The bears of Churchill

March 17, 2006 | CHURCHILL, Manitoba -- One morning last fall, Claude Daudet drove out to check his snowmobile trails around Churchill, Manitoba, a tiny town on Hudson Bay's western edge, south of the Arctic Circle. He grimaced at the unfrozen ponds speckling the tundra. His one-man snowmobile tour company had just been forced to cancel its first group of the season for lack of snow. As we bounced along in his truck, the generally sanguine Daudet, 47, seemed sunk in worries. Among these burdens was Camus, his dead dog, which, at the insistence of his animal-lover girlfriend, was boxed in Daudet's freezer, awaiting cremation on their next trip to Winnipeg. Then there was his business, of course, the muddy terrain, the belated winter, the absent wind, climate change and so forth.

We got out at the small warming hut he'd built in the woods. He started pacing. Normally at this time of year, he'd be inside the hut, serving hot chocolate and homemade Nordic cookies, after leading a convoy of snowmobiling tourists across the frozen Churchill River on a day tour. He pointed to a jagged tear in the door made by certain furry uninvited guests. They have been turning up more frequently, increasingly desperate for something to eat. This is another worry. "We can no longer get insurance for polar bear break-ins," he said.

As climate change sets in, the Arctic is warming nearly twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Polar bears, which live and hunt year-round on the region's ice, are becoming stressed for food. A population of about 1,000 bears roams outside Churchill, slightly outnumbering the 900 people in town. In fall, one might be spotted picking through a dumpster outside Gypsy's Diner or lumbering over the rocks behind the Duke of Marlborough High School. "They eat baby geese by the bundle, like roses," a lifelong Churchillian told me, a man with two shotguns in his front seat and ammo ringing the headrest. "They step on you, and your head pops off."

It's tempting to think of climate change in terms of elusive numbers and future scenarios -- a spiking line graph of global temperature, a virtual glacier receding on a climatologist's computer screen. But the ravages of climate change are already being felt by people and communities. Northern towns like Churchill, dependent on one major resource for its economic survival, may be the most vulnerable. As the ice on the Hudson Bay disappears, biologists and climatologists predict the town's bears will soon be the first polar bear population wiped out by global warming. This is not welcome news in Churchill. The town's fate and that of the bears may be terribly intertwined.

"The bears are a big draw because they're an exotic animal," town counselor Mike Iwanowsky explained about the town's booming tourism industry. "They're a symbolic animal. You think of the North, you think of polar bears. You think of winter, you think of polar bears. They're, I don't know, 'chic.'" Iwanowsky, a brawny man with a daunting red goatee, was clearly not comfortable using the word.

After falling on hard times in the '70s, Churchill found a way to leverage the menace surrounding it into big business. More than 10,000 tourists now visit the self-made "Polar Bear Capital of the World" each fall. For six weeks, beginning in mid-October, when the bears amass near town, beat-up school buses cart visitors toward the tundra every morning and all the restaurants fill up at the end of the day. Hotels and shops sell embroidered fleeces and high-priced bear kitsch.

It is difficult and expensive to get to the town, and trips are booked far in advance, often through one big company that hauls tourists to see the bears in "tundra buggies"-- kind of like mobile ski lodges propped on monster truck tires. Small entrepreneurs like Daudet must make most of their annual income during the "bear season" when the tourists are flooding the town. If the climate doesn't cooperate, it can throw off the whole system.

Churchill, though, is habituated to hardship. It's lashed with wind off the bay in winter and battered with "bulldog flies" in summer -- bugs, a local paramedic says, that pluck out a slab of skin through your jeans. There are no roads out of town (you arrive from Winnipeg by train or plane) and only a single paved one running through it. "We're basically a big parking lot with houses on it," a trapper friend of Daudet's had told me. He said this affectionately.

Churchill's history, meanwhile, reads like a 400-year succession of miserable luck. The town has dwindled toward extinction in the past, but always managed to clamber back. Now, facing the near inevitability of yet another bottom dropping out, there's something about the residents that refuses to be cowed.

"The polar bear business goes through different phases," Daudet said on the drive back to town. "I think we're now going through another phase with the changing of the climate. People are figuring out we might not see these bears in 20 years, so we better go see them now." He had chosen -- out of instinct, out of necessity, out of sheer Churchillian-ness -- to focus on the opportunities.

Next page: Scientists' icy predictions, a tundra buggy tour, and unique notions of bear evolution