From Polar Bear Science Posted on March 19, 2020 | On Tuesday 17 March 2020, several polar bears were reported in and around the community of St. Anthony on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, adding another threat on top of coronavirus concerns in the province. The photo below is from a 2018 Newfoundland sighting from…
From Polar Bear Science Posted on March 1, 2020 | Sea ice around Svalbard, Norway at the end of February 2020 is way above average, as the graph below shows – with more polar bear habitat now than there has been in two decades. Some comparison charts below show that the graph above includes some…
From Dr. Susan Crockford’s Polar Bear Science Posted on February 27, 2020 | Comments Off on State of the Polar Bear Report 2019: Are polar bear researchers hiding good news? International Polar Bear Day is a good day to ask: Are polar bear researchers hiding good news? Extended lags in publishing polar bear counts and…
Reposted from Dr. Susan Crockford’s Polar Bear Science Posted on February 24, 2020 | Google says many people ask this question so here is the correct answer: polar bears are not going extinct. If you have been told that, you have misunderstood or have been misinformed. Polar bears are well-distributed across their available habitat and…
From Polar Bear Science Worth watching if you haven’t seen it – and a second look if you have – a rare balanced documentary produced by the CBC in 2014 on polar bear conservation, with interviews with biologists Mitch Taylor and Andrew Derocher. “In The Politics of Polar Bears, Reg Sherren will pick his way…
From Dr. Susan Crockford’s Polar Bear Science Posted on February 14, 2020 | Comments Off on Polar bear habitat at mid-winter as extensive as 2013 & better than 2006 Arctic sea ice at the middle of winter (January-March) is a measure of what’s to come because winter ice is the set-up for early spring, the…
Reposted from Polar Bear Science Posted on January 12, 2020 | This aerial shot of six fat polar bears lolling around on a sand beach on the coast of the Southern Beaufort Sea, Alaska, was taken by NOAA employees in July 2019. It exemplifies the reality that bears in this subpopulation are currently abundant and…
From Polar Bear Science Posted on December 21, 2019 | This video tweet deserves a post of its own: two relatively inexperienced cubs-of-the-year in Russia deliberately break through thin ice, fall into the icy water and crawl back out – over and over again, for fun, as their mother watches in the background. Play is…
Reposted from Polar Bear Science Posted on December 7, 2019 | The media are so gullible. So eager are they for a sympathetic polar bear victim that news outlets everywhere carried a story earlier this week about a Russian polar bear that had ‘T-34’ spray-painted on its side. They took the word of Russian polar…
From Polar Bear Science Posted on December 5, 2019 | A scary-sounding headline from the BBC today screams “Ryrkaypiy: Far-north Russian village overrun by polar bears“. A little research would have shown (as I do below) that this sort of event is not unusual for this village, there is adequate sea ice off the coast…