Susan Crockford
Last December, researchers vigorously promoted a possible 27% decline in Western Hudson Bay (WH) polar bear abundance but kept hidden the fact that adjacent Southern Hudson Bay (SH) numbers increased by 30% over the same period.
And surprise, surprise: the bombshell SH results call into question everything the ‘experts’ have been saying about polar bears in Hudson Bay for years.
I finally got a copy of the 2021 WH survey report from the Nunavut government, which was reported on by the media around the world in December 2022. The Nunavut government also sent along a copy of the 2021 SH report (helpfully asking, “would you also like the SH report?”), published at virtually the same time. The existence of a SH report was never mentioned by any of the media articles in December, even though it was referenced several times in the WH report, which suggests reporters never actually saw the WH report but were simply given a press release with approved talking points.
WH Report
The WH 2011 population estimate was 949 (range 618-1280), the 2016 estimate was 842 (range 562-1121), and 2021 estimate was 618 (range 385-852). The media must have been given the 27% figure representing the drop between 2016 and 2021 in a press release, because that figure isn’t mentioned in the WH report.
According to Andrew Derocher, of the University of Alberta, regarding the WH population, “The actual decline is a lot larger than I would have expected.” [CBC News, 23 December 2022]
I’ll say. However, the apparent decline from 2016 to 2021 was not statistically significant and neither was the decline between 2011 and 2021: the authors state this explicitly on pg. 29 of the WH report.
Oddly, that’s not the impression the press seems to have been given considering phrases used in their headlines, such as “population plummets,” “polar bears vanishing,” “polar bears…in sharp decline,” and “polar bears disappearing fast.”
The WH report authors state that abundance of adult male bears remained unchanged over the three sampling periods but that a decline in abundance of adult females and subadult bears (especially in the area around Churchill) seems to have driven an apparent decline in overall numbers. A suggestion was made that perhaps some Churchill-area females and subadults had simply relocated a bit north or south but the authors shot that notion down.
Although, the estimated abundance of adult female and subadult bears in Area 2 [i.e. around Churchill] decreased significantly between the 2011 and 2021 surveys, concurrent increases of these types of bears in Areas 1 (Cape Tatnum) [to the south] or 3 (Nunavut) [to the north] of WH were not found (Table 13). [WH report, Atkinson et al. 2022, pg. 32]
So, the missing females and subadults didn’t move a bit north or south, but did they perhaps move further south, into Southern Hudson Bay?
Notably, between 2016 and 2021, the estimated abundance of SH increased by 223 bears while that of WH decreased by 224 (Northrup et al. 2022). Changes in both subpopulations, at least between 2016 and 2021, could therefore be accounted for by movement of WH bears into SH. [WH report, Atkinson et al. 2022, pg. 24, my bold]
However, the WH report reveals that results of an unpublished SH biopsy study led by graduate student David McGeachy found 22% of bears formerly sampled in WH were found in SH in 2021 but these were predominantly adult males, not the “missing” adult females from WH. This means that a large movement of WH females and subadults into SH in 2021 cannot explain the simultaneous abundance decline in WH and increase in SH.
Our findings that adult female and subadult abundance has declined while adult male abundance has remained unchanged are thus inconsistent with a range-shift hypothesis. [WH report, Atkinson et al. 2022, pg. 33, my bold]
The authors suggest the apparent WH population decline was “consistent” with predictions of adverse effect of climate change on polar bear health and survival, yet provided no sea ice data for the relevant period. However, observations by others (including the authors of the SH report) indicate the decline couldn’t have been caused by poor sea ice conditions over the last five years because WH ice from 2017-2020 was better than it had been for decades.
In short, the authors of the WH report were unable to explain why there was an apparent decline in abundance between 2011 and 2021, except that several hundred adult females and subadults seemed to have disappeared from the central WH area around Churchill. The authors seemed unsure that an actual decline had taken place at all, given the uncharacteristically tenuous language used to describe their results:
Estimates derived for the WH subpopulation indicated a possible decline in total bear abundance between 2011 and 2021. [WH report, Atkinson et al. 2022, pg. 29, my bold]
SH Report
SH numbers went from 943 bears in 2012 (range 658-1350) to 780 in 2016 (range 590-1029) to up to a whopping 1119 in 2021 (range 860-1454), an increase of 30% over five years (see pgs. 29 and 42). Oddly, the authors don’t mention if this is a statistically significant increase or not, but it seems likely it is.
