A number of concerns were raised and addressed. It was important, it was agreed, that a new agreement contain nothing that contravened any wider, existing international treaty. The treaty would be open to signature and ratification only by the five Arctic states; accordingly, it would need a provision under which those five nations would be expected to pressure nonsignatory nations and nationals not to hunt polar bears on the sea ice that covered international waters. There would need to be exceptions: it should not, for example, be a violation of the treaty to kill a polar bear in self-defense. Most important, the agreement would need to include particular emphasis that it did not in any way affect the rights of indigenous peoples to conduct traditional subsistence hunts.
Even with those caveats, the International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears and Their Habitat, as signed in Oslo, Norway, in November 1973, clocks in at under a thousand words, almost half of which are concerned with organizational matters—who can ratify, when, and where. The most immediately relevant of them all were the first eight in Article I, which spell out with impressive clarity and brevity the agreement's singular mandate. Notwithstanding the negotiated exceptions—science, self-defense, traditional rights—the article effectively brought to an end the era of commercial polar bear hunting.
"The taking of polar bears," it stated unequivocally, "shall be prohibited."
Perhaps just as significant in the long term, however, was Article II, which instructed the signatories to "take appropriate action to protect the ecosystems of which polar bears are a part, with special attention to habitat components such as denning and feeding sites and migration patterns."
This provision, too, was enacted with great rapidity. The same year the agreement was signed, the same year that Norway placed a moratorium on polar bear hunting in Svalbard, Oslo also protected approximately 40 percent of the archipelago's landmass by royal decree. In 1976, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated the Northeast Svalbard Nature Reserve as a Biosphere Reserve, as a result of which most of the denning areas and important summer sanctuaries in the area are completely protected.
And so it continued. The Northeast Greenland National Park, 375,000 square miles in area, the largest national park in the world, was established in 1973, acknowledging traditional rights by allowing Inuit from neighboring settlements to hunt there, but protecting the objects of their attention by requiring that such excursions be confined to the distance a sled could travel in and out in the course of a day. In 1976, the Soviet Union designated Wrangel and Herald islands as State Reserves, off-limits to virtually all visitors.
The agreement, wrote Ian Stirling, represented the first time the five Arctic nations had worked together to negotiate an agreement on a circumpolar issue; and, he continued, there was "still no other polar subject upon which the circumpolar nations have come to mutual agreement."
Almost overnight, the nations in which polar bears live ceased to regard those bears solely as a menace to be shot on sight, or as targets to be aimed at for sport and profit. At a time marked by a growing global environmental ethic, they placed themselves at the forefront, both recognizing that polar bears' presence in their territories conferred upon them a responsibility and immediately choosing to exercise that responsibility.
The agreement's adoption and success are all the more remarkable for the fact that it is held together almost entirely by the will of the countries that signed it. There is no enforcement mechanism, no infrastructure to oversee compliance, nothing to compel adherence other than the collective will of the countries involved.
But even as direct pressures eased, as polar bears no longer needed to fear being pursued across ice floes by rich men looking to display their bravery in the form of a rug, * as mothers and cubs could curl up in the warm darkness of their dens safe from the attentions of bipedal predators, other threats emerged—invisible, insidious, and with a potential impact far greater even than a parade of aerial sharpshooters could ever hope to have.
It had been a long summer. Several months of heat and nothing to eat do not a contented polar bear make. He found, as in previous years, an earthen den, sunk deep into the permafrost by generations of polar bears before him; its shade lowered the temperature enough that it was not sweltering, and its shelter protected him from the insects that buzzed outside the entrance. But now there was a familiar feeling in the air, a crispness that heralded the return of the ice and of the seals that would replenish his depleted fat reserves. The snow was now thick on the ground, deep enough that he could roll in it, rub his snout in it, toss it over himself. Its coolness was refreshing and comforting. Its familiarity reminded him of the good days that its arrival had always heralded.
He had left the den behind him, was traveling along a path similar to the one he always used, following the trails and scents with which he was familiar. He was determined but his pace was measured; the ice would not freeze up any quicker if he hurried, and he had used up energy reserves over the summer without being able to acquire any more. Far better to take his time, even to stop now and then to roll over onto his back, close his eyes, and feel the comforting blanket envelop him.
He lay there for a while, his massive paws dangling in the air, projecting an image more akin to an oversize pet than a ravenous predator. But then, with a start, he opened his eyes.
That noise.
He had heard it before, several years ago, and even now he could not be entirely sure what exactly had happened. There had been a pursuit of some kind, a fogginess, a disturbed sleep, the feeling of waking up yet not being able to move.
It had begun with that same noise. Yes, that noise was familiar, and it was growing louder.
He rolled back onto his feet and began to run—not a flat-out gallop, but a loping stride, enough to carry him into the willows and out of the open.
