Director Emiritus, PBI
What follows is a transcript of Downs' delightful narrative to accompany his slide show.
When I was in the third grade in Edgar Allen Poe School, back before the fall of Rome, Mrs. Black told the class about a strange people who dressed in furs and lived in snow houses way up in the Far North. It was electrifying. In Houston, Texas, we little kids had never even seen snow.
So, as a class project, we built little igloos out of cubes of Ivory soap. We made soapy polar bears and set them on sugar lump ice. Naturally, I was eager to look into this, and some 30 years later, I had a chance to see for myself. Now, after some 40 trips to the Arctic and Sub-Arctic, I can report to you that today’s Eskimos don’t really live in houses built of Ivory soap, or snow, either, for that matter.
But polar bears are there, sure enough, and they are without question the reigning lords of the Arctic.
The Polar North is the bear’s natural home. He, or in this case she, lives on all the frozen seas adjacent to Canada, the United States, Russia, Norway, and Denmark, all the way around the Circumpolar North.
Science calls the polar bear Ursus maritimus, which means the "sea bear." Nature designed him to prosper in a habitat far too severe for most forms of life. He is the world’s largest non-oceanic carnivore. If he has good luck hunting, a healthy old male can get his weight up to 2,000 pounds. Females usually run between 350 and 900 pounds, depending on their food supply. Obesity doesn’t worry them much.
The brown bear is his closest cousin. He’s big, to be sure, but the largest of them top out at around 1,000 pounds. And by the way, the Grizzly and the Kodiak and the Russian bears are all the same genus and species, all brown bears, all basically the same critter. Scientifically, the brown bear is Ursus arctos, the bear of the North.
Black bears are smaller still. Most weigh around 300 pounds or less, although a few do get heavier. One chubby old male, seen on his way to a fat farm, set a record at 759 pounds. His proper name is Ursus americanus, and he is the most common and widespread of North America’s bears.
The polar bear is not the Arctic’s only resident mammal, as you know. Paul Redington, who headed the U.S. Biological Survey in 1930, called muskoxen the “most truly Arctic of all the large mammals of North America.”
The Russian scientist Dr. Nikita Ovsyanikov, whose knowledge of polar bears is encyclopedic, still awards the title of “most truly Arctic” to the Arctic Fox, which he admires as the Polar Fox.
But you and I would probably vote for the polar bear as the quintessential king of Icebergia.
People really like polar bears. Among the charismatic mega-fauna, they rank at the top. Retailers say polar bear toys outsell all the other stuffed animals.
They are favorite subjects among artists. Their pictures appear on postage stamps.
Books and calendars feature them. At Christmas time, they show up on front lawns.
But polar bears haven’t always enjoyed such a good image. To some, they were Hannibal Lecter in a fur suit--sneaky and vicious. Inuit hunters with spears liked to tell everybody back in the igloo what a desperate battle they had with Nanuk. European hunters shot and killed polar bears on sight. Then they told everyone in the lecture hall what treacherous monsters they were.
When Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition disappeared, his mourners thought hungry polar bears might have eaten them, as this engraving from 1865 shows.
Our latterday cartoonists still have fun with that idea. Polar bears break into igloos and eat the inhabitants. And the more enterprising serve Eskimo thighs as a frozen treat.
Some even think that polar bears, endemic to the Arctic, eat penguins down in the Antarctic. It might happen, though. A penguin was recently captured in the North Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern Alaska.
Now I don't want to suggest that polar bears would make good house pets. I'd just as soon keep a great white shark in the bathtub. But over the past 50 years, we have learned a lot about these amazing animals that should help improve their image.
Let's begin with a look at the natural habitat of polar bears. Here's the Circumpolar Arctic. In the center, you'll see the vast permanent polar ice pack. In winter, this great sheet of ice covers an area of about 4.5 million square miles. That's an area considerably larger than all of Canada. In summer, it shrinks to less than half of that. But the ice cap doesn't just sit there like a beanie on the earth's skull. Currents in the Arctic Ocean move the ice cap clockwise in a big slow circle.
