Originally from Alaska, Drew Hamilton started in the bear viewing business in the late 1990s, working with brown bears at the north end of the Alaska Peninsula. By 2014, he was spending time in Churchill, Manitoba each fall, guiding visitors who come to see the polar bear migration; while continuing to work with brown bears in the summer. Eventually the allure of Churchill won out, and Drew and family moved there full time in 2021.
What drew you to bear guiding?
For me, the guiding business is really a way to recapture those moments of wonder that I felt when I first started watching bears by sharing those experiences with other people. It's also a way to give something back to the bears because, when done properly, bear viewing is an important avenue for conservation.
You and your family made the leap from Alaska to Churchill. What influenced that decision?
Churchill is incredibly important in the bear tourism world because it represents the most accessible population of polar bears for many people — and potential bear viewers become potential conservationists. In my mind, ecotourism represents one of the rare places where economy and ecology overlap. The bear viewing industry in Churchill makes it valuable to have a healthy population of wild bears that are accessible from town, and that creates an incentive for people to find ways to coexist.
How do you ensure that your work supports conservation efforts?
Ecotourism is a double-edged sword. The benefits can be cancelled out by overcrowding or irresponsible human behavior. At Discover Churchill Tours, we try to be aware of the impact we have on the land and on the animals, and we operate in ways that help mitigate those impacts. During peak polar bear season, for example, we reduce the number of vehicles we have on the trail network to help fight against overcrowding.
There is no single textbook for living alongside polar bears, and as Churchill continues to navigate life with our ursine neighbors, Polar Bears International has been an exceptional partner through its support of research, community development, and collaboration that we see in action everyday.
Having a community partner like Polar Bears International helps ensure our decisions are informed by the best available science while encouraging conversations between researchers, guides, communities, and visitors.
We're always looking for ways to improve our relationship with the bears, and one area we kept coming back to was increasing the skill set of guides to better interpret bear behavior.
You’ve started a project to improve the training of polar bear guides in Churchill. Why is that important?
We have some of the most experienced guides anywhere in the polar bear world, but experience alone isn't enough if we can't organize that knowledge and pass it on.
An organized bear guide training program in Churchill could really move the industry forward. It creates a common language among guides and operators. When everyone shares the same understanding of bear behavior and best practices, it's easier to make good decisions in the field and maintain Churchill's reputation as a world class wildlife destination.
And from your time in the brown bear guiding world, you’ve seen the benefits of a structured approach.
There’s a lot we can learn from other bear viewing communities about guide training and making that knowledge more accessible and more structured.
The Commercial Bear Viewing Association of British Columbia has developed the most successful bear guide training program out there, so we decided to put our entire bear viewing team through their course. We wanted to see how they organized their knowledge base and approached the teaching process. The class was fantastic and exceeded our expectations.
In your view, what does the future of polar bear guiding in Churchill look like?
I'd love to see Churchill become recognized not only for having exceptional polar bear viewing, but also for having the world's leading guide training program for polar bear tourism.
The demand for polar bear viewing continues to grow globally as new locations look to Churchill as a successful model, albeit not without its challenges. Churchill now has an opportunity to become a leader in polar bear guide education. If we can develop a structured program built on science, field experience, and collaboration, there's no reason it couldn't serve as a model for other Arctic communities that are developing or expanding polar bear tourism. The goal should be to create a framework that helps elevate and standardize the polar bear guiding profession here in Churchill and, ultimately, across the North.
The next step is finding a way to organize the knowledge that already exists here into a consistent framework that can be taught, evaluated, and continually improved. Rather than relying solely on years of field experience, new guides could build on a shared foundation while still learning from seasoned mentors.
Was there anything that surprised you when you switched from guiding with brown bears to polar bears?
People love to talk about the differences between North America's bear species, but at the end of the day, a bear is a bear is a bear. Many of the principles for reading body language, understanding habituation, minimizing disturbance, and making thoughtful decisions around wildlife apply across species. Every bear encounter, no matter the species, reminds you that you aren't interacting with a whole species or its reputation, you are interacting with an individual animal. The ability to interpret that bear's behavior in the context of that encounter is what really matters.