Goodbye Churchill

My favorite bear picture. They look so cuddly.  Hard to believe that she's viewing me as food.                        .

Goodbye Churchill. 

 This picture cannot convey how cold it was and the wind was blowing at 25 mph. Brrrr!

You need to dress warm!

Inutshuk are rock statues that come in all sizes and are still built.  They serve several purposes -they show that people were there and act as way markers.  They are also used as "additional people" and caribou are driven into a group of Inutshuk and rounded up against them with the Inutshuk acting like more hunters.  The Inutshuks also remind the natives that familiar spirits were there and offer them a spiritual comfort. 



St. Paul's Anglican church, circa 1890, in the town of Churchill at sunset which was about 4 PM.  Contains a beautiful stained  glass window that was a gift from the widow of Sir John Franklin, the famous arctic explorer as a thank you for the help of the people of Churchill in finding her husband--he was never found.  

Added March 2016--Sir John Franklin's ship was found by the  Canadian Government Sept 2014 after being missing for 160 years.   

Dog Sledding

We spent a morning at Gerald and Jennifer Azure's going for dog sled rides. The dogs are chained to their houses that you can see on the right in this picture.  When we got there the dogs were already tied up on a line to get ready for our rides.  They are jumping, barking and look so ill behaved until they are in harnass and then it's complete order. The dogs were placed one on either side of a line, 2 abreast and 4 rows back for a total of 8 dogs.  If an excited young dog doesn't stand still and behave himself, another older dog will snap at him. Younger dogs are harnassed close to older, experienced dogs to help "teach them the ropes"--wonder if that's where the saying came from?  If a dog accidentally got on the wrong side of the rope between the two dogs running abreast they have to learn how to get back over on their own side with the sled still moving. 
That's lesson #1 for the dogs.  The lead dog is in the first position and the musher calls their names and orders all throughout the ride.

 These are the new puppies that we saw 2 days ago.  One has his eyes open, the others are still closed.  Many of the people in the area don't vaccinate their dogs and parvo is a very worrisome disease.  We were not allowed to touch the dog in case we'd come in contact with any dogs in town that might be carrying the disease. 

 First they showed us how to sit in the sled.

 And off we go.  I was lucky in that I not only got to ride, but got to "mush".  I stood on the back and tried to control the dogs--no easy task!  They like to run and there is a brake bar behind the back of the sled between the runner that with all my weight on it, they could still pull me.  As you turn a corner, it's important to shift your weight to help the sled slide around the corner.  The afternoon group didn't get to mush because they said the morning group didn't do a very good job.  Well, it sure was fun and probably , I didn't do so good!!!

There are 2 breeds of dogs used for dog sledding. The Greenland Husky and the Eskimo  Sled Dog.  Some of their dogs are rescue dogs that are the husky or sled dog have been interbred with a completely inappropriate type of dog for the far north.  They have a greyhound mix and a border collie mix.  Both of these dogs can run faster and not overheat, but they don't have enough hair to keep them warm and they need to sleep inside when it's cold!

 Gerald, his brother Earnest in the orange pants, and two of our group

Sara mushing.

It was the perfect winter day with snow, cold temp and we were wrapped in caribou hides to keep warm.  FUN!

Some of these dogs will take part the Hudson Bay Quest a 210 km race from Churchill to Gillam, Manitoba.  (I notice that a woman from Kingston, WA, USA raced last year.)  The previous route from Churchill to Arviat was 240km along frozen Hudson Bay and proved to be too dangerous. There were several near fatal accidents.  The change of venue has eliminated some of the Inuit musher who usually won.  Instead of having their dogs in a line 2 wide and 4 deep, the Inuit dogs are fanned out  7-8 wide pulling the sled.  Hudson Bay is open water and there plenty of room for that but the newer route is in the trees and that configuration doesn't work.  So as a protest, some of the Inuit are boycotting the race.   