The report authors initially claim that it is “highly implausible” that an increase of this magnitude could be due to natural increases in birth rate or reduced mortality alone over such a short time period (pg. 29). However, their data also indicated that 35% of all SH bears they counted were yearlings or cubs-of-the-year (more than found in WH in 2021) and the authors finally concluded that a natural increase in numbers did happen in conjunction with good sea ice conditions from 2017 to 2020 (pg. 31), perhaps in conjunction with immigration of some bears from another subpopulation that they couldn’t verify.
Reconciling the Reports
The authors of both reports were left sputtering to explain their results. A loss of hundreds of WH adult females and subadults between 2016 and 2021 is not consistent with the prevailing hypothesis that lack of sea ice drives long-term declines in polar bear abundance in WH because sea ice conditions from 2017 to 2020 were better than they had been in decades (only 2021 was not as good). And besides, SH had similar sea ice conditions over the same period and polar bear numbers there increased, as shown in a copy of Figure 22 from the WH report, below.
Questions remain. Such as, if 22% of bears sampled with biopsy darts in SH in 2021 were males from WH, why didn’t the WH survey register this as a loss of adult males? That’s a real conundrum.
More importantly, what did happen to the hundreds of adult females and subadults between 2016 and 2021? Did they die of starvation for some unknown reason unrelated to summer sea ice conditions or did they go somewhere else? Is it possible for a population to grow by 30% in only five years? Are the population estimates the researchers have generated simply way off? The scientists can’t say.
Although at least one of the media articles from December 2022 suggested that a nebulous lack of ringed seals might be responsible for the apparent decline of WH bears, the WH report contains no mention of a possible dearth of ringed seals as a causal factor.
Oddly, there is also no mention of Foxe Basin (FB) to the north as a possible destination for the missing WH females and subadults. Foxe Basin bears haven’t be been surveyed since 2010 but at that time were doing very well with an estimated population size of 2580 (Stapleton et al. 2012). Who knows what’s happened since but FB bears mix with WH and SH bears on the ice of Hudson Bay over the winter and sea ice generally persists in Foxe Basin well into August, which means Foxe Basin might be a suitable refuge area for WH females and young bears looking for more predictable sea ice conditions, just as Franz Josef Land is for some Svalbard area bears.
Overall, the results of these two studies reveal that polar bear specialists have no idea what’s actually going on with Hudson Bay bears. Without sea ice to blame, they’ve got nothing. They simply can’t explain their results.
Polar bears may be dying for unknown reasons unrelated to summer sea ice in one region and reproducing like crazy next door, or they’re moving undetected between subpopulation boundaries. And if polar bears are indeed moving between Hudson Bay subpopulation boundaries, they are not acting like the discrete units required for management decision-making and reputable scientific research, and that’s a big problem for everyone.
No wonder polar bear specialists didn’t want the press to get wind of the SH report.
References
Atkinson, S.N., Boulanger, J., Campbell, M., Trim, V. Ware, J., and Roberto-Charron, A. 2022. 2021 Aerial survey of the Western Hudson Bay polar bear subpopulation. Final report to the Government of Nunavut, 16 November 2022. pdf here.
Northrup, J.M., Howe, E., Lunn, N., Middel, K., Obbard, M.E., Ross, T., Szor, G., Walton, L., and Ware, J. 2022. Southern Hudson Bay polar bear subpopulation aerial survey report. Final report to Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, 29 November 2022, pdf here.
Stapleton, S., Peacock, E., Garshelis, D., and Atkinson, S. 2012. Foxe Basin polar bear aerial survey, 2009 and 2010, final report. Nunavut Wildlife Research Trust, Government of Nunavut, Igloolik. Available online, Pdf here.
You would think Polar Bears are fairly hard to conceal.
Winter, yes. They evolved their white coats from ancestral brown bears for a spring/fall polar Arctic seal hunting reason.
Summer no.Their white coats stand out against green/brown boreal/tundra brush while the then feeding brown bears (salmon, berries, young reindeer) don’t. Easy and safe to count polies in summer/fall. They are all on land then.
Maybe we should send these so-called journalists and scientific bumblers to travel on-site to count them personally. Perhaps some snow-shoes would assist their travels and endeavors. 🙂
The reports look like artifacts of the survey process.
Agreed. When the surveyors treat each region as a discrete, self-contained area and the Polar Bears don’t then the surveyors will be left scratching their heads. It’s not like the Polar Bears can see the boundaries or even care about them.
I am reminded about the female polar bear that swam to Greenland and back just for fun.