This phenomenon plays an important role in the lives of polar bears and other arctic wildlife. Movement of the ice breaks it up and creates open areas called "polynyas." Polynya is a Russian word meaning open water with ice around it. Where you find polynyas in the arctic, you find seals. Seals need open water to breathe.
Wherever you find seals, you will usually find hungry polar bears.
South of the permanent polar ice pack, lies the seasonal summer ice
pack. This is a vast rubble of broken ice that moves back and forth with winds and tides.
And still farther south, you come to places like Hudson Bay, which freezes in winter, but is ice-free in summer. All of these are polar bear habitats, and bears roam this ice year-round in search of seals. They are great travelers.
This map defines the primary polar bear habitats. The red dots show places where wandering polar bears have been reported outside their usual hunting territory.
As a rule of thumb, though, polar bears stay within one large hunting area, such as Hudson Bay. Here, they know the ice will melt in summer and they will ride ice floes into shore where they will spend a summer at the beach.
There are other places where you can see polar bears, but getting to them is difficult and expensive. Nowhere but Churchill, in Manitoba, Canada, on the shore of Hudson’s Bay, does the infrastructure exist to enable you to watch polar bears in large numbers and in such safety and comfort. If one day you should visit Churchill and board a Tundra Buggy to go see polar bears, here are some things to watch for and think about.
Check out the bear's size. A truly large male can stand on his big flat feet and touch something 15 feet up with his black nose. This mature male has his nose about 12 feet off the ground and is really curious about what’s in the Buggy.
Polar bears will eat anything. Here's one eating his way through a bed of kelp salad. But the true prey base of polar bears consists of ringed, bearded, and harp seals.
The bear's tapered muzzle and long neck lets him to stick his jaws into a seal's breathing hole to grab it and kill it for dinner.
Those huge hindquarters provide the heft the bear needs to haul his catch out of its hole and onto the ice.
Polar bears evolved to occupy an Arctic habitat. Take a look at the ears and tail. Both are small, so they won't freeze.
Notice their big square paws. The soles are protected from freezing by fringes of fur, and they have little suction cups for traction on ice.
The bear's four big feet distribute its weight so that each foot exerts less pressure on ice than does a man's foot. As big as he is, a bear can still walk over ice that would crack under your weight.
His claws are hook-shaped to help him keep his footing on slippery surfaces. They also make good lunch hooks for seals.
Polar bears possess what scientists call cryptic coloration. They are white, like their habitat. But for them, it is not a matter of concealing themselves from predators, as they have none but man. Rather, their color hides them from the seals they hunt on the ice floes. Underneath the white pelt, the skin is black, perhaps to conserve energy.
The outer guard hairs of their coats are three to five inches long and hollow. That doesn't mean the hairs are tubular, but they are filled with air bubbles. Nature's own Styrofoam.
Polar bears are great swimmers. They can dive and swim underwater. With their blubber and insulating coats, they float like corks. The toes of their front feet are slightly webbed, which makes them more efficient paddles.
When swimming, polar bears stroke with their fore feet and steer with their hind feet, just as seals do.
Bears communicate with various sounds and body postures. But if you see one roll his lip, like this, he is warning you that you are too close and he doesn't like it.
In summer, Hudson Bay bears get dirty from lying about on the shore. But they are fastidious. You'll see them scrubbing themselves clean. They have the same problem as we do with scrubbing those hard to reach places, like chins... Flanks... Backs... Toes...
Being carnivores, bears are curious. They are hard-wired to investigate anything they don't recognize, just in case it might be edible. As you sit in your vehicle, bears will come over to check you out. They want to know what you are, because you don't look like any seal they ever saw.
A bear may stand beside your window to look in and smell you. Don't be frightened. He is not a good vertical jumper. A standing bear can hop upward six inches at most. Don't try to pet him, though. He will want to taste you.
Bears can stand easily, and often do. They rise to watch other bears and to look for meals on seals.
When you have a bear close by, notice its wet black nose and its black or purple tongue. It uses both to smell and taste the air. In terms of survival, a bear’s sense of smell is its most valuable tool.
