Arctic

Manitoba may have just a handful of polar bears by 2035, as the world's leading experts on the iconic Arctic species believe the bears that summer around Churchill are doomed.

The Western Hudson Bay subpopulation of polar bears, estimated at 935 animals in 2004, is expected to decline over the next 25 to 30 years to the point where there are not enough bears to sustain a breeding population, predicts University of Alberta biologist Ian Stirling, who's been studying polar bears for 37 years.

The increasing length of the ice-free season on Hudson Bay will soon reach a tipping point where 20 to 30 per cent of Manitoba's polar bears will begin dying off every year, according to a mathematical analysis released two weeks ago by Stirling's colleague, University of Alberta biologist Andrew Derocher, who's studied polar bears for 28 years.

The predictions mean the province that calls itself the polar bear capital of the world may no longer be able to count the iconic Arctic animal as a resident species within a generation.

The eventual extirpation of polar bears from Manitoba would have disastrous effects on Churchill's ecotourism business as well as the province's efforts to portray itself as a leader in conservation.

"We can say with a very great deal of confidence, sadly, the Western Hudson Bay population will be non-viable within 25 or 30 years," Stirling said in an interview, referring to periodic polar bear counts, an observed decline in the average weight of polar bears, a decline in the weight and number of polar bear cubs and the increasing length of the ice-free period on Hudson Bay.

Unlike bears in the high Arctic, the Western Hudson Bay population spends its summers on land, denning in and around Wapusk National Park east of Churchill. Since almost all of the bears' calories come from seals -- which are only hunted on sea ice -- a longer ice-free period means less hunting and less body mass.

The average polar bear eats 43 ringed seals a year, Stirling said. Missing out on only two of those meals every year is enough to cause a polar bear's body weight to decline to the point where females produce underweight cubs or no cubs at all.

A preliminary estimate of the Western Hudson Bay polar bear population prepared in 2009 suggested there are only 635 bears around Churchill, a disturbingly low number the biologists are dismissing as incorrect. A full count using the same methodology as the 2004 estimate will be conducted later this year, Stirling said.

But an analysis conducted by Derocher and two mathematicians suggests Manitoba's polar bear population will decline rapidly once Hudson Bay's ice-free period gets to the point where bears wind up with too little food to produce viable offspring -- let alone survive meal-free summers on land.

The notion that polar bears can turn to alternate food sources is preposterous, said Stirling, noting the species has evolved to subsist on seals. Claims by Inuit that polar bears are increasing in number are spurious because the animals are merely turning to human settlements in attempts to find food, he added.

The Western Hudson Bay population will decline even with no hunting and worldwide reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, Stirling said.

"Even if we had a magic wand to wave around or could touch a magic button, it's like trying to turn a supertanker around," Stirling said of climate change. "Even if we went back to 1970 greenhouse-gas levels, it will be years before we see a difference."

But Robert Buchanan, president and CEO of educational organization Polar Bears International, cautioned it would be fatal to give up on polar bears, which he describes as a "sentinel species" that draws attention to the plight of the entire Arctic ecosystem.

Canada, which has 65 per cent of the world's estimated 15,000 to 25,000 polar bears, has the potential to lead the world in the fight against climate change, he said.

"We have to provide hope," he said. "If Canada doesn't get it, then the rest of the world won't get it."

Manitoba declared polar bears a threatened species in 2008. Derocher and other biologists are urging Canada to follow suit this year.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 7, 2010 A3

About a month ago I covered a newser at Fort Whyte Centre featuring the University of Manitoba’s David Barber and his work in Canada’s north documenting global warming. Here’s the story.

Since then I’ve ended up on a couple of email lists decrying the work of Barber and other scientists who fear the impact of climate change is a lot more rapid than first thought.

The most recent comes from Peter Salonius of New Brunswick who cites former television meteorologist Anthony Watts who claims melting Arctic ice may have more to do with wind than warming.

We’ve already heard a lot about climate change and its impact on polar bears; ice is forming later on Hudson Bay and delaying when the bears head out on the ice to hunt seals.

What hasn’t been talked about much, at least in southern media, is the possible impact of climate change on the barren-land caribou.

A year ago I did a piece on the Beverly and Qamanirjuaq caribou herds that range in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

Experts say the Beverly herd appears to have almost disappeared – it once numbered in the thousands – and the same fate could happen to the Qamanirjuaq herd.

