For photographer Susan Portnoy, the opportunity to shoot polar bears—with her camera, of course—was an experience not to be missed. And so, lens at the ready, she ventured into Manitoba’s Hudson Bay.
My fingers have gone numb. Again.
I pull my mittens over my gloves and wait for the familiar prickly sensation that means my digits have started to thaw. At minus 34 degrees Celsius—and that’s without wind chill—the metal on my camera has become an adversary, and I can’t photograph too long without a break.
Radio Bear however, sporting heavy fur and several inches of fat, is content to lie on the ice. Tucking her nose into the bend of her elbow, she curls herself into a fetal position and closes her eyes. She may be the world’s largest land carnivore, but she looks more like a slumbering house cat than a polar bear.
There are also ptarmigan and Arctic hares. The hares are larger than their southern counterparts with longer back legs and are perfectly camouflaged—I rarely see them unless they move. I’ve come to think of them as the clowns of the tundra, little slapstick characters that roll in the snow and hop in every direction on their goofy oversized feet.
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Wolves are less common, though one evening we hear a pack howling like something from a Dracula flick. Following their cries, we find a lone caribou standing on the crest of a hill. “Where there’s caribou, there’s wolves,” says Rob, grinning. The howling stops as we reach a lake and in the sapphire light of the blue hour, we spy a wolf racing across the ice. Then another, and another. We only see them for a few seconds before they vanished into the night, but I am downright giddy.
She’s in front of me now, about 20 meters ahead. My heart is pounding, but until Andy says otherwise, I’m clicking away on my camera. He grabs two rocks to bang together, another tactic in an escalating strategy to warn her off. Some 30 feet away, she stops, sniffs the air then walks away to my right. We watch gobsmacked as she crashes through a clump of willows and disappears.
As the last glimpse of her disappears from view, I’m reminded that these incredible creatures, as a whole, are in jeopardy. According to Polar Bears International, the rise in global warming has been responsible for a 30 per cent reduction in Arctic sea ice since 1979. As a result, PBI says, “scientists predict that as the Arctic continues to warm, two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could disappear within this century.” They could be extinct by 2100.
While Hudson Bay polar bear populations seem to be stable at the moment, thousands of miles north in Baffin Bay, the South Beaufort Sea and Kane Basin, bear numbers are in decline.