Some interesting information

If you want to read, watch or visit websites to learn more about polar bears and the arctic--

Good movie about the Inuit  "Snow Walker"

Watch the polar bears from a tundra buggy in real time at polarbearcam.com

polarbearsinternation.org

greatbear.org

ursusinternational.org

footprint.wwf.org.uk   (world wildlife foundation) you can calculate your carbon footprint

Interesting books about the arctic:
Polar Wives by Kari Herbert
Ada Blackjack by Jennifer Niven
On Thin Ice by Richard Ellis
Lady Franklin's Revenge by Ken McGoogan
Hudson's Bay Boy buy John Seagrave
Churchill on Hudson Bay by Mac Iver (don't remember first name)
People of the Deer, Never Cry Wolf, and Walk Well my Brother--all by Farley Mowat

 Don't know if we have access to this or not, but there is an Aboriginal People Television Network in Canada that has a show called "Fish out of Water".  It follows different native people in their everyday lives for a few episodes and Gerald Azure, the trapper turned dog sled person was featured in one of those series.

Polar Bear Whisker Study

We had lectures every night about polar bears, permafrost, climate variability, other bears,   but one of the most interesting was Dr. Jane Waterman of the University of Manitoba.  She is compiling the "whisker prints" of the Churchill polar bears into an identification library to be used and maintained by different scientist to study the individual polar bears.  The whiskers of the polar bears act like finger prints for humans and can help identify individual bears.  She think that there is only about 90 bears in the Churchill area that account for the sighting by tourists. This is the most studied group of polar bears in the world since it is also the easiest to get to.  Dr. Waterman asked us to bring side view--left and right--of bears to a workshop the next day.  Also front views and whole body views of the same bears.  Most of the males have facial scars that are distinctive like this bear.  Females only breed every 3 years so there is stiff competition for the males and there are lots of fights during mating season.

 Some have ear tags, males are almost twice as big as females and any other unique characteristics were noted.  We named the bears we saw on Day 1 in the tundra buggy with alphabetical names of candies, so the first days bears had names  Aero, Bounty, Caramac, Dimebar, Eclipse, Fudge, Gummie, Humbug, Icebreaker, Jujube, Kitkat, and Lemon Drop.  Day 2 we came up with a list of insect names but since we only saw one bear close enough to study, she was named Ant.  Below is one of the polar bears that was entered into the data base.  Anchor points are marked at his eye, bottom of the nose and end of his mouth.  The computer will triangulate that whisker area and feed the information into an image pattern recognition software developed by one of Jane's grad students to identify the bear. 

 

 

There is a website that is open to anyone who is interested or wants to contribute a polar bear photo--even bears in zoos are welcome!  It's polarbearlibrary.org

I "Eskimo" a derogatory term?

The Eskimo  Museum in Churchill documents the history of the paleo-eskimos who came to Canada and Alaska in the second world warming wave about 4000 years ago.  The museum contains many small archaeological finds--these people were nomads--so what they carried with them was small and served a purpose except for a few items that probably belonged to shamans.

1400-1600 was the little ice age when the world got colder and the native peoples started moving again and gravitated to new European  whaling stations.  In the early 1900s missionaries came to the north and in addition to giving the natives a written language, Inuktitut, they started to commission art that was used as trade and showed the outside world a snapshot of Eskimo daily life.  The director of the museum and staff do not consider the word eskimo as anything other than the broad category of natives that live in the arctic including the Cree, Inuit and in Alaska , the Aleuts.  Others don't agree. Other people including a University of Manitoba professor disagrees  and told me that the word, "Eskimo" means eaters of raw flesh and is demeaning.  Inuit means "the people", so good luck figuring what is politically correct. I think historically the Eskimos were subjected to racism like all indigenous people and it might be very empowering for them to chose the name that they want to be called.

Interestingly, the Inuit and Aleuts do eat some fish and meat raw, and the Cree do not.

Polar Bears migrate out of town to hunt on the ice.

The ice is forming quickly on Hudson Bay.  Two days ago, we had "grease ice" and solid ice around the water's edge.  A vast area of land drains into Hudson Bay, including northern Quebec and Ontario, all of Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan, southern Alberta and a portion of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, in addition to parts of the northern United States.  All this fresh water draining into Hudson Bay freezes before the salt water of the Bay so the grease ice actually looks similar to a slushee with the frozen fresh water floating on top.  Well, it dropped to -37 C for a day and Hudson Bay froze solid--or at least it appears solid.  We watched a couple polar bears walk out on the ice to test it.  They both spread their 4 legs out very wide to disperse their weight and carefully walked out a bit to test if the ice would hold them!  They would slowly put one paw down, sniff the ice, wait a bit, move another paw, same, same until they'd proceed out on the ice a short distance.  Both times, they walked back to the shore, so guess the ice wasn't ready to hold them. This time of year the ice will freeze, thaw, refreeze until "the Freeze" and everyone suspects this is the Freeze and the ice on Hudson Bay will stay frozen solid with a few cracks until next summer.  Pack ice in the middle (chunks of ice that have been driven together into a single mass) and fast ice (ice that is attached to the shore) in the rest of the bay.  The ice is still subjected to tidal action a couple times a day.  The ice is not smooth--in fact, it looks like a frozen wave in the process of coming in.  