Or the, again female, Polar Bear that went for a wander in Russia and ended up 675 miles away from the Arctic overland.
When the West Hudson range is from:
2011: (range 618-1280)
2016: (range 562-1121)
2021: range 385-852)
it would be quite within the statistics to say the the numbers went up from 618 in 2011 to 852 in 2021. That doesn’t support the climate change fraud, though. So we won’t.
You’d need to cross-check that with fish and seal populations in the area – chances are that the Polar Bears follow the food or the easier access to food.
Dr. Susan, the world owes you a huge debt for your tireless fight for the truth regarding these magnificent mammals.
My very best to you and yours,
w.
Agreed.
However, Dr. Susan is showing that science has been warped by the need to get the “correct” result rather than the true one. And we assume that this is true of the polar bear questions because polar bears are symbols of wildlife charities, pretty and associated with Climate Change.
My concern is that this may be a coincidence.
The science may have been warped by a need to publish.
Admitting that you do not know is the start of real science but the end of a career in academic sciences.
How many other fields desperately need a Dr Susan Crockford?
Most of them. Physics seems slightly less corrupt but then the climate zealotry doesn’t go in for anything with difficult maths involved.
Thank you Willis, and everyone else, for your tireless support of the work that I do. This latest incident is yet another embarrassment to science that needs calling out if we are ever to get back to some measure of integrity. There are things about polar bears that would be useful to know that are being ignored in the pursuit of the forced narrative.
We should expect that numbers like this would be either downplayed or concealed outright. If the alarmists reported all the details and facts that countered their rhetoric, they’d lose what little credibility they currently have.
Who knew polar bears could move around Hudson Bay at will? Just about everybody who lives there. Of course, the report researchers don’t.
Yet another false report perpetuating a false Arctic narrative by the usual polar bear alarm suspects.
Thank goodness skeptics have Dr. Susan Crockford watching over polar bears.
So it seems the overall population has “barely” changed at all.
It’s gone up rapidly from when they were being hunted but is this the point where the bear and food populations are stable – ie the amount of fish supports this amount of seals which, in turn can support this amount of bears?
A separate broadening comment.
Polar bears are but one species supposedly threatened by ‘AGW’. Others include Antarctic Adélie penguins, western North American pikas, and the eastern North America ‘red wolf’ (which is a coywolf, coyote/grey wolf hybrid, not even a species). In each case the underlying biology/ecology is deliberately mis-stated by climate alarmists. Seems to be a repeating pattern of environmental alarm deceit.
Also, they’re too far away for most people to actually go and see for themselves. As if inner-city urbanites would even dare to go see real nature.
Each day, thousands of people drive by western North American pikas on I-90 east of the summit at Snoqualmie Pass. The rock fill required for construction of such a road is considerable. Those places make great habitat for the round eared critters. Our tax dollars at work building Pica habitat.
Adélie Penguins will not nest on ice, and preferentially choose areas where wind or the angle of the sun (or both) helps to keep snow drifts from accumulating. With those requirements a bit of warming should help them when nesting. They can remain on land to moult, although some move to ice flows. Food is Krill, small fish, and squid amongst other things, which means open water, diet varies from location to location .
Can’t see why they should be threatened by AGW, Competition with man for food quite possibly but that’s not directly a result of climate, anti-farming climate policies quite possibly
Twenty-first century journalism in a nutshell.
A “scientist”, saying what you want to hear, is never wrong.
Many of these polar bear counts are stated with confidence intervals of plus or minus 50%, in round figures; is this acceptable in this field? How is a 27% change in number regarded when the confidence interval exceeds that assumed change?
This is not my field, but gold/silver/lead/zinc/copper is. Ask any geologist that comments here how long they would last in their position if they gave their client or company an estimate of an orebody/oil horizon grade ‘plus or minus 50%’ in a report that was supposed to lead to any decision making.
Obviously there is much I do not understand about acceptable accuracy in wildlife counting.
It’s out of my field too- but I’d presume it’s very difficult to get accurage wildlife counts. That’s OK as long as they don’t offer strong conclusions and suggestions to policy makers.
Well that sounds a lot like so-called “climate science” – the supposed amount of warming is smaller than the always omitted error range of unfit-for-purpose temperature ‘measurements.’
It is difficult to do wildlife counts, especially in the Arctic where conditions are not great. The populations are not counted directly but they use a ‘representative sampling’ method – they’ll pick a few areas, fly over them and count the bears then extrapolate that for the whole region. As you can imagine, unless you are very, very good at picking your sample areas, you’re going to miss the detail, hence the large error range.
