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.