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By John L. Eliot | Photographs by Norbert Rosing
Global
warming has shortened the ice season in the Arctic, and the white bears
of Canada's Wapusk National Park are feeling the heat.
Excerpt from National Geographic Magazine 
The
bears start to move in October, when longer nights chill Hudson Bay and
snow starts to fly. Along the stony western shore, they head north over
the salt marsh toward Cape Churchill. Hunting season is about to begin,
after a four-month fast since the annual ice breakup in July. Almost
all summer the bears have been in "walking hibernation," sleeping in
dens and occasionally wandering through a vast boggy lowland called
Wapusk National Park, living mainly off their fat reserves.
But
soon shoreline ice will form. By walking north, the bears know they
will find it and their staple prey?ringed seals?faster. In November
when the ice usually thickens enough to walk on, hundreds of male bears
and nonpregnant females roam far from shore, scanning and sniffing
breathing holes of unwary seals. About 200 pregnant females remain
behind, for Wapusk offers them excellent nurseries.
"More
than half of Wapusk is peat bog, and some of the peat is 12 feet
thick," says Cam Elliott, superintendent of Wapusk. "It's perfect for
polar bear maternity dens. Females have dug more than 1,200 in the
area, one of the largest concentrations in the world."
Land and
ice are bound together for the polar bears of Wapusk, "white bear" in
the Cree language. But the 4,431-square-mile (11,476-square-kilometer)
park (nearly the size of Yellowstone and Yosemite combined) also holds
plenty of other species. "It is the ecotone, the transition zone,
between the boreal forest and the open tundra," says Andrew Derocher, a
University of Alberta biologist who studies polar bears. "There are few
places where polar bears, black bears, the occasional grizzly bear,
moose, caribou, red fox, arctic fox, beluga whales offshore, and others
overlap. The biological diversity of the area is huge." Almost 200 bird
species breed here, or migrate through, including boreal owls, hawk
owls, snowy owls, gyrfalcons, and peregrine falcons?a bonanza for bird
lovers.
Yet visitors to the area, more than 15,000 a year, stay
west of Wapusk, in or near the town of Churchill. Fewer than a hundred
visitors a year have come to Wapusk since it was created in 1996,
partly for the protection of the bears and their denning habitat. "The
two areas are right next to each other, yet they're so different they
might be two separate countries," says Elliott.
Simply put:
The Churchill area, which lies along a bend of the coast running west
from Cape Churchill, is underlain by bedrock near the surface, which
makes it much firmer than Wapusk to the south (where the bedrock is
deeper). So the Churchill area is terra firma, easier to walk on, drive
on, even build a town on (they did). Since the retreat of the last
continental glacier some 8,000 years ago, the land has been springing
upward. This is some of the youngest land in Canada?and some of the
soggiest. There are thousands of lakes and ponds in Wapusk. Bog, bog,
bog. There is peat bog, or muskeg, dangerous if you take a misstep and
fall into a muskeg hole. All of this is seasoned with an enormous and
aggressive population of biting invertebrates.
Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.
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Thursday, 09 February 2012
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