Polar bear gazing is a major draw year-round in this frosty Canadian land; tourists who track these huge, snowy beasts and capture them on film are rewarded with photo ops that vary with the season.
By YVETTE CARDOZO
Published August 1, 2004
[Photo by Yvette Cardozo]
Mother love: A polar bear cub, about 3 months old, romps on its mother near Churchill, Manitoba. View photo gallery
The action started the moment we arrived at tundra camp. A huge male polar bear lay sleeping beside the "train car" that served as kitchen. A smaller male lumbered in, and the two obligingly licked axle grease off the car's rubber tires, poked about under the wire mesh viewing platforms and stood up on their hind legs, staring face to face with the camp cook.
The camp, sitting on a point of land overlooking Hudson Bay in Canada, is 13 miles east of Churchill at the northern end of Manitoba and smack in the middle of the bear migration route. Each spring, the last of the bay's melting ice deposits bears along the shoreline, where they wait for the fall freeze so they can go back out across the bay and hunt for seals. Churchill sits where the ice freezes first. There are 1,500 impatient, ravenous polar bears; 1,000 people.
People have been coming to watch the fall bear migration for decades, and while fall is still most popular, bear watching is now a three-season affair.
There's fall - the few weeks around Halloween, actually - when you go out on the frozen tundra to see bears play-fight and lounge in the sun. There's winter, when you stay in a backwoods lodge and venture out in snow coaches to see moms and newborn cubs. And there's summer, even farther north at the top western edge of Hudson Bay, where you boat out to watch bears swim with huge white paws through translucent blue water.
Summer
You think Churchill is the far north? Sila Lodge on Wager Bay is 500 miles above that, sitting near the Arctic Circle about as far up the northwest side of Hudson Bay as you can get. Churchill, with its scattering of trees and thick mats of multicolored wildflowers, is tropical by comparison.
Though folks enjoy the tundra, what people really want here is bears - hunting and playing but, especially, swimming.
We had been out only 20 minutes in the lodge's skiff when someone spotted a lone caribou and then a polar bear attempting to stalk it. But the caribou was too fast, so the bear gave up the chase and lumbered into the water.
He paddled lazily, extending his huge paws before him. The water was so clear that we could see individual hairs under the surface. He circled. We circled. Then we spotted another bear climbing onto the rocky shore. We watched as he shook himself like a huge dog, sending a sparkling cloud of spray into the air.
All of this during the first hour of our first afternoon in camp.
There is, of course, more to see around Wager Bay than bears.
The plan is to alternate boat days with tundra hike days. One day, our guide led us on a "supermarket tour" of local plants. There were crowberries, cranberries, cloudberries and blueberries, all only inches high. We munched our way along, tasting mountain sorrel and mushrooms. We sniffed Labrador tea, fingered moss that was used by Inuits for everything from toilet paper to linings for oil lamps, and we inspected dwarf birches that grow horizontally in a spiderweb of branches just a finger knuckle high.
Plus, there is the scenery. The hills along Wager Bay are low, corrugated and cracked in places where the metamorphic granite has been twisted over the eons. Pastel colors and soft lines give the land a spare, clean beauty.
But, always, we returned to the boats for days filled with special moments.
One morning, we sat at the edge of the beach while a mother bear nursed two cubs. Nearby, we found a peregrine falcon nest that contained three fluffy white chicks. A few islands away were two belugas. And finally, the rarest of sightings: a pack of narwhal whales with spiral tusks cutting through the gentle waves.
What a difference nearly 20 years makes. Back in the late 1980s your choices boiled down to a few hours in a tundra buggy or, for the adventurous, a night in Len Smith's converted school bus with bunk beds and slabs of wood thrown over the seats to make dining tables.
Today, folks go out for five days at a stretch. The tundra camp looks like train cars but is much roomier. There's a dining car, a lounge car with plenty of stretch-out room and two cars with bedrooms laid out like train sleepers. Viewing platforms separate the cars.
Ah yes, and there's also a shower. With a drain that empties onto the tundra. And curious bears nosing about, just a hot breath away from your naked toes.
The daily activity also has changed. You've got clinics on photography, bear ecology, arctic weather. You can go out in the buggies, as always. But you can also hop a helicopter for aerial views. Folks tote laptops to download their photos at night. And one camp has a satellite feed so friends down south can also see the action.
Last fall we learned about the town of Churchill - how it developed bear watching to save its economy after the military bases closed. And how it deals with the bears. A careful system of patrols, traps and the infamous bear jail keep the town safe. It has been 20 years since anyone was killed or seriously injured near town. Troublesome bears are trapped, kept in an old military hangar (the bear jail) and sporadically choppered out (yes, it's a tourist photo op) to somewhere up north.
And we learned about the bears - that males can grow to 12 feet and 2,000 pounds, that a hungry bear can smell food 20 miles away and that global warming has pushed the bear season back weeks, meaning that bears today have less time on the ice to hunt seals, their main source of food.
