Just on the edge of the western Hudson Bay lies the small town of Churchill, Manitoba.
Here, the sea meets the boreal forest under the rippling northern lights. Farther to the north, the trees stop growing. Snow coats a harsh landscape of Canadian shield, and the ceaseless wind cuts through the willows.
No roads lead to Churchill. Just a rail line and an airport runway, carrying the occasional charter plane.
But it attracts tourists and scientists alike because for a short time in the fall, the kings of the arctic migrate through town back to their homes on the frozen sea ice. Travelers come here, from all over the world, seeking one thing: to lock eyes with a polar bear.
The bears
Polar bears meander through Churchill every autumn as they wait for ice on the bay to form. Males take to the ice first, roaming and testing out the edges, eager to travel north where they can finally hunt for the ringed seal – their primary food source.
Scientists converge on Churchill because it is the most accessible point to study polar bears. The bears here are the most researched in the world, and the most photographed.
These arctic beasts have big personalities: they play and cuddle and nap to pass the time. Males will often spar, trying to get to know each other so that they’re prepared for the charged battles in the spring, during mating season.
Cubs stay close to their mothers for two to three years before they’re chased off and forced to live on their own. For the following year, they test the waters – sometimes struggling to survive as they learn to hunt and sustain themselves in the tundra.
“A stark change in the ecosystem”
In recent years, however, the warming arctic is melting their habitat on the ice, changing the bears’ behavior: scientists from Polar Bears International say the ice is forming two weeks later than it was in the 1980s, and receding two weeks earlier in the spring.
This monthlong change in their environment is forcing bears to keep to shore longer, closer to humans and farther from the seal lairs in the north.
It’s a change — sparked by the altering climate — that their parents and grandparents didn’t have to face. Yes, the bears have been constantly evolving, ever since they diverged from the grizzly roughly 500,000 years ago, but the pace of change is what is alarming scientists.
Chief climate scientist for Polar Bears International Flavio Lehner says because of the decline in sea ice, the polar bear population in the western Hudson Bay is as low as 618, approximately half of what it used to be in the 1980s.
“That’s quite profound,” he says. “It’s hard to find other places, other than maybe that have been deforested in the Amazon, where you see such a stark change in the ecosystem caused by climate change.”
Lehner doesn’t anticipate that the situation will improve, and beyond the population decline, he’s seeing a behavioral shift as well. It used to be much more typical to find mothers with triplets, which, in his personal experience, is now rare.
Scientists at Polar Bears International say that these bears can only sustain themselves comfortably on land for 180 days. In other parts of the world, bears have been seen hunting birds and reindeer, but scientists say this high-protein diet can damage their kidneys, and doesn’t stop them from losing 2-4 pounds a day when they’re off the ice.
“The current pace of change is operating too fast,” explained John Whiteman, chief research scientist with PBI. “Polar bears won’t be able to evolve or acclimate in time to be able to deal with our current rate of sea ice loss.”
Whiteman expects that the polar bears will stick around for the next 10 years or so in Churchill, but the timeline starts to get fuzzy 20 to 30 years into the future.
“We ultimately know if we lose sea ice, we lose polar bears,” said Whiteman.
The town
Churchill has always been a town at the precipice. It’s lived many lives — from home to First Nations to trading post to military town to now, the polar bear capital of the world.
It attracts a special type of person. Often one that finds pleasure in the solitude. The people who come for employment are semi-nomadic tourist industry workers, or maybe they’re looking for a change. They’re guides and nature enthusiasts, seasonal workers attracted to this slow, simpler pace of life.
Others — like the town’s mayor of 30 years Mike Spence — have spent their lives here. Back when he was a kid, conservation officers in town were shooting 20 to 22 bears a year. But over time, the approach has changed.
“First of all, we respect wildlife,” he says. “The polar bears are quite significant in the Indigenous world – it’s at the top of its food chain. There’s a lot of respect in that.”
The town is now facing a future where the polar bear tourist season could potentially disappear. In the interim, the community will be forced to coexist more closely with the bears as they wait for the ice to form on the bay. And as infrastructure too struggles to adapt to a warming climate and melting permafrost, Spence is one of the many people looking for solutions.
“We’ve always been challenged,” Spence says. But the community also “usually finds a way.”
Those solutions include taking command of a port and rail line that collapsed in 2017 due to a combination of flooding and lack of maintenance. Once it starts operating at its full potential, the hope is that it will welcome more consistent jobs and resources for the community. Meanwhile, a new program in town grows microgreens, and new polar bear-resistant trash containers dot the streets, all to forge a sustainable path forward in the north for people, and the wildlife.
“What we need to do now is build on our young people growing up here, so that they play a bigger role in building a stronger community, and a bigger community,” Spence says. “They see for themselves what they’ve got is pretty precious.”
Fighting for a future
On the outskirts of town, Wyatt Daley hooks up his sled dogs, preparing to lead the first of three tours for the day. Fall is peak tourist season, and he’ll spend the day out among the trees of the boreal forest, gliding on the snow.
Churchill relies on the tourism that comes from those wanting to see the polar bears. In order to sustain their businesses, some tourism companies are looking to pivot to protect their futures.
One of these ways is by advertising other aspects of this wild north – the aurora that dances overhead 300 nights of the year and the annual beluga whale migration in the summer.
But it’s not just the economic engine that needs to be fueled: there’s a yearning for families and the next generation to choose Churchill, tend to it and savor everything it has to offer.
Wyatt Daley was one of those children who, years ago, begged his parents to move further south. His father Dave, a dog musher and tourism company owner, would shake his head and tell him, “We have the dogs, this is where we make our living.” And that was the end of that particular conversation.
He watched his friends and their families move away – especially in the middle school years – searching for “better opportunities.” After graduation, he traveled throughout the world, working in the tourism industry in Australia and Cologne. But he came home. Back to the dogs, and back to Churchill.
Churchill, he says, has given him “everything.” He feels a connection to the dogs, to the land. His father is his best friend. And that’s exactly what he wants for his own son Noah – now 3 years old – who has an affinity for the dogs, too.
“I remember being a little kid and standing on the back ski with my dad and doing tours,” he says. “That’s what I’m looking forward to most right now . . . I think about [Noah] coming out and doing tours with me.”
But this legacy is threatened by the warming arctic, and it’s a weight the Daleys feel as they fight to protect their way of life in the north.
“It’s a scary thought to think the polar bears may not be here one day,” Dave Daley says. “The planet earth is a living being, and we’re the ones treading on it and changing everything. I think we really need to get a handle on it and start taking this seriously.”
