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Polar Bears Are Thriving

Jack Hays said:
Ten fat polar bears filmed raiding a stalled Russian garbage truck
Posted on October 20, 2020 | Comments Offon Ten fat polar bears filmed raiding a stalled Russian garbage truck
From the Siberian Times today (20 October) is a story with few facts but a fabulous video of six fat adults and four fat cubs as they set siege to a stalled open garbage truck in the Russian Arctic. It may have been filmed on Novaya Zemlya but that has not been confirmed.

Of course, Novaya Zemlya has had previous problems with bears habituated to garbage, most famously an extended incident in 2019 that was perversely blamed on climate change.
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Alternate headline-

“Polar Bears so desperate for food they are raiding garbage trucks”
 
Threegoofs said:
Alternate headline-

“Polar Bears so desperate for food they are raiding garbage trucks”
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I suspect Polar bears see a garbage truck as a hard candy shell with a soft chewy filling!
 
Jack Hays said:
Hmmm. Pretty fat to be "desperate for food." Just sayin'.
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Winter is coming.

If you understood Polar Bears, you’d know that they need to fatten up for winter.

But you dont, because you read Susan Crockfords blog, and she isnt an expert on polar bears.
 
Threegoofs said:
Winter is coming.

If you understood Polar Bears, you’d know that they need to fatten up for winter.

But you dont, because you read Susan Crockfords blog, and she isnt an expert on polar bears.
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Crockford did see a polar bear at the zoo once
 
Polar bear research on hold in Western Hudson Bay due to COVID-19 restrictions
Posted on October 23, 2020 | Comments Offon Polar bear research on hold in Western Hudson Bay due to COVID-19 restrictions
After spring polar bear research was cancelled in Western Hudson Bay (and pretty much everywhere else) this year because of Covid 19 concerns, it now transpires that fall research is out as well. Travel restrictions implemented by government departments and university administrations (not the health department) apparently mean fall programs to assess the health and status of polar bears in Western Hudson Bay have been put on hold.

Triplet litter of polar bear cubs spotted in Wakusp National Park, Western Hudson Bay. 23 October 2020. Courtesy Explore.org.
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Jack Hays said:
The same crowd whose earlier predictions Crockford debunked, now trying to revive their reputations by pushing extinction off to 2100.
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Crockford??? Now now we all know she is a paid hack that cant get thru peer review
 
vegas giants said:
Crockford??? Now now we all know she is a paid hack that cant get thru peer review
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Peer review in her field is controlled by the people she embarrassed with her research results. The paper you linked is, as I said, their attempt to revive their reputations.
 
Jack Hays said:
Peer review in her field is controlled by the people she embarrassed with her research results. The paper you linked is, as I said, their attempt to revive their reputations.
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Oh looky you have an opinion. That's quite amusing
 
Looks like an especially good year for the bears.

Western & Southern Hudson Bay polar bears experience earliest freeze-up in decades
Posted on November 3, 2020 | Comments Offon Western & Southern Hudson Bay polar bears experience earliest freeze-up in decades
This is shaping up to be one of the shortest ice-free seasons in at least 20 years for both Western and Southern Hudson Bay polar bears.

Hudson Bay sea ice at 2 November 2020. NSIDC Masie chart.
Last week, sea ice started forming along the shore of Hudson Bay, from the north end all the way south into James Bay. So far, the shorefast ice that’s forming is only a narrow strip along the coast but is thickening and becoming broader each day, which means that unless something changes dramatically, the bears should all be on the ice at the end of the week, an exodus from shore that hasn’t happened this early in WH since 1993 (the earliest since 1979).
The last WH tagged polar bear didn’t leave the ice this year until 21 August, which means if it’s on the ice by the end of this week it will have spent only 11 weeks onshore – less than 3 months. Even the first bears that came ashore in mid-July will have only spent about 16 weeks on land – at least a month less than they did a decade ago (Stirling and Derocher 2012). Four months spent ashore was the historical average for Western Hudson Bay bears in the 1970s and 1980s (Stirling et al. 1977, 1999). This year, most polar bears will have spent only about 13-14 weeks on land because they did not come ashore until early August.
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Shorefast ice formation and the fall feeding season for polar bears
Posted on November 11, 2020 | Comments Offon Shorefast ice formation and the fall feeding season for polar bears

What may seem like a silly question is actually fundamental to polar bear survival: in the fall, why do Western Hudson Bay bears correctly expect to find seals in the new ice that forms offshore? Why are seals attracted to that new ice – called ‘shorefast ice’ or ‘fast ice’ – when they would clearly be safer out in the open water where there is no ice and no bears?
As the picture below attests, polar bears can and do kill ringed seals in the new ice that forms off the coast of Western Hudson Bay even when it is but a narrow strip of thin ice – and so close to shore their successes can be caught on camera.

