MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Winter 2020

79 words & photos :: Leslie Anthony The shots are close and unmistakable. Echoing through the blue light of dawn in Churchill, Manitoba, the crack-crack-crack of bear bangers means only one thing: conservation officers are hazing a polar bear out of town. Our guide, Duane Collins, quickly hectors our straggling posse towards a hotel doorway—a route of escape should the trouble shift our way. From here, the encounter sounds like a spirited pas de deux as shots and sirens and helicopters trade places on the landscape. During a pause, we cross the street to the gift-shop headquarters of Frontiers North Adventures, with whom we’re travelling. We file quickly in through a door held wide by Erin Greene, all-too- familiar with the town’s “get inside” bear-safety policy. Walking home from a Halloween party with two friends in 2013, a polar bear had charged her group in the dark. The others escaped but the bear grabbed Greene. The bear was eventually driven off—literally—when someone rammed it with a vehicle. Greene’s arm, knee, and ear were injured, and a tear in her scalp required 35 staples to close. The encounter left her with a healthy respect for polar bears, and a deep affection for the people of Churchill, whom she credits with saving her life. Greene’s misfortune, however, is far from emblematic of life in the self-described Polar Bear Capital of the World. Rather, over four decades Churchill has transitioned from a community perpetually on edge to a model of co-existence with the planet’s largest land predator. A highly effective, globally unique Polar Bear Alert Program works to safeguard both people and animals, dovetailing with a sustainable commercial bear-viewing industry that contributes both to the town’s economy and the animals’ conservation—the latter made increasingly tricky by climate change. Our specific Frontiers North tour—billed as the Conservation Journey—is a once-a-year affair with scientists and personnel from the non-profit organization Polar Bear International, whose research, education, and action programs address issues endangering polar bears across the global Arctic. But there’s a reason they run education programs in Churchill, which offers a sort of polar-bear vortex. When ice breaks up in July, bears from the Western Hudson Bay sub- population of Ontario and Manitoba come onto surrounding land. Here, most engage in low-energy lounging until autumn, when they gather along the shore to await re-formation of the ice that delivers the seals they feed on. A convergence of currents, geography, and abundance of freshwater make the Churchill area of the Bay earliest to freeze, drawing hungry bears from far and wide to await the ice. Thus, both the problems and conservation opportunities this brings. Numbering around 800, the Western Hudson Bay sub-population is the most-studied on the planet, with some 85 per cent having been in human hands at some point—either for harm reduction or scientific purposes, such as radio-collaring as part of a 40-year effort to collect baseline data on growth and longevity. The first place we’d visited on arrival was the Polar Bear Holding Centre (aka “Polar Bear Jail”) outside town, decorated with a stunning mural. As we would experience, bears that approach town are typically chased out by Manitoba Conservation staff. But bears that refuse to stay away are captured and placed in one of the holding facility’s 28 cells, where they’re watered and provided bedding but no food (so there’s no reward association). Once ice forms the bears are released. That day there were only two bears in lock-up—an unusually low number. As a measure of the Polar Bear Alert Program’s effectiveness, in the late 1970s around 40 bears were destroyed each year in Churchill. BIOPHILIAC Watching, studying, and co-existing with the Western Hudson Bay polar bear subpopulation A mother and two cubs cruise the Hudson Bay shoreline near the Tunda Buggy Lodge.