Dr. Susan Crockford
Nearly half of the tagged West Hudson polar bears are still out in the Hudson Bay ice, though much of that has been broken up: as of yesterday, 10 of the 22 bears are still out. sea.
This is supposed to be a great year for the bears in Hudson Bay!
There doesn’t seem to be any bears on the shore causing problems in Churchill, because Polar Bear Warning Program Weekly Report for Churchill has not yet begun. Last year, the first report was released for first week of julywhile in 2020, the first report was not published until the end of August.
Sea ice chart
On the first week of August 2022.
Weekly chart for August 1, 2022 by stage of development (i.e. thickness):
Daily graph for 4 Aug 2022 by concentration (below), North and South Hudson Bay (note all of this ice, as in the chart above, is first year ice >1.2m thick) :
Follow polar bears with a necklace
Based on Andrew Derocher (August 3), who installed trackers on these 22 bears:
Some polar bears in W. Hudson Bay roam the last sea ice. It was too cloudy to get a good picture of the ice but there was still a precious little bit left. Ashore August is a great year for the bears!
Note that the ice graph Derocher used shows only >50% ice concentrations, at this time of year inhabited by many species of polar bears. Some bears stay out on the ice for as long as possible while others at the same latitude reach shore much earlier: clearly, there is some aspect of personal preference regarding when bears decide to enter. shore and not all are based on some threshold of ice concentration set in ice as polar bear experts would have you believe.
Compare the charts above with Derocher’s chart below: bears that look like bears in the open water north and south of Churchill are actually bears tagged on highly concentrated sea ice low level (may be used by more untagged bears):
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