Our second day out in the Tundra Buggy was very different from the first when we saw lots of bears close to the shore.  The ice froze in that short amount of time and today we saw at least 10 bears out on the ice and there was a red stain by a bear.  Our guide said it was  probably a ringed seal and the bears are back to hunting!  That's great news for the bears.  They haven't eaten since mid July and I'm sure they're hungry. They are too far out to have that up close, personal feel of 2 days ago.  Can't believe how lucky I am to get to experience both scenarios!

But we did have a close encounter with one 3-4 year old female.  We started watching her as she was eating kelp and then rolling in the kelp.  We'd seen this behavior several times.  The bears prepare their digestive system to start working again after fasting all summer by eating kelp, which is thought to have some nutritional value, but mostly it gives them diarrhea and prepares them to start eating again.   The bears seem to be very curious animals and I was constantly surprised how they would walk up to us seemingly unafraid,  and like other bears, she walked right up to the tundra buggy.  She must have found us very interesting and to everyone's surprise, she actually jumped up on the tundra buggy for a closer look.  I am surrounded by a fortune in cameras and lenses, but those mega lenses can't take photos up close like my "point and shoot" camera with minimal telephoto capacity.  The bear got within 2 feet of me, so guess who got some of the best photos of the bear?  Me!  These pictures were taken with no telephoto.  The first two pictures of the bear, named Ant, was taken with my telephoto, but he others are not.

 

 

 

 

One of my trip mates gave me a video or the entire episode of the bear coming up to the tundra buggy, checking us out and then jumping on the back to get a closer view, and then walking away.  It is an adrenaline rush and I was so excited.  It made up for only seeing one bear up close today!

I always thought of the tundra as cold and desolate, but there are all kinds of animals.  Some are really hard to see like this arctic hare.

  And others, like this silver fox, really stand out.  Our guide said this is the first silver fox he has seen in 16 years of research in the arctic. 

The one thing we didn't see was an arctic fox.  They are known for following the polar bears out onto the ice and eating after the polar bears have had their fill of seals.  They cannot get wet like the bears, so they need to get off the ice prior to breakup.  They are also different from the polar bears in that they have a varied diet of eggs, geese, ptarmigans, lemmings and they will do much better with the warming climate since they don't just depend on eating one thing like the polar bears.  Woodland Park Zoo has an "Adopt an Arctic Fox Program"  so guess I can walk a couple blocks and see arctic foxes!  Interesting fact about them is that they have the largest litters of all carnivores and can have up to 25 pups.

A Metis Dog Musher

We spent an evening in the tent of Gerald and Jennifer Azure.  He is a Metis, half Cree Indian and half French, and one of 10 kids that grew up in a small town in rural Manitoba, sounds like lots of alcohol problems in his family and they made their living by running trap lines with their dog teams.  When snowmobiles made it easier to manage the trap lines, his parents had more time to drink in town and left the kids at the cabins out on the trap lines.  As trapping came to an end, Gerald says, "our life fell out from underneath us".   He has evolved from that to running the most successful B&B in Churchill called Bluesky Bed and Sled and he's kept his dog team and offers tourist dog sled rides and is the co-founder of The Hudson Bay Quest, an Iditarod type dog sled race from Churchill to Quillan south of here.  He starred in a segment of a reality TV show on the Aboriginal People's Television Network called "Fish out of Water".  He was featured in a human interest story during the Canadian winter Olympics about Isabel, one of lead dogs who is blind.  Two of their lead sled dogs were in the tent with us for the evening, and Jennifer brought in two of their 5 day old puppies snuggled in leather and fur gloves.

Gerard told us really almost unbelievable tales of his dog sled races and life on the trap lines, but his love for sled dogs and the problems these dogs face was his main focus.