"The NWT government has conducted reconnaissance surveys on the Beverly calving ground for the past three years, finding fewer and fewer animals," the Beverly and Qamanirjuaq Caribou Management Board (BQCMB) says in a recent release.

"In June 2009, less than 100 adult caribou were counted on the calving ground during the peak of the calving period, compared to 5,737 animals counted using comparable methods in 1994."

Manitoban Ross Thompson is BQCMB secretary-treasurer and the board is supported by the Manitoba government. The board recently met in Saskatoon.

The current size of the Beverly herd is not known, the BQCMB adds. It says reconnaissance surveys are not population surveys – they only provide a snapshot of some of the animals on the calving ground during the June calving period. In 1994, when surveys required to calculate a population estimate were last done, the herd numbered around 276,000.

"These recent calving ground surveys suggest that the Beverly herd has suffered a major population decline," the board says. "The causes are likely a mix of natural and human-caused factors. These include the natural caribou population cycle, diseases, changes in habitat (including winter range lost to forest fires), parasites, and predation. Limited satellite-collar data indicate that some cows that had previously calved on the Beverly calving ground have shifted to the Ahiak calving ground in recent years. The Beverly herd may also have been affected by human-caused activities, including climate change, mineral exploration and development, and hunter harvest.

"The BQCMB urges everyone – governments, companies and individuals alike – to do everything possible to take pressure off the Beverly herd right away. The herd will need the most favourable conditions over many years for its numbers to increase again."

Why the numbers have to increase is simple: Many people who live in Canada’s north hunt caribou to feed their families.

The BQCMB says its next step is for members to visit caribou-range communities to talk with residents about what’s happening.

The idea is to collect more information from the people who live in the north about what should be done.

The BQCMB will write up its findings and recommendations to release in the fall of 2011.

More information about the Beverly and Qamanirjuaq herds.

Biologists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History and City College of the City University of New York have found that grizzly bears are roaming into what was traditionally thought of as polar bear habitat -- and into the Canadian province of Manitoba, where they are officially listed as extirpated. The preliminary data was recently published in Canadian Field Naturalist and shows that sightings of Ursus arctos horribilis in Canada's Wapusk National Park are recent and appear to be increasing in frequency.

"Grizzly bears are a new guy on the scene, competition and a potential predator for the polar bears that live in this area," says Robert F. Rockwell, a research associate at the Museum and a professor of Biology at CUNY. "The first time we saw a grizzly we were flying over the middle of Wapusk, counting fox dens, when all of the sudden Linda Gormezano, a graduate student working with Rockwell and a co-author of the paper, shouted 'Over there, over there -- a grizzly bear.' And it wasn't a dirty polar bear or a moose -- we saw the hump."

That sighting in August 2008 spurred Rockwell and Gormezano to look through records to get a better picture of the bear population in the park. There was no evidence of grizzly bears before 1996, not even in the trapping data from centuries of Hudson Bay Company operation. But between 1996 and 2008 the team found nine confirmed sightings of grizzly bears, and in the summer of 2009 there were three additional observations.

"The opportunistic sightings seem to be increasing," says Gormezano. "This is worrying for the polar bears because grizzly bears would likely hibernate in polar bear maternity denning habitat. They would come out of hibernation at the same time and can kill polar cubs."

Before this study, researchers thought that the barren landscape north of the Hudson Bay was an impassable gap in resources for potentially migrating grizzly bears. But some U. arctos horribilis have managed to move from their historic ranges in the Rockies, the Yukon, and Nunavut, probably because of their flexible, mixed diet of berries and meat. The potential gap was navigable, and now some grizzly bears have reached the abundant caribou, moose, fish, and berries found to the south in Canada's Wapusk National Park.

"Although we don't yet know if they are wandering or staying -- the proof will come from an observed den or cubs -- these animals will eventually be residents of this national park," says Rockwell. "The Cree elders we talked to feel that now that grizzly bears have found this food source they will be staying."

"A big question is how to deal with these new residents," continues Gormezano. "In Canada, both the polar and grizzly bear are federally listed as species of special concern. In Manitoba, the polar bear is provincially listed as threatened while the prairie population of the grizzly bear is listed as extirpated."

