Everybody Wake Up! There's a Polar Bear!

In a lifetime of outdoor adventures, I had never heard words that more effectively woke me from a deep slumber.  Cozy in my sleeping bag and tent, a moment later I was standing in boxers and a down jacket on the arctic tundra – oblivious to the brisk morning wind.  Scanning the treeless horizon, it only took a moment to spot a large white bear a few hundred yards from us – and shuffling our way.  Its stark color seemed out of place -- highlighted as if by a spotlight against the scarlet and golden autumnal colors of the bearberry and dwarf willows on our riverside campsite.  My mind was instantly filled with two thoughts.  First, of the polar bear’s fearsome reputation.  (At that moment, I was literally scared pantsless.)  And second – “What on earth is it doing here?”

The voice that woke us was Michael Engelhard, one of our guides.  My wife and I were on the trip of a lifetime – 10 days floating down the Canning River in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.   We had come to see some of the remarkable wildlife that inhabits one of the wildest places on the continent.  But this was definitely not what we had in mind.  We had been told of the slim possibility of sighting polar bears – which some consider to be more dangerous than their smaller cousin the grizzly.  But we were far more likely to see the largest of all land carnivores after our river trip was over, as we passed through the village of Kaktovik, on an island in the Beaufort Sea.  Male polar bears often wait on the shore in the fall for sea ice to form – and pregnant females wait there for the snows that they den in, to protect their newborn cubs from winter weather that can reach more than 50 degrees below zero. 

Actually, our eagerness to see these bears was outweighed by our trepidation about encountering them on the river.  This is one reason why our trip was planned to end where the river split into a web of delta channels ten miles from the ocean.  Above that point, polar bear sightings were unlikely.  But on this late August morning we were 25 miles from the coast – and there was the bear. 

Seeing a polar bear in the safety of a zoo is one thing.  But we woke up that morning on its turf -- camped on the Refuge’s coastal plain.  We couldn’t simply retreat to the safety of a van or a hotel.  I found that this realization had a remarkable ability to focus my thoughts.  But eventually, a third thought entered.  Was this animal out of place because the bear’s world is increasingly out of balance? 

Polar bears are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because of the threat posed by global warming.  The bears depend on sea ice to hunt the seals that comprise the vast majority of their highly carnivorous diet.  Retreating polar ice poses multiple threats.  As comfortable as they are in the water, according to the Minerals Management Service, bears are drowning during storms in the growing distance between the polar ice cap and the shore.  But more fundamentally, without ice the bears can’t hunt for seals.  And without the ice on which they raise their young, the seals themselves are in trouble.   

Our particular bear looked plump and healthy.  It didn’t appear to be hungry.  And we certainly couldn’t tell if it was a pregnant female looking to den.  (Actually, to me, all polar bears look pregnant.)  But what we saw that morning on the Canning River is part of a trend.  According to the U.S. Geological Survey, with the loss of sea ice, polar bears are being pushed onto the land to den.  (In another disturbing sign, the USGS study also found that polar bears in this part of the arctic are smaller than in the past – probably from reduced access to food.)  Far from the sea, polar bears on land face new dangers from energy development, local residents – and even frightened rafters.  In fact, in 2008, a polar bear was shot near the Alaskan town of Fort Yukon, 300 miles from the Arctic Ocean.

Much to our relief, rather than continuing into our camp, our bear found a promising spot for a nap.  After several hours watching the bear – and taking turns packing our rafts more hastily than usual – we pushed off with sighs of relief, the knowledge that we had seen something remarkable, and a sinking feeling that this memorable sighting didn’t bode well for these bears.  As excited as we were, this was not an entirely happy encounter.

Standing on the tundra that morning, I felt in a personal way the threat that unchecked global warming poses to this magnificent animal, to the Arctic Refuge – and, as we watched this out-of-place bear, to my wife and me. 

Comments