The object was right above him now, its clattering sound growing louder and louder. A slightest of stings in his hip briefly caught his attention, but he continued onward. Suddenly, though, his legs felt heavy, his paws started to act as if they were trying to obstruct each other. He felt an overwhelming urge to sleep. The willows, so close, seemed as if they would never get any closer. He tried to churn his legs forward some more, but the snow seemed to grip his ankles and pull him down.
Then everything went black.
"The bigger adult males don't really care about the helicopters," says Jon Talon, a helicopter pilot who carries tourists and scientists in search of the polar bears of Hudson Bay. With tourists on board, he remains at a discreet distance, far enough away that the bears don't even notice his proximity; scientists he brings down to the bears' level, low enough to fire a sedating dart into the animals' flanks.
"They all have personalities, they all react differently, even the big adult males," he continues. "I had one of them try to jump up and grab the helicopter. We have adult males that we just fly up to, they just sit there, we put the dart in them, they go to sleep, an hour later it just sits up, and when we fly over there again it's still in the same spot, just hanging out. Other bears, they run as soon as they hear the helicopter. Obviously, we take precautionary measures; if there's a bear running and it's obviously very terrified of the helicopter, we're not going to chase it down and dart it. These guys, the researchers, they have thirty-five years' experience in the field, some of them. They know these animals."
Which is not to say that only those bears that sit passively are the ones to be darted; to do so would result in a wealth of data from the biggest, boldest, bravest males and an absence of information about the rest. Even if not exactly terrified, many bears—often, Talon notes, the ones that have been tagged before and that therefore associate the descending helicopter with some form of unpleasantness—will jog away and glance anxiously over their shoulders. After all, notes polar bear researcher Geoff York, "it's the closest thing to an alien abduction that you or I could imagine."
Once a bear is
spotted, its size is estimated and the appropriate amount of tranquilizer—Telazol: part Valium, part paralytic—calculated. If the bear does take flight, pilot and biologist seek to work it toward a spot that is relatively flat and as far as possible from water. Polar bears may be creatures of the ice, but it is to water that a frightened polar bear will instinctively flee, an outcome to be avoided at all costs when that bear is sedated.
The helicopter descends to about twelve feet—close enough that if a bear were so inclined, it could leap up and grab the skids—slides in behind its quarry, and angles slightly to the right, at which point the darter fires the shot and the aircraft moves off and waits for the drug to take effect. Depending on the size and condition of the bear, the drug can take as few as three or as many as twelve minutes to take effect. Once it does, the bear falls asleep, the helicopter lands, and the biologists get to work.
Time is short: although the bear will be to some extent incapacitated for as much as three hours, it will be immobile only for an hour or so, and it is during that period that the researchers must fulfill most of their tasks.
Priority one is to tag the bear, in four separate places: tattoos on the upper and lower lips and tags in the right and left ears. "Every bear gets four markings because you'd be surprised how many times we recapture a bear and can barely read its markings," York explains. "Polar bears live pretty tough lives; ear tags get chewed on by cubs, and in males they get damaged in fighting."
The bear is measured: its length, its girth, its paws, its weight. If it is the first time a bear has been captured and tagged, the researchers pull a tooth—always a vestigial premolar, a relic tooth that is no longer needed and many bear species no longer have. Back at the lab, the tooth will be cross-sectioned and dyed, unveiling a series of rings that, like those of a tree, reveal the animal's age. Blood and serum samples are examined for clues to the bear's health and diet and are kept in storage for tests that may in the future be deemed useful and have not yet been considered.
When measuring and bagging one bear, a team of two scientists—frequently enlisting the help of the pilot—takes about an hour to run through the checklist, watching all the time to be certain the subject isn't overheating or otherwise suffering. With multiple bears, such as a mother and cubs, the same process may take an hour and a half. When all is done, the researchers spray a number on the pelt: an advisory, until it disappears when the bear molts, that this individual has been captured and tagged already this season and should not be so again, and a caution flag to any Native hunters that it has been injected with a small amount of tranquilizer, which is often cause for them to allow it to pass by.
If the process seems intrusive, it is, for many polar bear biologists, the extent of their hands-on experience of the animals they study: a view from an aircraft, a tranquilizer dart, an hour or perhaps two measuring and weighing, and the opportunity, while on the ground or in the air, to infer behavior from clues—tracks here, a seal carcass there.
Facts and figures about how far and where polar bears roam are derived more from plotting GPS signals from radio collars than from direct observation. The inaccessibility and inhospitability of the polar bear environment, coupled with the sheer extent and unpredictability of an individual bear's movement, make prolonged observations in the field all but impossible.
"There are some places where you can do direct observations, but direct observations can only give you so much information, and they're only possible in certain very limited portions of the polar bear range," explains Steven Amstrup of USGS. "So, for example, by going out and staying out in a cabin where there are polar bears, and watching them, you can understand certain things about their behaviors and watching them. If you're lucky, like Ian [Stirling] was when he was watching polar bears feeding, he was able to watch them hunting seals; that's not possible most places. But even that only gives you a glimpse of certain aspects of the polar bear lifestyle. It doesn't tell you anything about population dynamics, for example.