In addition to Rockwell and Gormezano, this paper was authored by Daryll Hedman of Manitoba Conservation in Canada. This research was supported in part by the Hudson Bay Project.

The United Nations has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. It would be great if the year could be simply a celebration of the Earth's biological richness, but Biodiversity Year is occurring while non-human life on our planet is in a more perilous state than ever before.

Experts believe the world is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis on par with earlier mass extinction events. Some 17,000 of the plant and animal species that we've identified and assessed are now in serious decline, including many that are well-known and well-loved by Canadians, such as caribou, polar bears, and some salmon populations.

This perilous situation for plants and animals threatens not only the ecological health of ecosystems like old-growth forests and arctic tundra but also the wellbeing and welfare of human communities that depend on the ecological goods and services that nature provides. The deep bio-cultural ties to the land and its resources, especially wild plants, that many of Canada's aboriginal people have long held offer a direct illustration of this, as well as a source of knowledge that can benefit everyone.

A report just released by the David Suzuki Foundation and its allies, Conservation Value of the North American Boreal Forest from an Ethnobotanical Perspective, considers the importance of Canada's boreal forest to aboriginal people as a storehouse of plant resources. Boreal plants, like Labrador tea, wild rice, jack pine, and countless other trees, shrubs, and herbs have always played a significant role in the culture of the people who inhabit this vast northern region that extends from Newfoundland to the Yukon.

Food and beverage plants, such as wild chives and chokecherry, provide essential nutrients to complement a predominately meat-based diet. Medicinal plants, such as lingonberry, mountain alder, and common juniper are at the core of a holistic approach to healthcare and have been used for millennia to treat a myriad of ailments, from easing aches and pains and curing urinary-tract infections to assisting in childbirth. Before the introduction of modern technologies, boreal plants also offered materials for transportation, such as balsam fir timber used to make canoe frames and tamarack fibres used in snowshoes.

This range of benefits reflects a long tradition of botanical and ecological knowledge that aboriginal people have acquired over thousands of years of using the boreal forest as grocery, pharmacy, school, and spiritual haven.

Traditional knowledge held by Canada's First Nations is not just a relic of the past. It offers scientists, policy-makers, resource companies, environmentalists, and anyone else who cares about the boreal a vitally important information source to better manage the region's land and resources.

University of Victoria environmental studies professor Nancy Turner argues that we must not overlook the close interrelationships between indigenous peoples and their lands. Scientists must respect indigenous people as keepers of traditional ecological knowledge.

Too often, we undervalue the contribution of aboriginal traditional ecological knowledge in our debates about resource extraction, wildlife management, and land-use planning. We must remember that aboriginal people were actively involved in managing the boreal and other regions long before western science or industrial development came along. For example, boreal people commonly used landscape burning to maintain soil productivity, healthy wildlife populations, and a diversity of habitats. The practice has since been adopted by many forestry companies.

Such scientific information has been encoded in indigenous peoples' languages and has been passed on through stories and place names. Indeed, indigenous people have mapped the landscape and resources of the boreal forest to a much greater extent than scientists had previously understood. For example, the Gwich'in in the Northwest Territories long ago identified black currant island in the Husky River area. The Dogrib call Mesa Lake in the Northwest Territories Gots'okati, which translates as Cloudberry Lake. This type of detailed information on the ecological and cultural importance of places and landscapes that are important to aboriginal people can help planners prioritize what areas should be protected.

We must ensure that wilderness and wildlife conservation, including creating new parks and protected areas, recognizes indigenous rights to land and water and includes the involvement of indigenous peoples. The fact that we're now seeing more and more integration of thousands of years of traditional knowledge with modern science in Canada's boreal forest gives us one reason to celebrate the International year of Biodiversity.

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David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation. Faisal Moola is the director of science at the foundation (www.davidsuzuki.org).

New modelling suggests that the Arctic Ocean could be almost ice-free in the summertime as early as 2014, Al Gore warned delegates Monday at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

The projection, based on computer models showing several years of dramatic losses of polar sea ice, suggest the ice cap could vanish well before 2030, as forecast by the U.S. government eight months ago.

A U.S. government scientist said the new prediction was too severe, but many other researchers have predicted a quicker end to the summer Arctic ice cap as well.

"It is hard to capture the astonishment that the experts in the science of ice felt when they saw this," former U.S. Vice-President Gore said in his first appearance at the two-week conference.

