:08:12] Speaker C: So, yeah, that's. That's a great question too. There's currently a researcher, Dr. Brooke Biddlecomb. She's fabulous. She's working with us in Churchill right now. She's looking at the impacts of tourism on polar bears. Kind of trying to get more at that. There was a study done in the early 2000s by Marcus Dick, and then Brooke is kind of revisiting some of that. But. But polar bears, they all do have different personalities and some are going to want nothing to do with humans. And if they see a tundra buggy or humans on Quads, they're like, bye, like I'm out of here and they're gone. Whereas other polar bears, I swear this is anthropomorphizing way too much. So I apologize to people who I might offend here. But I swear some polar bears love attention and it's not really true but like sometimes I swear some of them love to hang out like around, around tundra buggies that can go view the polar bears in Churchill. They go out on these certain trails.
There's also a lodge again up north in the Seal river area and they post some stuff online. But some polar bears just, maybe they're probably just more curious about the people is what it is, curiosity. But they will hang out. They put, they like put on shows once the cameras come out, they're like goofing around. They will just weave in and out of like tourism operators all day long and they don't get spooked by anything. And they're just, they're there for weeks at a time. And we think there's some that come back year after year, year and again. Other polar bears wouldn't come anywhere near that sort of thing. So they just have different tolerances for being disturbance for human activity.
There is a concern that bears might be habituated to some activities. I know. So there's a community north of Churchill called Arviat in Nunavut and I think Arvate has some really legitimate concerns that there, you know, some polar bears in, in Churchill get super used to human activities and they walk up the coast to Arviet and they get maybe a little too close to human stuff. And so some of it I think is like ice patterns and just what's going on with the bears. But yeah, there's, there might be something to that that some of these bears that are more used to humans are, are getting more used to humans and that's not really good in some cases. So it's curious though. I think we're gonna. As Hudson Bay is going to change a lot in the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years, we're going to see a lot of changes and we're gonna. There's a lot of people on Hudson Bay that will be reporting on those changes and we will also be there watching the changes and how it will affect polar bears and the communities that live with them. It's going to be let's say, interesting. And so yeah, we need to supporting.
[01:10:42] Speaker B: Yeah, it is interesting. I mean, I suppose like, it's like you say with the polar bears, it's a, it's not just the polar bears that you don't know, they're all individual. It's like the humans and the communities as well. One household is like, yeah, there's a polar bear, I don't mind. But the next one over is just like, I don't want that polar bear here. So then you've got a problem.
[01:10:59] Speaker C: That's an excellent point. Yeah. And with tour operators too. There's many excellent tour operators, you know, and then there's maybe some tour operators that are maybe being a little more dodgy or something, you know. Yeah. Between that different tolerances of humans, different tolerances of bears, it's complicated.
[01:11:16] Speaker B: Yeah, it is, yeah. And I guess speaking of change, this is my little segue we haven't really talked about yet, but about the effects of climate change on polar bears. What are the effects? Like what, what will happen if something isn't done about it now? Sort of in, in essence, like what's the future of polar bears at the moment?
[01:11:37] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, the future, I mean it is a bit uncertain at the moment. I will say we're optimistic.
So we are losing Arctic sea ice, you know, then this 2026 is turning out to not be a great year for that too. So we're losing Arctic sea ice both in it extent and thickness. In some areas, having thinner sea ice actually will work better for polar bears in the short term. But ultimately, as we lose Arctic sea ice extent, polar bears are losing access to seals. So they are not able to eat as much over time. This results in the bears not having as many babies, not being as big population shrink. This is what we've seen in western Hudson Bay, the Churchill bears.
So these bears are now on land about four weeks, weeks longer than their grandparents or great grandparents were. Its population has declined about 50%. We've also seen declines in the southern Hudson Bay in the southern Beaufort Sea.
But it's complicated because we've seen nice declines in the Barents Sea. But those Fallbard bears, many of them are still doing quite well because there's a lot of easily accessible food even without as much sea ice there. So it does depend. But ultimately again, polar bears need ice to actually excess seals to eat the blubber to be polar bears.
And as we lose Arctic sea ice, we are going to continue to lose polar bears.