"Almost all of what we know about polar bears we know from capture/recapture: flying out in helicopters, darting them, catching them, ear-tagging them, and then doing it again."
But, while the nature of polar bears may seem to preclude the emergence of an Arctic ursine Dian Fossey, there are a few locations where they congregate at the beginning and end of each season, locations where, for at least certain periods of the year, a dedicated biologist can base himself or herself, where he or she can watch and learn and develop an awareness of polar bear behavior that cannot be ascertained from any radio collar or tooth cross section.
On Wrangel Island, Nikita Ovsyanikov continues to this day the long-term study he began in 1990. And on the southern shore of Hudson Bay, for over forty years researchers have watched at Cape Churchill as polar bears gather en masse before heading out onto the newly frozen sea ice.
Wrangel Island is forbidding and remote; it took several days of grinding through thick sea ice for the Arctic Sunrise to reach its coast in 1998. Ten years later, a trip to Hudson Bay required nothing more onerous than a ticket to board a train.
That accessibility makes southern Hudson Bay and its environs unique. It is more than a location from which scientists can watch polar bears up close. It is the only place on Earth where, for several months a year, the worlds of polar bears and humans intersect, where tourists join locals for a glimpse of an animal they could not hope to see anywhere else. It is where a young polar bear is shaking off the effects of a tranquilizer as it heads toward the coast while, several hundred miles to the south, a train travels slowly through the night, rattling quietly northward.
Mature polar bears are mostly solitary.
Robert and Carolyn Buchanan/PolarBearsInternational.org
A polar bear mother and two cubs rest in the snow.
Robert and Carolyn Buchanan/PolarBearsInternational.org
Two young males spar in the snow near Canada's Hudson Bay. Although playful, such sparring can sometimes inflict bloody wounds.
Robert and Carolyn Buchanan/PolarBearsInternational.org
Cubs stick close by their mother's side for the first two years of their lives.
Robert and Carolyn Buchanan/PolarBearsInternationalorg
A polar bear's forepaws are massive - ideally suited to act as snowshoes, paddles in the water, and powerful weapons with which to strike seals. Kieran Mulvaney
Polar bears are perfectly at home in the water for short periods.
Nick Cobbing
A ringed seal about to surface at a breathing hole in the ice. The outlines of a net used by researchers to capture seals for tagging and measuring can just be seen at the hole's perimeter. Brendan P. Kelly
In Churchill, Manitoba, the "Polar Bear Capital of the World," residents and visitors alike are warned to keep their eyes open. Robert and Carolyn Buchanan/PolarBearsInternational.org
The Tundra Buggy Lodge near the town of Churchill, on the shores of Canada's Hudson Bay. Robert and Carolyn Buchanan/PolarBearsInternational.org
Close encounter: A polar bear investigates the occupants of a Tundra Buggy near Churchill. Dan Guravich/PolarBearsInternational.org
A skinny polar bear photographed off the Alaska coast. As sea ice melts and retreats, scientists predict polar bears will find it harder to feed and survive.
Kieran Mulvaney
Polar bears feeding at the town dump in Churchill. Since the dump was closed, instances of so-called problem bears have decreased dramatically.
Dan Guravich/PolarBearsInternational.org
A polar bear appears to stare at its own reflection in the water off the coast of Greenland. Nick Cobbing
Churchill
Time is necessarily elastic when one takes the train from Winnipeg to Churchill.
It isn't that the distance is especially immense: approximately 625 miles as the crow flies, somewhat longer when following the route of the railway, which veers first to the northwest and then northeast before ultimately turning due north.
But the ground, often boggy, is less than ideal terrain; it freezes and melts, stretching and sinking beneath the tracks, which twist and warp, ensuring that for long stretches the train can do little more than crawl.
Accordingly, a journey that by air takes but a couple of hours stretches into approximately two days by rail. Although an official timetable optimistically predicts arrivals at and departures from the various stops en route, it functions primarily as a guide to how far behind schedule the train is falling.
On such a voyage, the key to contentment is a surrender of control, an ability that does not come naturally to all and on this particular occasion seemed especially vexing for one passenger. He studied the Timetable of Questionable Accuracy with the kind of fervor normally reserved for the Torah, using it—and, perhaps, an unseen set of actuarial tables—to calculate and loudly pronounce, with each stop the train made en route, our average speed and likely time of arrival. Concerned over our glacial progress, he grilled a fellow passenger, a Churchill veteran, for keys to maximizing his time when eventually we reached our destination. How long would he need to set aside to be guaranteed a bear sighting? We were scheduled to arrive on a Saturday afternoon; if he had "done" the polar bears by the end of Sunday, what would be the best way for him to spend the remaining day before his departure?
The Great White Bear Page 15