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Watching polar bears
By Matt Volz |
November 4, 2011, Friday
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IN the harsh wilds of the Canadian tundra, a wolverine scampers up to a polar bear snoozing near the shore of Hudson Bay. The bear rises and makes a half-hearted charge, driving away the fierce, badger-like animal.
The brief encounter was streamed live to computers around the world through a new program that aims to document in real time the annual migration of hundreds of polar bears outside Churchill, Manitoba.
The bears travel through the small town each October and November and then wait for the Hudson Bay freeze-up, when they can get out on the ice and hunt seals. In the past, their trek was witnessed mainly by scientists and intrepid tourists.
An initial US$50,000 grant from the Annenberg Foundation to set up four cameras on a makeshift lodge and a roaming Tundra Buggy, plus ongoing payments for bandwidth and technical infrastructure, allows the bears' antics to be viewed through the foundation's website, www.explore.org.
"It brings the Arctic to the people," said Krista Wright, executive vice president of Polar Bears International, an advocacy group based in Bozeman, Montana. "The polar bear is the North's iconic species. This is that exotic animal that people travel from all over the world to see."
There are 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears worldwide. The Western Hudson Bay polar bears are estimated to number between 600 and 800. Their gathering point near Churchill makes them among the most studied group of bears in existence.
Their numbers are expected to grow over the next few weeks as the weather turns colder. The bay usually freezes around the third week of November.
The Polar Bears International camp is about 50 kilometers outside of town. Each September through November, they and Frontiers North Adventures host scientists and hold webcasts for schoolchildren to give them a firsthand view of how climate change is damaging the bears' habitat.
It's unseasonably warm in Manitoba, as evidenced on the webcam by the tundra bare of snow. That raises concerns that ice will be late in forming again this year - last year, freeze-up didn't happen until mid-December. That's a problem for the bears, Wright said.
"It's breaking up earlier and freezing later, so the time they're spending on land is longer. The time they're on land, they're basically fasting," she said.
Charles Annenberg Weingarten, the foundation's vice president and a trustee, said he hopes to expand this into a program called Pearls of the Planet that would place streaming cameras in various wild places.
The brief encounter was streamed live to computers around the world through a new program that aims to document in real time the annual migration of hundreds of polar bears outside Churchill, Manitoba.
The bears travel through the small town each October and November and then wait for the Hudson Bay freeze-up, when they can get out on the ice and hunt seals. In the past, their trek was witnessed mainly by scientists and intrepid tourists.
An initial US$50,000 grant from the Annenberg Foundation to set up four cameras on a makeshift lodge and a roaming Tundra Buggy, plus ongoing payments for bandwidth and technical infrastructure, allows the bears' antics to be viewed through the foundation's website, www.explore.org.
"It brings the Arctic to the people," said Krista Wright, executive vice president of Polar Bears International, an advocacy group based in Bozeman, Montana. "The polar bear is the North's iconic species. This is that exotic animal that people travel from all over the world to see."
There are 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears worldwide. The Western Hudson Bay polar bears are estimated to number between 600 and 800. Their gathering point near Churchill makes them among the most studied group of bears in existence.
Their numbers are expected to grow over the next few weeks as the weather turns colder. The bay usually freezes around the third week of November.
The Polar Bears International camp is about 50 kilometers outside of town. Each September through November, they and Frontiers North Adventures host scientists and hold webcasts for schoolchildren to give them a firsthand view of how climate change is damaging the bears' habitat.
It's unseasonably warm in Manitoba, as evidenced on the webcam by the tundra bare of snow. That raises concerns that ice will be late in forming again this year - last year, freeze-up didn't happen until mid-December. That's a problem for the bears, Wright said.
"It's breaking up earlier and freezing later, so the time they're spending on land is longer. The time they're on land, they're basically fasting," she said.
Charles Annenberg Weingarten, the foundation's vice president and a trustee, said he hopes to expand this into a program called Pearls of the Planet that would place streaming cameras in various wild places.
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