Tag Archives: Tundra

Can we bear the suspense?

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Wednesday 28 September 2022 – The mood, as we got into the bus to go to the buggy to spend another day searching for polar bears, was a little muted; everyone was, I think, disappointed that the previous day’s searching, whilst it had shown us some wildlife, had been unsuccessful in its main objective.  Joe took us along a road where there was a possibility of seeing bears – indeed, there was a bear guard in evidence.

We passed the graveyard, which is really quite extensive (and the norm is three feet down rather than six feet, due to the permafrost)

and a site where there is extensive quarrying for stone to support the improvements being implemented to the railway leading to Churchill.

(The railway is one of only two ways to reach Churchill, the other being by air.  It currently takes 18 hours to reach the town by rail from where the road ends, at Thompson, 400k to the south, and the target is to halve that time, which requires a lot of current improvement and then maintenance work on the tracks.  The quarries in Churchill will be active for a while yet.)

All we got, though, was the by now customary opportunity for the more emotional among us to shriek with excitement at seeing some passing Belugas.

As we got to the buggy dock, one of our group, Theo, suggested that we exit the bus facing backwards, to leave the previous day’s bad luck on the bus.  For some strange reason, we all did this.

The buggy route, which of course is constrained by the network of available trails, was pretty much exactly as the day before – 26 miles in total.

I had got my gimbal working, so was able to record some better footage to give an idea of just how not smooth progress is.

However, the day perked up a bit when, just after 10am, one of the eagle-eyed people on the bus spotted a bear!

As you can see, it was quite a way away – my eyesight is not very good (it took Jane a few minutes of patient explanation to enable me to actually locate the bear in the surrounding landscape) and I am utterly impressed that Bob and Jason and Mark are quite so expert at seeing wildlife.  Zooming in, this is what I got out of the above.

Well, it’s identifiably a polar bear, at least.  It was doing what polar bears in the West Hudson Bay bear population do at this time of year, which is, well, not much, really.  The good times for them start when the ice freezes in Hudson Bay and they can get out on to it to catch and eat seals.  Unlike Grizzlies, which can subsist on berries and other such foods, polar bears really need the skin and blubber of seals to fatten up; they convert over 80% of such fat to their own adipose tissue.  Until the seals can be hunted, the bears are basically fasting.  Of course they’ll gorge on anything they can find, such as a Beluga carcass on the beach or some such, but basically they’re just waiting around for the freeze – and being careful not to expend too much energy.  So this bear did really not very much for quite a while.  On the other side of the buggy, we could just about make out a bald eagle, perched on a rock,

and there were some shore birds (Lesser Yellowlegs it seems) to keep us amused

whilst we waited to see what the bear did.  There was excitement when it stood up and walked a few paces

but then it lay down in the vegetation and basically disappeared from view.

We moved on, hoping to find more bears.  We passed the Frontiers North Lodge, by now expanded from yesterday and almost ready to receive guests

and we noted that the Tundra Swans had got a couple of other birds trying to get in on their act.

But, apart from a distant dot on some distant rocks which Bob declared to be a sleeping bear, that was it for the rest of the day on the buggy.  We got back to the dock just after 4pm having bagged just the one bear.  It was a lovely sunny day and the temperature was quite high – nearly 20°C, so there was some, erm, very scenic scenery. Jane caught this nice example of fall colours in the landscape.

At the buggy dock, Joe was on hand to take us back to town, on a route which took us past the rocket base that was once such an important part of Churchill’s military role.

It’s disused now, and the ugliest building – the concrete blast bunker – has, of course, been the recipient of a mural to try to pretty it up a bit.

As he drove us on a roundabout route towards the town, Joe actually spotted more bear!

At first, we thought it was a mother and a cub, but it turned out that there were actually two cubs with their mother, who seemingly just wanted a bit of peace and quiet but had to keep rounding up her boisterous cubs.

We watched them for a while and I recorded some video.

They’re quite a way away, but at least the bear quotient was rising.  Jason pointed out that visible on the other side of the bus was an arctic hare.

It’s a shame it didn’t move to give us a better look, but it was just resting in the shade – why would a sensible hare move under those circumstances?