So depending on the choices that humans make and on the people we vote for and the changes we can make to our energy systems, because really this ultimately boils down to moving away from fossil fuels, moving more towards solar power, wind power, cleaner Energies and you know, that's good for humans too. So we like to say that too. Like whatever we're doing for polar bears is good for people.
It's really you, maybe you can think of it even selfishly or whatever we want to do for people is good for polar bears when it comes to kind of cleaning up our world and our energy.
But if we did nothing to change anything about our current trajectory, we believe we would lose about two thirds of the world's polar bears by 2100. So we'd still have some in the high Canadian Arctic, largely in that, probably the archipelago sea ice region I mentioned previously.
But we would lose a lot of polar bears and in the meantime they would be smaller.
There's some inbreeding popping up already. We're going to probably see more of that.
Yeah, more stressed bears coming into more communities that do not need to deal with stressed out polar bears. My goodness.
So we'll see a lot of changes. But cool thing about sea ice is that it is, there's no tipping point. It's very responsive.
So if we got our atmosphere back to like normal temperature and functioning, functioning normally, we would get Arctic sea ice back. It's like never too late for Arctic sea ice, which is a really good news story. So if we do get our act together for ourselves and for polar bears and we can clean up our world and use these energies from nature, then we think we can keep polar bears around for a long time.
[01:14:31] Speaker B: No, that's good.
[01:14:32] Speaker C: We're going to see some changes. Hudson Bay's got some stuff baked in again, the most southern polar bears in the world.
But time will tell what we see.
[01:14:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, well it's like, well it's like you say, I mean I know a lot of people have a lot of opinions about energy and it's. But like it just seems obvious like investing in renewable energy, nature based solutions, adopting things like circular economy principles.
You know, I mean I think is that we use, we use up about one, the amount of energy we use is like one and a half Earth or something. So it's like that's not sustainable.
So it needs to be a bit of a reframing in how we think about these things. But yeah, that's a big topic.
[01:15:14] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a whole other podcast.
[01:15:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's outside of the remit of this one I think but. Well, I mean there are, well it does sound like there are ways we can be optimistic. They say there's no tipping point, so that's good. And I guess One way of celebrating polar bears and being optimistic and raising awareness of the situation is International Polar Bear Day, which.
Yeah, which I was going to ask how you celebrate that. It's. When is it? It's February.
[01:15:44] Speaker C: Yeah. February 27th is Polar Bear Day. Yeah, that's always a fun one, that one. We really celebrate moms and cubs a lot because it's kind of right before they're coming out of their dens.
So. Yeah, we always just post a lot on social. We've had a maternal denning project run for years, and we would post highlights from some of those, like, remote cameras that captured, like, sneaky footage of moms emerging from their dens with cubs. So we're, like, not bothering the family, but we're able to get some early shots. So. Yeah, and it's just a fun way to.
To celebrate the bears. We also do have Polar Bear Week every November, the first week of November. Ish. And that's when we're in Churchill. We're surrounded by polar bears. We're able to show live polar bears with our partner, explore.org and that's also also a really fun way to just connect people to just how cool these animals are.
And then we're. I mean, throughout the year, we're always posting cool stuff, but those times, especially fun. And then we do, like, Earth Day is a good one. And then we do have Arctic Sea Ice day also on July 15th.
It's a bit of a smaller one, but we really just try to raise awareness about the importance of Arctic sea ice. Two polar bears, but also two beluga whales. And we have beluga whale cams that we run in Churchill as well. Belugas also rely on Arctic sea ice, as do many other creatures we talk about. And Arctic sea ice is just, like, super cool. So trying to talk about how neat it is as an ecosystem.
[01:17:07] Speaker A: There's a day for everything, really.
[01:17:08] Speaker B: Isn't that cool?
[01:17:11] Speaker C: Why not? Yeah.
[01:17:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:17:13] Speaker C: In the world right now, probably.
[01:17:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Something I always like to ask our guests about, like, the specific species we're talking about. It's like, so why are polar bears important?
[01:17:25] Speaker C: Oh, yeah.