Look into its little brown eyes. Their eyesight is as good as yours, but we don't really know if they see colors, nor do we know if they have problems with snow blindness.
A bear's hearing is excellent as well, and sounds carry for miles over the ice. Some people think bears are closely related to swine. They are not, of course. But some people call male bears boars and female bears sows, which tends to perpetuate the mistake.
Once a bear has satisfied himself about you, he may just lie down by your vehicle and go to sleep. Or, if the day is windy and cold, he might stretch out behind a pressure ridge to conserve energy.
If it is really frigid, like 30 below with a 30-knot wind, he might dig a day bed in a snow drift. He'll tuck himself in and let the snow cover him like a blanket. In medieval times, a company of bears was called a sloth of bears, perhaps because they seldom get in a hurry.
If it’s a nice cold day, not too windy, and there's a patch of soft snow nearby, a male bear might find a friend and start a game of play fighting.
Males do most of the play fighting. It's a guy thing. A bear must know how to fight if he wants to become a father. Actually, it will take him eight to ten years to get big and heavy and perhaps frustrated enough to win in the mating wars.
Usually, a younger male will pair off with an older male so as to learn the moves from a veteran.
In the fall of the year, females with cubs will show up, all hungry.
Here's a map showing the important polar bear denning areas in the Circumpolar Arctic. Here in the Sub Arctic, cubs are usually born in December. Their mother brings them out in late March or early April when they are large enough to travel.
In the denning area south and east of Churchill, the female may dig a tunnel into the permafrost and let the snow cover the entrance, as shown in this engraving. Elsewhere, she might make her birth den by digging into a snow bank on the side of a hill. You're looking at the ventilation hole of a den site on Wrangel Island.
Here's what a polar bear birth den looks like from the inside.
If you make sure no one is home, you can crawl in and look around, as I did. I thought when I went in that it might be nasty, but the mother bear had kept it clean and neat. There was just a very faint odor of ammonia and just a little yellow snow.
Polar bear cubs of the year are called COYs, for short. The mother can have one cub or two or even four, depending on how she feels about it. But the usual number is two. If her fall hunting was poor and she lacks fat reserves, she may choose not to go through with it and just absorb the fetuses into her body. Human females could use this useful facility, I think.
Young bears of the Hudson Bay population usually stay with their mothers for two years. So you may see a mother with yearlings almost as big as she is.
Polar bear females make great mothers. They are just as nurturing and protective of their little ones as human moms. You may see a female with cubs drive off a male who has come too close. The mother knows that males sometimes kill cubs and she wants him out of there. Older, experienced mothers don’t tolerate males. She’s a third his size, but she doesn’t hesitate to take him on, and his brother, too. Her coy, on the upper right, is minding orders and staying close by.
If you are fortunate, you may get to see a mother nurse her cubs. She digs a hole in a snow bank and sits back into it. Then she calls her cubs to come nurse. They make little lapping noises and she purrs like a big house cat.
Young bears like games. They play king of the hill, hide and seek, and keep-away. This kid spent all morning digging a tunnel to China. These two subadults were playing seal tag. The one popping up through the hole is doing the seal role.
Chances are, you will see arctic foxes following bears around to pick up scraps bears overlook. Bears are too slow to catch arctic foxes, but that doesn't keep them from trying.
If you are wondering how to tell males from females, remember that sexual dimorphism is the rule, and males are much bigger and heavier. Males also have long penile hairs that grow down about where they ought to be so as to channel the bear's urine to the ground so he doesn't get his feet wet. That’s quite a useful feature, actually.
The female bear is smaller and sleeker and, of course, has no penile hairs. The area under her tail may be stained. Don't say anything to her about it. She is easily embarrassed.
Finally, let me mention that polar bears are "crepuscular" animals. That's scientific jargon meaning "of the twilight." For bears, it suggests that they are most active in the early dawn or the late evening. In this last picture, the crepuscular sun illuminates Cape Churchill's bears as they
await the return of winter.
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