Dr. Susan Crockford
Virtually half of all tagged Western Hudson polar bears are nonetheless out on the ice of Hudson Bay, regardless that a lot of it’s damaged up in items: as of yesterday, 10 out of twenty-two bears have been nonetheless offshore.
That is shaping as much as be an incredible yr for Hudson Bay bears!
It additionally seems not one of the bears onshore are inflicting issues in Churchill, because the Polar Bear Alert Program weekly reviews for Churchill haven’t but begun. Final yr the primary report was issued for the first week of July, whereas in 2020 the primary report didn’t come out till the top of August.
Sea Ice Charts
For the primary week of August 2022.
Weekly chart for 1 August 2022 by stage of improvement (i.e. thickness):
Day by day charts for 4 August 2022 by focus (under), Northern and Southern Hudson Bay (observe all of this ice, as within the chart above, is first yr ice >1.2m thick):
Monitoring polar bears with collars
In response to Andrew Derocher (3 August), who put in the monitoring gadgets on these 22 bears:
Some W. Hudson Bay polar bears hanging out on the final sea ice. It’s been too cloudy to get an excellent ice picture however there’s valuable little left. August ashore is a good yr for the bears!
Notice that the ice charts Derocher makes use of present solely ice >50% focus, which at the moment of yr leaves out numerous polar bear habitat. Some bears are staying out on the ice so long as bodily potential whereas a couple of others on the similar latitude headed to shore a lot earlier: clearly, there’s some facet of particular person choice relating to when bears resolve to go ashore and isn’t all primarily based on some set-in-stone threshold of ice focus as polar bear specialists would have you ever consider.
Examine the charts above to Derocher’s chart under: what appears like bears on open water north and south of Churchill are literally tagged bears on low focus sea ice (which might be utilized by much more untagged bears):
Associated
