Where were the starving W. Hudson Bay polar bears in 2020?

Written by Dr Susan Crockford on January 9, 2023. Posted in Current News

Polar bears are supposed to starve before they die, the experts said.

They said only a few years ago that dead or emaciated individuals onshore were evidence that many polar bears would soon be dying of starvation out on the sea ice.

So, if the Western Hudson Bay (WH) subpopulation had indeed dropped by 27% by late summer 2021 as researchers claimed, where are all the photos of starving bears in the fall of 2020, the year before the count?

The photo below of a thin female and cub was taken in late fall of 2021 (the year of the count) by a stationary web cam. In other words, some bears came off the ice without an optimal amount of fat because of poor hunting conditions over the winter but they were still alive.

We know that 2020 had the shortest ice-free season in at least 20 years (and no similar images were captured), so bears went into the winter of 2020/2021 in good condition. Ditto for 2017-2019. In contrast to 2021, in 2016 (the year of the previous survey that also indicated a declining population size), bears reportedly came off the ice in good condition.

All I’ve seen are photos of fat bears and fat cubs, even a triplet litter in fall 2020.

The shore of WH near Churchill should have been abounding with starving bears in 2020 (and in 2015), if the experts were right about starving bears preceding a population decline.

More importantly, where are the studies on food-deprived bears onshore, as were done in the 1980s when WH bears were emaciated and cub survival poor (e.g. Ramsay et al. 1988)? WH bears are being used exclusively to model an implausibly pessimistic future for polar bears across the entire Arctic (Molnar et al. 2010; 2020), which means lack of good science for WH polar bears has big consequences. Covid restrictions in two of those ten years don’t excuse lack of study on this phenomenon.

Condition of bears since 2017

If adult females with cubs and young bears on their own for the first time actually starved to death over the winter of 2020/2021–accounting for a 27 percent decline in numbers documented in the fall of 2021–at least a few of those bears should have come ashore in the summer of 2020 in poor condition.

As a result of not eating over the summer months, those bears should have been skin and bones by late October/early November 2020 and died over the winter of 2020/2021.

Yet as far as I know, not a single photo of a lean or truly starving polar bear was shared on social media by locals or captured on the Explore.org stationary or buggy-mounted web cams in 2020 (which weren’t affected by Covid restrictions in 2020).

There was certainly nothing in the media or shared by Polar Bears International. If I’ve missed any, please let me know.

The two lean bears below (probably youngsters) were photographed be the Explore webcam on 26 November 2021 just as ice formation had begun that fall. The photos of these bears, and of the thin female with cub above, indicate that some bears came off the ice that summer in less-than-ideal condition but were still alive. It’s what we should have seen in 2020 (and in years before that) but didn’t.

By 2022, Andrew Derocher said the bears his team out tagging bears in April were in good condition (by “past years”, he meant many years past, not the recent past, since he said bears were in good condition in 2019).

Although researchers weren’t out in fall 2020 because of Covid restrictions, the Tundra buggies of Frontiers North were out watching and photographing the bears even if they weren’t taking tourists (see photo below, taken 4 November 2020).

Very good sea ice conditions in 2020 (late breakup, early freeze-up compared to early 2000s) and photos of fat bears taken by the webcams suggest the animals did very well that year.

More photos of fat bears below, most from the fall of 2020 and one from 2017, captured by stationary Explore.org web cams or those mounted on Tundra buggies (which I have monitored since 2017).

The purported 27 percent population decline between 2017 and September 2021 would have required a large number of bears to have died very quickly of starvation over the spring of 2021, even though they were in good shape beforehand.

That premise is hard to swallow without some kind of corroborating evidence.

That leads to an even bigger question.

How does a population of polar bears supposedly decline by 40 percent over 10 years–from about 1030 in 2011 to about 618 in 2021–without significant numbers of bears in poor or very poor condition being documented in the years immediately before the counts were done, especially for the most-studied–and probably the most photographed–subpopulation in the world?

On the two notable occasions when starving polar bears were studied (1974-76 in the Southern Beaufort Sea, and the 1980s in Western Hudson Bay), lack of summer sea ice was not the cause and in only one case (the SB example) did significant numbers of starving bears result in a documented population decline.

However, on both previous occasions, bears in poor condition were noted by researchers in studies dedicated to documenting the phenomenon. If a polar bear population decline of 40 percent between 2011 and 2021 indeed occurred in WH because of starvation caused by ‘climate change’, where is the evidence?

Why has there not been a single scientific study documenting bears in poor condition onshore during the summer and fall over the last 10 years (2020–and perhaps 2021–excepted, due to Covid restrictions)?

The stakes for polar bear researchers couldn’t be higher.

This makes it all the more significant that they have provided no actual evidence that WH bears are indeed starving to death in sufficient numbers to substantiate a 40 percent decline over 10 years.

If the claimed population decline of 2011-2021 is real and not an artifact of some other phenomenon (like females moving north of Churchill to have their cubs), we should have been seeing numerous photos of starving bears in the summer/fall of 2016 and 2020 at the very least, as well as a peer-reviewed paper or two describing the situation.

So far, neither has been presented and there is still no publicly-available copy of the 2021 population count report.

See more here polarbearscience.com

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