It's a big question for so many reasons. Well, polar bears are important because they are a keystone species in their ecosystem. They are a key part of the Arctic, and the Arctic is a critically important ecosystem to the entire world. Arctic sea ice acts like Earth's air conditioner. It helps kind of regulate the temperature of our entire planet. And by protecting polar bears, we are protecting the world in that way. And I truly do believe that they're also just such an incredible species. And as just a wildlife lover and someone who appreciates the Earth, to lose polar bears is almost unfathomable. Like, to not be able to get our act together, to protect the species and all the others that are under them is. I can't even really bring myself to think about that. So I. Protecting polar bears is protecting people.
They're beautiful and intelligent and amazing and dangerous and interesting and all those things. So, yeah, I just, I, I don't know, I just think they're important. I probably should put better thought into how I answer that question, but it's such an overwhelming question of like, wow, it's a great one. I should think about it more. But yeah.
[01:18:44] Speaker B: Oh no, I put it on the spot and well, like you say, it's unimaginable. Like, yeah, it's any species. If we lose any species in this day and age, it feels like, what are we doing?
[01:18:57] Speaker C: Moral failure. Yeah, I feel there's a. At least personally, I don't think everyone should feel this. I think we're all wired differently and I've done what I'm wired for. But I do feel it would be such a moral failing to allow us to continue. I know we've already lost so many species, but to continue to allow that to happen. I mean, we're so fortunate to live in this world with this diversity of life and to be the only life on Earth that can choose to protect it. Like, we have a responsibility there. So doing what we can to make the world slightly better place for us and for animals is a good thing.
[01:19:34] Speaker B: And also, so where can people, if they want to, you know, support or get involved, where can they find out more?
[01:19:41] Speaker C: Yeah, you can visit our website@polarbears international.org it's got all sorts of just cool information about polar bears, about our research, about our staff.
You can email us questions. We do answer them a good amount actually. We get a good amount. So. Which is great.
Also check out our polar bear tracker. This is. Is kind of a fun time of year because in the next like month or two we'll see the bears all choose to do different things as they come back on land. That's. I always find that really interesting. Again, kind of the different personalities of the bears. So, yeah, lots of good stuff. We also, we have Facebook, we've got, I think X Instagram, all that stuff if you ever are in the mood for some cute polar bear pictures and facts.
[01:20:26] Speaker B: Oh cool. And yep, I can confirm that you do respond to emails. So that's good.
And also, I guess, do you have any advice for like budding polar bear ologists or wildlife biologists in general?
[01:20:40] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. We also, we do get students reaching out to us a lot, which is great. So definitely always feel free to do that.
For me, I would try to get hands on experience wherever you can. That really helped me. This is kind of a. This one sounds a bit cliche, but I tell kids this wash the dishes is kind of a funny thing. So one of the reasons I believe I kept getting invited back for different opportunities was that I am a good team player. So, yes, I'm, you know, I work hard and I did well in school and I all that stuff. But when I'm in the field, I'm also helping pack the bags, I'm carrying the bags, I'm helping make lunches. When we go back at night, I'm helping with dinner, I'm helping clean the dishes. Like, you're just being part of the team and most people are doing that.
There are people that I've worked with who just don't kind of help or they're not the team player. And they might be, you know, sometimes maybe even one of the smartest people in the room or have, you know, a really important skill set. But if they are so difficult to live with, like when you're in the field, living with a team in a little house, if you are a really difficult person, no one wants you back. So just like being a good team player can honestly get you a far away. And this also plays into this collaboration idea we talked about. So we're collaborating with people around the world. So being a flexible team player, a good communicator, someone who kind of steps up and helps or is just willing to even ask questions to help move things along that will get you so far, you do not need to be the smartest person. You do not need to have always the most education in a certain area. But by being inquisitive and helpful and hardworking, you really can do yourself a lot of good and open more doors than you thought. Also, just a quick tip too. So Andy told me, Andy Deroche, who I mentioned before, he gets a lot of emails from a lot of interested students. And the ones he does not really look at are the ones friends that email him and he's. They're like, I love polar bears. I've been obsessed with polar bears since I was young. I think they're so beautiful and cute and I want to work with polar bears. He's kind of like eh. What he really interested in is people who email and they're like I'm interested in polar bears because I have this scientific curiosity about movement or genetics or diet or pollution and polar bears, you know, fit into this in this way. Or I've, you know, it's more of like asking the questions and wanting to move the conservation forward and it's good to just love an animal but also if you want to be a wildlife biologist having that, just that curiosity mind of like what do you want to know more about or what would be helpful for conservation? So there's a, there's a few random tips for you.