His group presented two new reports on developments in Antarctica, Greenland, and the rest of the Arctic.

"The time for collective and immediate action on climate change is now," Denmark's foreign minister, Per Stig Moeller, said.

However, the negotiations were bogged down through much of Monday, even as developing countries agreed to resume talks.

European Union spokesperson Andreas Carlgren said a series of informal talks resolved the impasse, which erupted when developing countries halted the negotiations and demanded that rich countries offer much deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Representatives from 135 developing countries had refused to participate in any working groups when the boycott was announced earlier Monday. The move disrupted delegates from working on technical issues they hope to resolve before the arrival of more than 110 world leaders later this week.

Poor countries, supported by China, suggested that conference president Connie Hedegaard had raised suspicion that the conference was likely to kill the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which limited carbon emissions by wealthy countries and imposed penalties for failing to meet those targets. These countries want to extend Kyoto, but the U.S. has withdrawn from the treaty, citing economic concerns and the fact that China, India and other major greenhouse gas emitters are not required to take action.

Gore's reports

Gore and Danish ice scientist Dorthe Dahl Jensen used slide shows to present two reports at a stand-room only crowd of hundreds.

One report was on the Greenland ice sheet and was issued by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, a group formed by eight Arctic governments, including Canada and U.S. The other report commissioned by both Gore and Norway, was compiled by the Norwegian Polar Institute on the status of ice melt worldwide.

Average global temperatures have increased 0.74 C in the past century, but twice as quickly in the Arctic. Scientists says the northern polar ice has dropped significantly in recent years.

In summer 2007, the Arctic ice cap was reduced to a record low of 4.3 million square kilometres. The melting in 2008 and 2009 was the second and third greatest decreases on record.

"Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be (nearly) ice-free within the next five to seven years," Gore said.

No consensus

Prior to the end of the boycott, CTV's Tom Kennedy described Monday's events as being a "global squabble" with "no sign of an emerging global consensus."

"At the moment, it does really look like a complete and utter failure is possible," he told CTV News Channel by telephone.

Others saw more progress in the talks that have taken place so far.

"I don't think the talks are falling apart, but we're losing time," said Kim Carstensen, of the World Wildlife Fund.

Canada's environment minister, Jim Prentice, said Monday's boycott was "not particularly helpful" to the Copenhagen talks.

Earlier Monday, Prentice said the divide between the U.S. and some of the major emitters is posing a challenge to the ongoing climate negotiations.

"Essentially, here in Copenhagen, the United States has indicated they're not prepared to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, or something that looks like Kyoto," Prentice told CTV's Canada AM from Copenhagen on Monday.

"The Chinese, the Indians, Brazilians and others, want an international agreement that looks a lot like Kyoto, in terms of some of the obligations. And so that is the essential challenge we all face at the negotiating table."

Despite the challenges, Prentice said he remains optimistic that the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen will be able to eventually make a deal they can all live with.

"We're hopeful that we can reach, essentially, an agreement in principle, which could then be translated into a full international treaty in the subsequent year 2010," he said.

From a Canadian perspective, Ottawa is hoping to also develop a continent-wide approach to fighting climate change in North America.

Also Monday, Canada's Conservative government was forced to refute a fake press release that suggested Ottawa would be changing its climate change policy.

It is not clear who is behind the fake press release.

"They don't know which group or who was targeting Canada for this kind of embarrassment, but it's just one more of these very peculiar elements coming out of what has been a very difficult conference so far," said Kennedy, when explaining the incident to CTV News Channel.

With files from The Canadian Press and The Associated Press

Polar boulders. Caribushes. Muskrocks. Victoria-based wildlife guide Andrew MacPherson has seen them all during summer sojourns in the Arctic.

Drift through Wapusk National Park near the west shore of Hudson Bay aboard a slow-moving train and you will too, as wildlife melds with the landscape. A quartz boulder suddenly morphs into a polar bear sprawled in a grove of white birch. All at once a patch of spongy, bleached-yellow moss sprouts a sik sik - an arctic ground squirrel the size of a cat - curious about passers-by.

Wapusk is a national park most Canadians will more likely cross by rail rather than on foot and which was created in 1996 with pregnant polar bears in mind. In fact, wapusk is a Cree word for "white bear." Female polar bears head to dens as far as 100-kilometres inland, MacPherson explained to Pique during a recent visit. The naturalist emphasized the uniqueness of this transition zone at the 60th parallel, where Arctic tundra meets boreal forest. All three North American bear species are found here - black, polar, and barren land grizzly.