The mother and cubs disappeared and Joe took the bus along a road which we hoped would take us a bit nearer.  I’m not sure he succeeded in that; but all of a sudden we saw yet another bear, quite a bit closer than the previous encounters.

The experts on the bus eventually came to the conclusion that this was a lone male, and he, like the others, was basically just mooching about.

I got some video of him, as well.

So by the time we got back to the hotel we were a much happier band of bear seekers. We were late for our appointed dinner slot, but since we were basically the only tour in town, I don’t think we inconvenienced people too much.  Had this been later in the season, with multiple tour groups going through the town, we would have had to have limited our time watching the bears, which would have been a shame.

After dinner, Jane went to a reportedly enjoyable presentation at the Parks Office (which, you’ll know because you’ve been paying attention, is housed in the Railway Station)

whilst I toiled away sorting through the vast number of substantially identical photos of bears in various places and combinations to decide what to include in this entry.  I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing and reading about the fruits of my labours and the group’s success in achieving the main objective of our visit to Churchill.

Our time here is almost over.  We have greatly enjoyed it, despite the initial disappointment of yesterday’s fruitless quest.  Things here are workmanlike rather than luxurious, but the hotel was comfortable, the food was good, hearty and well served, and the people we’ve met have been delightful.  There’s a real sense of community here, which has been a pleasure to see in action.

There are a couple of excursions organised for tomorrow before we leave Churchill to get back on our eastward journey and I will, of course write about them here.  Please keep in touch with these pages to see our final activities in this engaging place.

 

Tundra: birds are Go!

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Tuesday 27 September 2022 – The plan for the day was simple – get out on a Tundra Buggy and find polar bears. So, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and breakfasted, we got on the bus and Joe took us for a half-hour drive to the Buggy Dock

where number 15 was to be our chariot for the day.

We were a small group, so there was plenty of room to spread out in a nice warm cabin.

Our driver was “Buggy Bob”, a man of great experience in driving these great big things across terrain which is tricky, but not impossible; we would go along old tracks originally created by the military in the 1940s and not deviate from them in order to minimise disturbance to the local wildlife. This is Buggy Bob.

I reckon he looks a lot like Sean Connery in The Hunt For Red October, but Jane disagrees.

Anyhoo…

The ride in these great beasts is not the smoothest, as it’s over very rough terrain, including places where water has covered the trail.

I want to give you some idea of how ungentle the ride is, but unfortunately “buggy” also applied to the software for my stabilising gimbal which I use with my mobile phone. I couldn’t get the two to co-operate and so this is the best I could do under the circumstances. I will try to get you a better impression during tomorrow’s ride.

We covered about 25 miles in 6 hours, so progress is barely above walking pace. But it’s a good way of seeing the wildlife without the risk of attack from a disconcerted bear, and it’s warm (the temperature outside was about 4°C and the brisk wind was once again of the lazy variety, so it gets my vote).

The scenery is at times quite striking, with fall colours becoming more and more established.

We passed near the accommodation buggies of a tundra lodge offered by another tour company

and were near the Churchill River when an excited cry went up as someone spotted what might have been a Beluga Whale swimming along. So we stopped for a closer look. Many people were delighted to have seen these Belugas, but frankly I found it difficult to be greatly moved, as this was the scene.

The Belugas are the white flecks towards the middle of the picture. Even zoomed in, they don’t, to me, present a scene to get excited about.

There were apparently some Eider ducks to be seen, too.

If you zoom in, they are the little black dots just above where the waves are breaking.

There was more excitement as we saw bear footprints – an adult and a cub, apparently.

The next excitement was the sighting of a bald eagle.

Yes, there it is.

But then it flew away.

Jason, one of the tour leaders reckoned he saw a beaver.

It turned out to be a muskrat.

We passed a site where Frontiers North are establishing their own residential lodge in the midst of all this tundra.

This will be fully commissioned and operational within a couple of days to receive the first guests of this year’s Bear Season (basically October and November).

There was even more excitement as we saw a Tundra Swan – the second largest bird in North America behind the Trumpeter Swan, Mark tells us. In the end, we saw it was a family of two adults and four cygnets, who took one look at us and moved away, slowly and with dignity.