Our first night in camp the aurora traced writhing fingers of vivid green light across the sky. The next morning before dawn, we headed in buggies toward the area's second camp, some 5 miles down the coast. We followed a bear as he picked his way through skim ice with that peculiar flop-footed, pigeon-toed walk that polar bears have. Suddenly, an arctic fox ran right in front of us and dashed along a low ridge, his feet kicking up a spray of snow, his fine long white fur glowing against the sun.
Then we got to the other camp, and it was bear city; a mom and cub plopped in a lazy lump not 100 feet away, another bear lying like a golden furry ball, others artfully scattered across the landscape. A dozen bears in all.
The bunch of them eventually got up and wandered off, appropriately into a glowing orange sunset.
Winter
This is not Churchill in October.
It's harder. It's much less certain. It's also the only place on Earth you can see polar bears and brand new cubs. Wat'chee Lodge, which is south of Churchill, has been a jealously guarded secret of professional wildlife photographers for years.
They come here year after year, like a religious pilgrimage: avid hobbyists and an international crowd that regularly supplies photo stock agencies.
You need patience, says Mike Spence, owner of the lodge. And very warm clothes, which you can rent from the lodge or in town.
After arriving in Churchill, we took a train 40 miles south, got out in the middle of nowhere and got into a Bombardier. These snow coaches became our second home. They look like oversized Volkswagen Beetles that mated with snowmobiles. They're noisy and filled with gasoline fumes but are the only multipassenger vehicles that can survive out here.
The lodge is comfy and functional. Its power comes from a generator and there's no running water, but it does have satellite TV.
For three days, we were teased with bad weather and no bears. Visibility was so flat that you couldn't see footprints a yard away. Still, the lodge guides went out and looked for tracks. And when you realize there are only 200 dens scattered along 150 miles of tundra, you begin to understand how special the bears' ability is.
The moms arrive here in late summer to dig a den, crawl in during fall, have their cubs around December and emerge in mid February when the cubs are the size of large house cats and oh, so cute. Mom leads them for short walks while they build strength, and by mid March they've all left for Hudson Bay's pack ice to hunt seals, their main food.
Against all odds on the fourth day, the trackers found bears.
We chugged south, carefully picked our way across a snow-filled creek and there, on a low ridge surrounded by a small stand of trees, was our prize: a mom and her cub.
Just then, a weak sun peeked through the clouds. For three hours, we photographed them. The cub chewed mom's foot, mom's leg, mom's ear. Then he moved to her cheek, mouthing a tuft of hair. At this point, mom's patience ran out. A quick huge paw caught the cub by the shoulder and firmly shoved him to her stomach. There, he happily went back to lunch, nose down, rump up, hind paws scrabbling madly.
During the nine days at the lodge, we saw five sets of bears, though only two were easy to photograph. Those two, though, were more than enough. We watched them a total of seven hours and shot nearly 1,500 digital images, the equivalent of 40 rolls of film.
The last day, especially, was unique.
Again, the bears were on a mound backed by trees and, thank goodness, facing the sun.
The cub was chewing on mom when she decided to go for a short stroll, circled the mound and scrambled up a small snow bank. The cub took a full five minutes to navigate the climb - scrabbling up, falling back, squealing for mom at the top of his tiny lungs. She gently grabbed his head with her teeth, more nudging than pulling. Finally, he clawed his way up, all to the running clicks of a dozen camera shutters.
Even the a big gun pro from National Geographic was impressed. "That," he said after putting 10 rolls of film through his camera, "was special."
- Yvwette Cardozo and Bill Hirsch are a freelance writer/photographer team living in Issaquah, Wash.
If you go
GETTING THERE: Some airlines offer connecting flights from Tampa to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Then visitors generally fly a little more than 600 miles or take a train (about 1,060 miles) northeast to Churchill.
STAYING THERE: Polar bear viewing season in fall runs from early October to late November, but the prime weeks straddle Halloween. The winter cub season runs late February to mid March. Summer season runs mid July to mid August.
In fall, you can stay in town and do day trips in tundra buggies or stay at one of the two tundra camps. Two companies offer package trips that range from three to 12 days and from about $1,740 to $5,140.
* Natural Habitat Adventures, 2945 Center Green Court, Boulder, CO 80301; toll-free 1-800-543-8917; www.nathab.com
In winter, stay at Wat'chee Lodge, a two-hour train ride south of Churchill. Temperatures this time of year can reach well below zero. Proper clothing is essential and can be rented from the lodge. The stay is $453 a day and covers lodging, meals and all activities, but no transportation.
Summer trips (mid July) are to Sila Lodge on Wager Bay, 500 miles north of Churchill, and run approximately $5,670 for the one-week stay, including air fare from Winnipeg. There's a main lodge plus five guest cabins, each with three bedrooms. Activities include trips by boat to see polar bears and hikes across the tundra.
For more information, contact Frontiers North (see above).
