CANADIAN POLAR BEARS FIGHTING FOR SURVIVAL
12.19.07 - Leído 65 veces. Enviar esta notaPaul Richards
As ice retreats off Hudson Bay, the bears must venture further out for food
MONTREAL, Canada; December 19, 2007.- Polar bears in Canada’s Hudson Bay area are battling for survival, as climate change reduces the time they can hunt for food, warn environmentalists and locals in Churchill, the self-proclaimed polar capital of the world.
“For many years, there were 1,600 to 2,200 of our polar bears, called the western Hudson Bay sub-population,” Bonnie Chartier, a Churchill native who works as a guide for tour groups who come to this northern town to spot the world’s largest bear, told AFP.
“Now they’re saying there are about 965. Boom! In a very short span of time, we have a much smaller population and this has been attributed to global warming,” she said.
Polar bears are carnivores, and the seals that live in the Hudson Bay are their favorite meal.
They hunt when the bay is frozen, venturing far out on the thick ice and waiting patiently for a seal to pop its head out of the water for air.
They spend the part of the year when the bay is not frozen on land, fasting.
“In the last 20 years, our bears have been coming off the ice two weeks earlier and going out about one week later, so you’ve taken three weeks’ hunting time out of their diet, including the crucial spring weeks, when seals are pupping. Seal pups are easier prey for the polar bears,” Chartier said.
“The bears are having a harder time. They’re not able to put on enough weight to carry themselves through the whole fasting season,” she said.
With less possibilities to seek food on their natural frozen hunting ground, the bears are tending to venture into town — leading some people to believe that stories of the bears’ struggle to survive are an exaggeration, designed to draw more tourists into Churchill to view the mammals.
“The bear industry in Churchill is big bucks… what better way to keep people coming than to tell them they’d better hurry to see the disappearing bears,” a Churchill local, who said he sees as many bears today as he did years ago, told Britain’s Daily Mail in an article published last week.
“This is a local person taking the numbers at face value and saying, ‘I see 50 bears a day and that means numbers aren’t declining.’ In reality, they are,” biologist Brad Josephs, who works as a guide on Churchill’s polar bear viewings, said.
“One reason you can see more bears around Churchill is because they are desperate for food because they don’t have as much time to hunt.
“Something similar happened in several villages north of Churchill: the elders were telling the government there were more polar bears because they were seeing more bears in town,” Josephs said.
“So the government increased harvest levels but when they did a population census, they realized there was not an increase in the bear population but a decrease,” Josephs said.
Chartier also insisted that polar bears are beginning to feel the negative effects of global warming.
“We’ve seen a few bears that are skinnier than they should be,” she said.
“Things have changed, there’s no doubt about it,” she added, referring to the climate in her northern Canadian hometown.
“When I was a kid, we wore jackets in the summer. Nowadays, people wear shorts and tank tops.
“Even storms have changed: they last half a day and when I was a kid we would have a three-day blow.
“I’m worried for the polar bears — they’re going to be the first ones to suffer.”
Josephs’s worries for the bears and the planet ran even deeper.
“A lot of people believe it might be too late to save the polar bear,” he said.
“But maybe it takes the threat of losing a really charismatic species like the polar bear, that everybody loves and that people go to see in Churchill, for the world to wake up and say, hey, global warming is real, and we have to do something about it.”
(AFP)
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