Polar bears in Canada are on the verge of extinction. Here’s what is being done to protect yourself.

Only on the edge of the Western Bay of Hudson is the small town of Churchill, Manitoba.

This is where the sea meets with a fighting forest under northern lights. Further north, the trees stop growing. Snow coats the sharp landscape of the Canadian shield, and the continuous wind passes through the willows.

No road leads to Churchill. Only a railway and airport runway, carrying a occasional charter plane.

But it attracts tourists and scientists, because for a short time in the fall, the Kings of Arctic migrates through the city back into their homes on frozen sea ice. Passengers come here, from all over the world, looking for one thing: lock your eyes with a polar bear.

Bears

The polar bear is meandering through Churchill every fall as they wait for ice in the bay. Males first go to ice, wandering and testing the edges, eager for traveling north where they can finally hunt ring seals – their primary food source.

Scientists get closer to Churchill because it is the most affordable point to study polar bears. The bears are the most explored here in the world, and most photographed.

These Arctic beasts have great personality: they play and cure and sleep to go through time. Males will often protect themselves, trying to get to know each other so that they are prepared for charged battles in the spring, during the mating season.

The cubes remain close to their mothers for two to three years before they are expelled and forced to live alone. Next year they test the waters – sometimes they fight to survive while learning to hunt and maintain themselves in Tundra.

“Great change in the ecosystem”

In recent years, however, the warming Arctic melting their habitat on the ice, changing the behavior of the bear: scientists from Polar Bears International say that the ice is formed two weeks later than in the 1980s, and withdraws two weeks earlier in the spring.

This month’s change in their environment forces bears to be done longer, closer to people and beyond the varnish for a seal in the north.

This is a change – caused by a change in climate – with which their parents and grandparents did not have to face. Yes, the bears have been constantly developing, since they had separated from Grizlje about 500,000 years ago, but the pace of change is what is alarming scientists.

The main climate scientist for Polar Bears International Flavio Lehner says that due to the fall of the sea ice, the population of the Polar Bear in the Western Bay of Hudson is as many as 618, which is approximately half of what was once in the 1980s.

“That’s quite deep,” he says. “It’s hard to find other places, except perhaps that were divided into Amazon, where you see such a great change in the ecosystem caused by climate change.”

Lehner does not predict that the situation will improve, and beyond the fall of the population, see a change in behavior. It used to be much more typical to find mothers with three, which, in their personal experience, is now rare.

Polar Bears International scientists say these bears can be comfortably held on land 180 days. In other parts of the world, the bears have been seen hunting birds and deer, but scientists say that this high protein diet can damage their kidneys and do not prevent them from losing 2-4 pounds a day when they are from ice.

“The current pace of change is too fast,” explained John Whiteman, a chief scientist with PBI. “Polar bears will not be able to develop or acclimatise on time so they can cope with our current rate of loss of sea ice.”

Whiteman expects the polar bears to stay for the next 10 years in Churchill, but the time strip begins to become unclear 20 to 30 years in the future.

“Ultimately, we know if we lose sea ice, we lose polar bears,” Whiteman said.

City

Churchill has always been a city on the stack. Many lives have lived – from home to the first nations to trading in a military city so far, the capital of the Polar Bear in the world.

Attracts a special kind of person. Often the one who finds pleasure in solitude. People who come to work are semi-nomadic employees of the tourism industry or may seek change. They are guides and nature lovers, seasonal workers who have attracted this slow, simpler pace of life.

Second – like the mayor of the city of 30 years of Mike Spence – they spent their lives here. When he was a child, 20 to 22 bears were shot in the city for a year. But over time, the approach changed.

“First of all, we respect wild animals,” he says. “Polar bears are quite significant in the autochthonous world – there are food chains at the top. That’s a lot of respect for.”

The city is now facing a future in which the tourist season of the polar bear could potentially disappear. In the meantime, the community will be forced to coexist more closely with the bears as they wait for the ice to form on the bay. And as the infrastructure struggles too much to adjust to the warming climate and the melting of permaphrost, Spence is one of the many people looking for solutions.

“We’ve always been challenged,” Spence says. But the community also “usually finds a way”.

These solutions include command of the port and rail that collapsed in 2017 due to a combination of flooding and lack of maintenance. Once he starts acting in his full potential, he hopes to welcome more consistent jobs and resources for the community. Meanwhile, a new program in the city grows micro -green, and a new polar trash resistant to the streets, all so that humans in the north and wild animals create a sustainable path to the north.

“What we need to do now is to build on our young people who grow up here, so they play a bigger role in the construction of a stronger community and a larger community,” says Spence. “They see themselves what they have quite precious.”

Fighting for the future

On the outskirts of the city, Wyatt Daley connects dogs to sinks, preparing to run the first three tour for the day. Autumn is a top tourist season and will spend the day among the trees of the boreal forest, sliding in the snow.

Churchill relies on tourism that comes from those who want to see polar bears. In order to maintain their business, some tourism companies want to turn to protect their future.

One of these ways is the advertising of other aspects of this wild north – Aurora that dances over the ground 300 nights of the year and the annual migration of whales in Belugi summer.

But it’s not just an economic engine that needs to be encouraged: longing for families and to choose Churchill for the next generation, harder to enjoy it in everything it can offer.

Wyatt Daley was one of those children who begged their parents a few years ago to move on south. His father Dave, dog musher and owner of a tourist company, would shook his head and say to him, “We have dogs, we make a living here.” And that was the end of that special conversation.

He watched his friends and their families go away – especially in high school years – looking for “better opportunities”. After graduation, he traveled all over the world, working in the tourist industry in Australia and Cologne. But he returned home. Return to dogs and back to Churchill.

Churchill, he says, gave him “everything.” He feels connection with dogs, with the earth. His father is his best friend. And that is exactly what he wants for his son Noah – who now is 3 years old – who has a tendency for dogs.

“I remember being a little kid and stood on the back skiing with my father and doing tours,” he says. “That’s what I’m looking forward to right now … I think [Noah] going out and doing tours with me. “

But this heritage is threatened by the Arctic warming and it is a weight that daleys feel as they struggle to protect their lifestyle in the north.

“It’s a scary thought to think that polar bears may not one day not here,” says Dave Daley. “The Earth of the Planet is a living being, and we are those who walk it and change everything. I think we really have to solve it and start to take it seriously.”