By Peter Ewins
It’s 0530 and my WWF-US colleague Rhys Gerholdt and I are with an ABC News crew from New York, heading up to Wapusk National Park and the world’s largest concentration of maternity dens for polar bears.
The recent science papers have sparked heightened public interest and concern for the trends and future prospects of these most southerly of the world’s wild polar bears.
Over the next week. we will be based in Wat’chee lodge in the denning areas, and hope to see firsthand how these polar bear mums and their cubs are doing as they emerge from the deep snow dens. WWF has helped support these long-term studies of polar bears in west Hudson Bay, so we are eagerly following these results and the experts’ assessments of the prospects for bears in this region of rapidly retreating sea ice.
We’ll try to beam you daily updates from the Cree-owned and operated little lodge out on the tundra – but please bear with us as the high tech equipment doesn’t always work reliably out there at 40 below!