I certainly understand all that, having walked through and flown over my share of wilderness in mineral exploration and geologic mapping. It seems very unwise to be drawing any kind of scientific conclusions, or making decisions, from numbers with that much uncertainty. Thanks to Dr. Crawford for once again pointing out the foolishness and folly.
“… what did happen to the hundreds of adult females and subadults between 2016 and 2021?”
The majority of them are now identifying as males.
I think they got smart and hid from the people with sharp sticks.
omg !!! Don’t tell me we have to add PB to the many list of genders !
One of the sub-adults got into a fight so they all decided to go live with their cousins away from West Phil. sorry, West Hudson Bay.
You know, if the researchers were really looking hard for polar bears, flying all over the place and making lots of noise, I wonder if the bears wouldn’t just wander off to somewhere quieter until the fools left?
The researchers and journalists are liars and cheats, I don’t care what they say I won’t believe them.
“The WH 2011 population estimate was 949 (range 618-1280), the 2016 estimate was 842 (range 562-1121), and 2021 estimate was 618 (range 385-852). The media must have been given the 27% figure representing the drop between 2016 and 2021 in a press release, because that figure isn’t mentioned in the WH report.”
Alternative perhaps the media is capable of doing simple arithmetic. (842-618)/842*100 =26.6% getting rounded up to 27%. It is not a difficult calculation even for the BBC.
Really? The media? You think they are actually capable of extrapolating from data? Maybe 20 years ago but not now – now they merely regurgitate what they are told, practically verbatim. Frankly if that’s your only nit-pick in a story of scientific researchers and media colluding to hide unwelcome data then the world truly is in trouble, but not from madey-uppy climate change scare stories.
Taking a percentage of a rough guess?
Looking at the ranges:
2011: (range 618-1280)
2016: (range 562-1121)
2021: range 385-852)
It seems that the actual number could be any value between 618 and 852 (a wide range, in itself), and be UNCHANGED through the ENTIRE eleven year period. Is there something to be concerned about? Not with these numbers.
Polar Bear Jail was established in the early 1980s. This is not a fun place and the bears are not fed.
Word gets around when disincentives are imposed on a population.
Would you stick around? Me neither, and believe it or not, that nice map with the 2-letter codes – – – bears don’t read maps.
To be fair it is only for the time when they would find it difficult to find a meal anyway, so not too much extra hardship. But it is more likely that a population will move to where a more stable or long-term food supply is available and, in other species, that move is often made by the females, with young if necessary. Incentives rather than disincentives I think.
The problem is obvious. The scientists made the mistake of assuming the polar bears gender in the first study, and since then, many of the bears have chosen to change gender. Shame on these scientists for gender profiling these poor animals.
Thanks for this.
And if that opening picture isn’t photoshopped then those are two of the healthiest bears I’ve ever seen
I’m no expert but I’ve been watching live feeds from Hudson Bay for years and there doesn’t appear to be any problem with them. More rubbish being talked although the tide is turning at last.
Allen, can you post a link to the webcams?
Yooper and others,
The land-based cams have been offline this year because the tower they were mounted on had to be replaced. I don’t know if they will be up and running at all this year.
However, the Tundra Buggy cams go live Thursday 19 October. If nothings going on in the live feed, check out the comments where obscessive viewers post screencaps of action of interest (but also clouds and sunsets). See https://explore.org/livecams/polar-bears/polar-bear-cam
Those are very, very healthy look bears in the above photo- assuming it’s a real photo- hard to tell nowadays. It’s sure a contrast from the photos the propagandists show- of some very old, sickly, dying bear- as if bears don’t also get old, sickly and die, just like us. How about some photos in a nursing home and pretend that’s the condition of the human race?
Heads I win, tails you lose! That’s the way this cherry picking works with the warmunists and their ignorant handmaidens in the media. Context? Nah, that’s only a denier’s fraudulent tactic that must be ignored.
If they’re not simultaneously counting ALL of the Polar Bear “populations” then they don’t have a clue whether the total population is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same.
They might as well count the citizens of one state of the US and extrapolate a “trend” in US population from that. 🙄
If you couldn’t rely on US citizens filling in the forms, but had to round each and every house and physically count each person living there then you’d do it this way too!
Cherry picked data and false assumptions define the fraudsters media promotes. The decline in W Hudson bay was widely reported as evidence of a climate trend toward extinction ignoring the healthy numbers in all other areas.