[01:23:28] Speaker B: No, thank you. Yeah, some of the things that can definitely relate to all that kind of stuff.
[01:23:32] Speaker C: Yeah. Right. It really, it sticks in your mind. I know a whole group of.
Yeah. I'll just say young people who came up with us in Churchill wants to do some work and they, they have not been invited back because they were expecting to be waited on and it's just not. Doesn't fit in a busy field team. Yep.
[01:23:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:23:51] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:23:52] Speaker B: Basically just to sort of build on probably what you've just been saying is just any other takeaway messages you have for, you know, the, in general, for people listening.
[01:24:01] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I do want people to leave with like the, the love is really a drive for me. So like love and empathy are such a drive for me. Like it's such a strength and they can help get us through times of like fear or anger even. And I feel like it's okay. I talk about this with some of my colleagues, like it's okay to be a bit angry about the state of the world and to be a bit scared, but at the same time there's so much good being done by so many good people and we don't hear about that as much, but it's so true. And so leaning into these connections we have with like even people, people like yourself, you know, you're connecting all these bear people together. There's so much cool stuff happening. There's so many people who care.
Let that kind of motivate us through these maybe next few years. There are a lot of positive things happening with technology, with cleaner energy, we can get to a better place. We do need to work together, we do need to use our voices and speaking up is really powerful and because I think humans care about what other humans care about.
So sometimes you might not want to share what you love or what you care about, but it really can make a big difference for your friends, families, colleagues, for kids. That are listening to you anyway. Just a general sense of optimism built on action, I guess. Yeah, I think there's a lot of good momentum happening and we'll keep it moving together.
[01:25:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I like that.
Yeah, it was like you say, I think it's more effort to hang on to things like anger and hate. Like just embrace the love. I mean it's, it's gonna sound very, very you woo woo and hippie dippy. But no.
[01:25:35] Speaker C: Yeah, by acting like even we talk a lot about like climate anxiety too. And like one of the best things you can do is just do any, any action. Just do something to like to go through it and like it's okay to feel that. Of course, we all feel that way. But yeah, it's gonna, you can really move through it. Like on. With love, with empathy, compassion.
Get to the good stuff.
[01:25:59] Speaker B: Oh, wonderful.
Yeah. Well, was there anything else that you'd like to mention or have we haven't exhausted you yet?
[01:26:08] Speaker C: Yeah, no. Thank you so much. This has been super fun. I just love talking about bears and there's so many people doing so much great work on both polar bears, on bears, broadly, on wildlife, broadly. I just love hearing about what people are doing and what they're interested in and I'm really grateful to be working on the work I do. So, yeah, I hope to do it for a long time, hopefully.
[01:26:31] Speaker A: Thank you, Elisa.
[01:26:32] Speaker B: What a.
[01:26:33] Speaker A: What an incredible talk and I just
[01:26:35] Speaker B: want to go see some polar bears now. Yeah, I really appreciate that and it's great to hear. There's some great stuff happening and it
[01:26:41] Speaker A: does take a team to make these things happen.
[01:26:43] Speaker B: And yeah, we, we all have different
[01:26:46] Speaker A: skill sets and strengths.
[01:26:47] Speaker B: So I hope anyone listening feels empowered to harness their fortes and make an impact in whatever it is they do.
[01:26:55] Speaker A: Science isn't my strong point, but I found a way to contribute, I hope.
[01:26:58] Speaker B: And as the title suggests, if we
[01:27:01] Speaker A: protect polar bears, we protect the world. And you know, you can take that
[01:27:05] Speaker B: and apply it to whatever it is you want, you want.
[01:27:10] Speaker A: So unless any other detours come up, we will be returning to the Northwoods and the Vinscruti Wildlife Sanctuary in the next and last episode of this series for some final thoughts and a bit
[01:27:21] Speaker B: of a wrap up.
So we'll see you then.
[01:27:24] Speaker A: Thank you and bye for now.
The Bear Den the American Bear association podcast was written and presented by me, Philip Stubley. The music was composed by React Music.
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[01:28:51] Speaker C: Sa.