Three adult male polar bears share a seal kill on the newly-formed ice off Wapusk National Park, Western Hudson Bay. 5 November 2020. Buggy cam, Explore.org
A different bear was also filmed killing another seal on 31 October. And these are only the kills we know about along a very short stretch of coast – the killing is almost certainly going on up and down the entire coast, into James Bay (see below), where there is just as much ice but no cameras.

As far as I am aware, this seal killing by polar bears goes on in newly-formed shorefast ice everywhere across the Arctic in early fall, not just in Hudson Bay. Although the timing varies, virtually everywhere in the peripheral seas of the Arctic Ocean (Barents, Kara, Laptev, Chukchi, Beaufort, as well as Baffin Bay and Davis Strait), shorefast ice forms before the mobile ice pack expands to meet the ice developing from shore.

This shorefast ice formation in fall provides a predictable but short-lived source of prey for polar bears as they strive to regain some of the weight lost over the summer.
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The bears are having a good year.
Strange sea ice pattern over Hudson Bay as winds blow polar bears offshore
Posted on November 16, 2020 | Comments Offon Strange sea ice pattern over Hudson Bay as winds blow polar bears offshore
Winds blew a huge mass of new shorefast sea ice way out into Western Hudson Bay a few days ago (13 November) and very likely took some polar bears with it. This offshore wind phenomenon is common at this time of year – it happened in 2017 – and is often part of the yearly ‘freeze-up’ process for sea ice. But the extent of ice and the distance blown offshore in Hudson Bay this year is impressive.

In previous years, this has happened very early in the freeze-up sequence, well before the ice was thick enough to support polar bears. This year is different: freeze-up was early (starting in late October) and the ice was thick enough off Western Hudson Bay to support bears hunting successfully for seals by the last day of October. By 7 November, most bears had left for the ice, with only a few stragglers left behind – since they were all in good condition due to a late breakup of the ice this summer, there were remarkably few problem with bears in Churchill and some seemed in no hurry to leave once the shorefast ice started to form.
It’s doubtful that any bears out on that wind-blown ice are in any kind of peril. As long as the ice is thick enough to support their weight, they should be fine – and keeping themselves busy catching seals.
The chart above is from NSIDC Masie for 15 November 2020 (Day 320) – it showed the same large offshore patch of ice the day before. . . .
 
The growing bear population, documented.

Good news: Gulf of Boothia and M’Clintock Channel polar bear survey results
Posted on November 17, 2020 | Comments Offon Good news: Gulf of Boothia and M’Clintock Channel polar bear survey results
Final reports for two Canadian subpopulations reveal the number of polar bears in M’Clintock Channel has more than doubled since 2000 while Gulf of Boothia as remained about the same despite moderate declines in summer sea ice cover. All of the survey results were published online yesterday (16 November 2020) and I was alerted to the posting this morning via email by a Nunavut employee.
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With Arctic sea ice in a spiraling decline—2020 was recently declared the second-lowest ice year in the satellite record—it’s an axiom of climate change that polar bears are in peril. But until now, scientists have been unable to pinpoint when and where populations of this charismatic marine mammal will begin to collapse. A novel model combining projections of future sea ice loss by region with calculations of the maximum number of ice-free days polar bears can withstand now gives a timeline for one of the most familiar symbols of global warming.

The outlook is grim. If our greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current high rate, dwindling sea ice will cause nearly all of the 19 polar bear (Ursus maritimus) subpopulations ringing the Arctic to collapse this century, the study, published this summer in Nature Climate Change, predicts.
 
vegas giants said:
With Arctic sea ice in a spiraling decline—2020 was recently declared the second-lowest ice year in the satellite record—it’s an axiom of climate change that polar bears are in peril. But until now, scientists have been unable to pinpoint when and where populations of this charismatic marine mammal will begin to collapse. A novel model combining projections of future sea ice loss by region with calculations of the maximum number of ice-free days polar bears can withstand now gives a timeline for one of the most familiar symbols of global warming.

The outlook is grim. If our greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current high rate, dwindling sea ice will cause nearly all of the 19 polar bear (Ursus maritimus) subpopulations ringing the Arctic to collapse this century, the study, published this summer in Nature Climate Change, predicts.
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Proven wrong before and will be proven wrong again.
 
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