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All Polar Bears Articles
A new polar bear conservation centre at the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg puts the heat on Manitoba to do more about climate change, according to a polar bear biologist of 14 years.
Call them Canada's billion dollar bears. While it's no secret that polar bears have captured Canadians' hearts, they've apparently got us by the purse strings, too. Canadians would be willing to pay $6.3 billion per year - $508 per household - to ensure the polar bears do not disappear, according to a report commissioned by Environment Canada.
The majestic but vulnerable polar bear has been declared a "species of special concern" under Canada's Species at Risk Act.
Only one of three newborn polar bears was still clinging to life in the intensive-care unit of the Toronto Zoo on Thursday, after his two siblings succumbed to injuries inflicted by their mother.
Zoo workers are struggling to keep the tiny cub alive, born prematurely on Tuesday and then rejected by its mother, 10-year-old Aurora.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement is investigating after a guard at BP's Endicott oil field apparently mortally wounded a polar bear by shooting it with a pyrotechnic shotgun shell in a hazing incident.
BP spokesman Steve Rinehart said Wednesday that the security guard, who works for the contractor Purcell Security, was hazing an aggressive polar bear on the night of Aug. 3 in an attempt to stop it from moving toward a housing unit at the North Slope oil field. He said the guard believed he was firing a non-lethal bean bag round from his 12-gauge shotgun.
We have an odd relationship with polar bears.
As we watch them pace inside their zoo enclosures, or marvel at their portrayal within natural history documentaries, we are drawn to their big paws, fluffy white fur and button-like black noses. We find polar bear cubs adorable.
A Churchill woman and her two young children came face-to-face with a polar bear Friday morning.
"I just held up my bags and started screaming," Gloria McDonald, 39, said of her encounter with the polar bear outside the community health centre.
McDonald said a friend had driven her to the health centre where she was dropping off her children -- Aurora, 4, and Adam, 2 -- at a daycare.
Black bears are undeniably a part of the Whistler scene and are beloved by locals and tourists alike. Unfortunately, they're also the source of frustration for some, most notably the conservation officers who are forced to deal with the animals when the get into conflict with humans.
Most of the time these conflicts are not the fault of the animal but rather people who were careless in how they went about securing potential bear attractants such as garbage and bird feeders.
Edmonton scientist Ian Stirling's new book on polar bears wasn't even in bookstores this summer when a venerable American wildlife magazine posted a gushing review.
"A delight to view and to read," wrote biologist Sterling Miller, who noted in his National Wildlife review that he's long benefited from similarities in their names.
Describing Stirling as the "Godfather" of polar bear science, Miller couldn't say enough good things about the book and about Stirling.
It was seen as one of the most distressing effects of climate change ever recorded: polar bears dying of exhaustion after being stranded between melting patches of Arctic sea ice.
But now the government scientist who first warned of the threat to polar bears in a warming Arctic has been suspended and his work put under official investigation for possible scientific misconduct.
Charles Monnett, a wildlife biologist, oversaw much of the scientific work for the government agency that has been examining drilling in the Arctic. He managed about $50m (£30.5m) in research projects.
Arctic sea ice is at a record low this month, according to the University of Washington Polar Science Center. Sea ice volume is 47 per cent lower than it was in 1979, when researchers started collecting satellite records.
Because their ice habitat is shrinking away from land, polar bears have been forced to find food by either staying on shore or swimming vast distances to find sea ice.
Canada is set to include the polar bear on its list of species at risk, but not as a threatened or endangered species.
The federal government gave notice this month that it intends to list the Arctic animal as a species of special concern - one level below threatened and two levels below endangered - under the Species at Risk Act.
The move would require a plan to be devised within three years to prevent the species from becoming endangered or threatened.
A bit about polar bears and how to be safe in polar bear country.
Dr. Ian Stirling, the best known polar bear scientist in the world, compresses the major new discoveries of the last 40 years of research on this iconic Arctic mammal into a major new, easily readable, and scientifically comprehensive book about the ecology and natural history of polar bears. In an accessible non-technical style, he explains how polar bears evolved, how researchers study them, aspects of their behavior, how they prey and live on various marine mammals for their very survival, how the seals and bears have evolved in response to each other, and how, specifically, they have come to threatened by climate warming. In a separate chapter, he explains why the polar bears in Hudson Bay have become so important to our understanding of the species, how Churchill became "The Polar Bear Capital of the World".
A polar bear and her cub emerged from hibernation on a remote Alaskan island, to find an oil company construction site over their snowy den.
Workers on the new site for Italian oil firm Eni saw the bears on 18 March on Spy Island, a man-made island in the Beaufort Sea, north of Prudhoe Bay.
An international treaty will set the first-ever limit on the number of polar bears Natives in Northwest Alaska can harvest while also legalizing polar bear hunting in Russia for the first time in decades.
Details are still being worked out, but the Russia-U.S. commission governed by the treaty agreed last spring to let Native subsistence hunters in each country take 29 bears, for a total of 58, from the Alaska-Chukotka polar bear population.
The book follows the PBS TV crew as they travel more than 4,000 miles around Alaska, and it details the hardships and challenges that come with filming a nature documentary. Packed with gorgeous color photographs of bears in their natural habitats, Bears of the Last Frontier is a keepsake for anyone interested in wildlife conservation.
The two grizzly-polar bear hybrids discovered in Canada's North in recent years may be the tip of the iceberg, warn a trio of U.S. scientists who say the bears are a sign that Arctic biodiversity is at risk.
Pointing to other Arctic hybrids – an apparent bowhead-right whale photographed in the Bering Sea in 2009, a suspected narwhal-beluga found west of Greenland in the late 1980s, as well as various confirmed hybrid porpoises and seals – they argue governments must manage hybrids before interbreeding leads to the extinction of rare species.
Scientists say polar bear moms and their cubs near Churchill in northern Manitoba are suffering the worst effects of a late freeze-up of sea ice on Hudson Bay.
The bears are just now setting out for the sea ice they use as a hunting platform for seals, said University of Alberta researcher Andrew Derocher.
That’s weeks later than usual — and comes on top of an early spring thaw that drove the bears off their hunting ground nearly a month sooner than usual.
This document presents a synopsis of the presentations and discussions at the Third International Bear/Human Conflict and Polar Bear Focus Day. Topics include bear behavior, bear/human conflict updates, bear management, people management, attractant management, education and training, deterrent and detection tools, community‐based programs, and risk and liability.
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