The word barren neatly sums up this mantle of peat. Roly-poly is another way of looking at it: summer heat combined with a relentless upswell of the earth's crust causes the tundra to ripple. Across the taiga, Via Rail's Hudson Bay glides delicately over a gravel rail bed layered atop muskeg and permafrost. When warmed, the undulating ground slows train travel to a crawl, not great for business if you're hauling grain to the port of Churchill but a trance-inducing pace for wildlife watchers. Between now and November is prime time to catch the show, both in the national park and Churchill, as polar bears rouse themselves from summer semi-hibernation and gather on the shores around Hudson Bay to await the arrival of shelf ice.

Just as unpredictable as the annual freeze up is the future of train travel in northern Manitoba itself. According to Catherine Kaloutsky, Via Rail's senior communications officer, this may be either one of the last years the Hudson Bay operates or the dawn of a new era, depending on whether or not the U.S.-based owner, OmniTRAX, puts money into upgrades or not. When approached during the 36-hour, 1,700-kilometre journey north from Winnipeg to Churchill, Kaloutsky estimated the cost of repairs at $1 million per mile.

Parks Canada commemorates the construction of the Hudson Bay Railway in the 1920s as a National Historic Event. Before the passenger train service was named Hudson Bay in 1997 - the year OmniTrax took responsibility for the rail line as well as operations at the Port of Churchill - the twice-weekly run was called the Muskeg Express.

In 1964, pianist Glenn Gould drew inspiration from the train trip he took to Churchill for an hour-long radio documentary, The Idea of the North. At the time he was quoted as saying the he had long been intrigued by that incredible tapestry of tundra and taiga which constitutes the Arctic and sub-Arctic of our country.

With one notable exception, not much has changed since Gould's northern journey. In 1999, the creation of Nunavut meant that Churchill became a crossroads for the new federal territory, as it has been for citizens of northeastern Manitoba and the Northwest Territories. As meteorologist Carmen Spiech explained to Pique during a walk along the shore of Hudson Bay, if you want to set foot in Nunavut, all you have to do is wade into the bay's chilly surf. Nunavut is huge, she said, almost a third the size of the whole country. Its land mass includes the ocean floor beneath the bay. A lot of its residents journey here for health care, which means Churchill's population is made up of Inuit, Dene, and Cree, as well as every other nationality that arrived in more recent times.

Arresting sights for visiting southerners are the firearms carried as casually as umbrellas by many northern residents. As a precaution, both Spiech and MacPherson shouldered rifles. One look at the size of polar bears, which range from 400 to 680 kilos on average, is explanation enough.

Long-necked Ursus maritimus makes grizzly and black bears look downright cuddly in comparison. Spiech, who lives on the outskirts of Churchill, wouldn't consider even walking from her home to her car without protection.

Not for nothing are these bears referred to as polar boulders as they silently shape-shift to fool potential prey, whether seals, beluga whales, sik sik or humans, all of whom are featured on the omnivore's menu.

Certainly the most popular way for tourists to explore the taiga is aboard one of the lumbering tundra buggies, enormous fat-tired vehicles designed to inflict minimum imprint on the delicate landscape while delivering maximum visual rewards to riders. Note: travellers prone to motion sickness would be well advised to self-medicate or wear acupressure wrist bands, as tundra buggies rock from side-to-side when crossing creekbeds and pebble beaches.

By far the most enjoyable way to experience this exotic countryside is on foot. Delicate features, such as boletus mushrooms, Labrador tea and cloudberries, which resemble salmonberries and taste like apricots, provide a surprisingly complex ground cover. Just mind those white boulders as you wander.

Access: For information on Wapusk National Park, visit www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/mb/wapusk/index.aspx. Information on Churchill is posted at www.churchill.ca, www.destinationchurchill.com and www.travelmanitoba.com.

Via Rail's Hudson Bay train schedule is posted at www.viarail.ca.

To learn more about Glenn Gould's "The Idea of North" project, visit www.hermitary.com/solitude/gould.html.

Jack Christie is the author of The Whistler Book (Greystone). To learn more, visit jackchristie.com.