Mark diverted us for a while with an explanation of why these Spruce trees have grown the way they have – clumped together, bushy at the base and scraggy at the top.

The weather is the driver of this. Ice particles driven by the wind strip the upper branches back; snow covers the ground to a depth of two feet on average and stops this happening for the lower branches. The short growing season and the snow also prevents the normal conifer reproduction method of dropping cones with seeds in them. Instead, the branches grow round and back down to the ground and “sucker” new growth before themselves dying back. Apparently beneath the little “skirt” of branches the temperature can be up to 10°C warmer, helping the trees establish an underground network for spreading through the permafrost and providing a congenial microenvironment for small creatures.

We saw some snow geese. They heard us coming and flew away.

Later, we came across an unusual sight, which was a single snow goose, just wandering around seeking food.

Then someone saw a Ptarmigan.

Bob confirmed it as a Willow Ptarmigan. Excitement mounted as we saw there were several,

all with the distinctive cute feathery leggings.

The scenery continued to be striking at times.

In the photo above, you can see that the path leads in to water, and so we relied on Bob’s skill and experience to get us through safely.

And then it was 4pm and we were back at the Buggy Dock.

This was an opportunity for a group photo (to be published when I can get my hands on it). Notably, there was an armed Bear Guard on duty (shown here chatting to Bob) whilst we were outside the Buggy.

I can’t imagine why, because there weren’t any fucking bears anywhere around. To prove this, Joe took us on a drive round the back roads in the bus, past various locations such as the “golf balls”,

that once housed radar tracking technology for the rockets that were tested hereabouts, and the shipwreck,

the rotting remains of a ship called the Ithaca which ran into trouble in the 1950s when ice crushed the rudder into the propeller and has been abandoned there ever since.

But no bears.

I took a couple more pictures of the town of Churchill as we headed back to the hotel, which add to its strong identity as a frontier town.

But no bears.

And that was it for the day, for me at least. After dinner, Jane went to a talk given by a trapper, but I stayed behind to deal with the recalcitrant gimbal and to see what photographs could be rescued from a day which had, apart from the bird life, featured a bear minimum of activity. We go out in the buggy again tomorrow, with our fingers firmly crossed for the polar opposite of today’s searching. I hope you will come back to find out how we got on.

A Chur-chilly Reception

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Monday 26 September 2022 – Last night’s briefing was, erm, brief and gave us one or two important bits of information and a chance to get a sense of the group of 12 people (mostly Australian) of which we will be part for most of the rest of this week (and also whether my ridiculously heavy backpack would be acceptable on a forthcoming flight).  As I said in my last entry, we had to be ready to leave the hotel at 0700, having breakfasted and tagged our bags so that Frontiers North, the organisation which will be shepherding us along, know what to do with them at the far end.

We trailed into the airport and checked in to flight MO144, scheduled to depart at 0900.  I had been advised that the best photo opportunities from the flight would be if I sat on the right hand side at the front.  Since it was open seating, I made jolly damn’ sure I was first on the plane, and selected my seat accordingly.

Photos from the plane shortly after take off emphasised how flat the Winnipeg landscape is.

We flew alongside lake Winnipeg

and this was pretty much the last even halfway decent picture I got until much later, for two reasons.  One is that the visibility (already visibly worsening in the photo above) didn’t improve; the other is that the bright sunshine, normally so welcome when trying for aerial shots, threw a distinct shadow on to my window through the aeroplane’s propellers.  This meant that I had a strobe effect in operation which conflicted with the shutter in my camera such that I had unwanted horizontal bars across any images I tried to capture.  I suppose it was a lesson learned, but actually I had no way of knowing that this would be a problem.  I amused myself by taking a photo of the aeroplane safety card, which was in no fewer than three languages.

The next opportunities I had for aerial photos came as the plane was on final approach.

when it became clear that the light yellowish/green things you can see on the landscape were actually trees.

Since these appear to be conifers but are changing colour this autumn, one can infer that they are larches.

Despite the captain’s warnings of a bumpy landing, we hit the deck quite smoothly and were soon in the terminal, awaiting our bags.