Several of their dogs are rescue dogs who have been abandoned, mistreated, some has been interbred with other breeds like greyhound and border collie so that the dog can run faster and not overheat, but they don't have enough hair to withstand the cold nights and they need to sleep inside!  Most of his team are Greenland Husky or Eskimo sled dogs and they are compact dog that are smaller than most people's labs.  Names of his dogs included Ultra, Sound, Yahoo, Google, Pepsi, Coffee in addition to the more traditional Buck and Chinook.  Tomorrow, we go for a sled dog ride with Gerald.

One last note on the Hudson Bay Quest.  It was originally a 240 mile ride from Churchill to Arviat hugging the coast of Hudson's Bay.  Lots of storms and the ice moves twice a day with the tides.  It became so dangerous and several mushers and dogs were almost killed, so now the route has been moved from Gillam to Churchill.  Gillam is 210 miles due south so the route is now through the trees.   

All good sled dogs come back as ravens." 

Where I'm staying

The town of Churchill has been inhabited by indigenous people for about 6000 years.  It is the traditional meeting place of three existing tribes: the Cree, Dene and Inuit.  French trappers came in the 1500-1600 and married Eskimo women and created a new culture called the Metis who are still alive and well in this area.   Charles I of England gave his nephew, Prince Rupert all the land that drained into Hudson's and James Bay.  That was an enormous amount of land--1/3 of N. America.  Next came Hudson Bay Company that dominated the area for the next 300 years with the fur trade.  The Hudson's Bay train arrived in 1927 and linked Churchill and the small towns south to Winnipeg and the rest of Canada. During WWII, American created Fort Churchill to aid the war effort in Europe and 5600 people lived here  .  Then in 1950s, Fort Churchill was continued to flourish with a population of 7000 working on rocket research, cold weather training and exercises for the military, and refueling for B52 during the cold war.  200 scientist worked on atmospheric testing.  In 1970, the American closed the base and left.  Even though many of the military building were demolished close to the actual base, the airport and D20, a double Quonset hut --know as the polar bear jail --remain.  There are still lots of scattered buildings from the military era and it's just too expensive to removed them currently. Some like around where we are continue to be used and some are just abandoned.  The permanent population of town is about 800 with another 200 as seasonal workers and port employees.  Most of the seasonal influx is now for 6 weeks to see the polar bears, 6-7 weeks in the summer to see Beluga whales and less so in Feb/March is experience the Northern Lights on cold, clear nights.  This is Churchill-

 

 Left over military structures- below are 2 that are part of the Center where we are staying.

 Churchill Northern Studies Centre was established in 1976 by members of the local Churchill community, university researchers and the government of Canada.  It remains independent with no university or organizational affiliation.  It's a non-profit whose mandate is to facilitate research and education of the Western Hudson Bay. There is a full time research staff that assists investigators in locating and selecting field sites and help collect data and maintain equipment on a contract basis.  For a daily fee, researchers get room and board, airport/train transfers, lab space and internet. We are not allowed to go out of the building, so I just have the front of the building on my way to the bus!

We took a tour today of the new facility that was opened in 2011 and is where we are staying.  It sits adjacent to the repurposed building left over from the missile site that was used since 1976.  The 18 million price tag created a gold star green building that houses a cafeteria, classrooms, laboratories, reference collections, wireless internet--remember we're at the end of the world--There is a 360 degree aurora viewing dome upstairs that is good for watching storms in addition to the northern lights.  Since we can't go outside to see bears--or anything else, there is an observation platform on the second floor.  Fitness room, media center with lots of movies, a library, recreation room, quiet room, computers for use by anyone, and a gift shop.  Our rooms are 4 person dorm rooms.  A bit tight, but I haven't spent much time in the room.

Apparently this is a researcher's paradise.  Churchill has a unique location between the arctic tundra and the northern boreal forest.  There is fresh water from the Churchill River flowing into Hudson Bay and Northern Canada's only deep water seaport and  during the ice-free months of the year, it's an important link between the wheat fields of Western Canada and markets in Europe.  It is also an area with a 6000 year history and an excellent, but small Eskimo Museum with artifacts starting with the pre-Dorset people dating from 3000 BCE to the historic Eskimo cultures dating to the 17th century.