Polar bears in Churchill

Churchill Manitoba is on the polar bear migration route. Most bears avoid the town, but not all of them. Nearly 800 polar bears live in the vicinity. That number increases dramatically to 10,000 during hunting season. 

Churchill residents have to be careful all the time. Many people keep the doors of their houses and vehicles unlocked, should anyone need to make a quick escape. Polar bears that wandered into the town used to be shot. Now, when people spot a bear, they call a hotline and professionals try to scare the bear away by firing cracker shells or rubber bullets. If that doesn’t work, the bear is tranquilized and taken to the world’s only polar bear jail.

The bears are kept locked inside these cells for up to 30 days and fed only snow and water to discourage them from returning to town in search of food. Polar bears are accustomed to not eating for long periods of time. But it’s not pleasant. Bears are marked before they are released, so that they can be tracked. Repeat offenders are held for more than 30 days. 

The Polar Bear Alert Program receives about 300 calls on average each year. About 50 bears end up inside the jail. Since the establishment of the Polar Bear Alert Program, bear-human conflicts have dropped. But climate change is causing the ice to disappear. Polar bear needs ice to survive because it enables them to walk over the water and hunt seal. Now the summers are longer and the ice is delayed. The bears become restless for food after months of starvation, forcing them to frequently encroach into human space. This trend has been seen in Alaska, Norway, Greenland, and elsewhere in Canada.

The late freeze is coupled with an increasingly early thaw, which means that the bears spend less of the year hunting. This leaves them with not enough time to build up an acceptable amount of body fat to survive the summer. Some experts fear that two-thirds of all polar bears will be gone by 2050, and they might even become extinct in the wild by the end of the century.