Not that we’re paranoid or anything, but I noticed that my bag was one of the last to come through, and the carousel stopped the instant Jane took her bag off it.  No matter – we handed them over to Frontiers North for them to deal with and went out into the biting cold wind  to the bus which was to be one of our main transports for the next three days.  The tour leader, Mark, carried on his briefing as we headed for downtown Churchill,

and our hotel, the Tundra Inn.

We had lunch at the associated Tundra Pub

with further briefing from Mark (right) with input from Jason (left) and driver Joe.

Joe then drove us around the area, giving us a chance to see some of the highlights of the Churchill area: a large scale inukshuk – an Inuit construction with a variety of possible meanings (landmark, signpost, waymark etc);

a Beluga Boat which has never actually been used for its intended purpose of watching Beluga whales but which is used by the locals as a gathering point for e.g. picnics;

the Complex – a 1976 construction which provides most of the municipal needs for this remote community – school, medical and dental facilities, kids playground, that kind of thing; the now unused grain elevator, which used to be a significant source of employment but is no longer economically viable for a variety of reasons;

and occasional reminders that Churchill is in Polar Bear territory, and the community needs to take care (the pickups are part of the Polar Bear Alert Program).

Yes, we’ve come here to see polar bears, but we want to do it in a planned way, rather than through an ad hoc encounter.  We were warned not to stray far from the bus and, if necessitated by an unexpected polar bear encounter, drop everything and make for the protection of the bus.  Frankly, it was so cold (just a couple of degrees above freezing) that the likelihood of straying far was limited anyway, but it’s a sobering thought that one could just walk around a corner here and be confronted by a polar bear.

The Churchill landscape is tundra, an environment where tree growth is hindered by frigid temperatures and short growing seasons.

Can you guess which way the prevailing wind blows?  Today’s wind was one of those lazy winds that doesn’t bother to go round you; it just goes straight through.  That said, we have been lucky in the timing of our visit, in that the rather scrubby vegetation here is changing into its fall colours.

The orange of the plants is matched by the orange of the lichen on the rocks, making for a richly coloured, if rather low-level, landscape.

Churchill is a frontier town, and its buildings show this very clearly. This is the high street, for example;

and the side roads show also very plain levels of construction.

It cannot be reached by road. The only ways in are by air or by rail; this is the train station building

which also houses the Parks Canada Visitor Centre.  The town has done a lot of work to brighten what might otherwise have been a very dull and workmanlike appearance with artworks, some commissioned from recognised artists.   Some artistic touches are light;

many are striking;

and some are wonderful large-scale adaptations of buildings.  For example, the town has a Polar Bear Holding  Facility, where bears that wander into the town, or are injured or become a nuisance are trapped

(on the left above is an old-fashioned type of trap) and held in separate rooms in this facility,

one end of which has been gloriously decorated by an artist specially invited for the task.

Another large-scale artwork was wrought on the wreckage of a cargo aeroplane which took off from the airport, but got into difficulties; the pilot crashed it safely (all the crew survived)

and, again, an invited artist has used it as a canvas.  The suspicion is that it was overloaded, hence it being called “Miss Piggy” – Too Fat To Fly?

There are stores, which tend to stock a wide variety of goods, from food to construction machinery;

there are churches and a post office and occasional other artworks;

and the whole place exudes a strong sense of community.  Fewer than 900 people call Churchill their home, but it’s clear from the number who have lived here for years that the town can exert a strong attraction.

It is home to Polar Bears International, a non-profit organisation dedicated to polar bear conservation.  Outside their building is a Tundra Buggy

another one of which will be taking us out to view the area’s wildlife over the next days.  Our final act of the day (dinner excepted) was to visit, and we were treated to an interesting and educational session from Kieran MacIver on the bears, their environment and the threat from climate change

which incidentally gave us a chance to understand how big a fully-grown male polar bear actually is.

Today has been our introduction to the area.  Tomorrow, we hope for an introduction to its polar bears (two of our group did a special helicopter flight and reported back that they saw bears in the area, so the prospects look good).  Will we get to see the bears we have come so far to seek?  Watch this space!