Polar Bear Control

Sometimes in the Arctic man is not the top predator:

A number of Eskimo on the Alaskan coast show frightful scars obtained in contests with them in winter. One man, who came on board the Corwin [U.S. Revenue Cutter active in the Arctic and Bering Sea in the late 19th Century.  The storyteller, the anthropologist Edward Nelson, traveled on her at times - Ben], had the entire skin and flesh torn from one side of his head and face including the eye and ear, yet had escaped and recovered. One incident was related to me which occurred near Point Hope during the winter of 1880-'81. Men went out from Point Hope during one of the long winter nights to attend to their seal nets, which were set through holes in the ice. While at work near each other, one of the men heard a bear approaching over the frosty snow, and having no weapon but a small knife, and the bear being between him and the shore, he threw himself upon his back on the ice and waited. The bear came up and for a few moments smelled about the man from head to foot, and finally pressed his cold nose against the man's lips and nose and sniffed several times; each time the terrified Eskimo held his breath until, as he afterwards said, his lungs nearly burst. The bear suddenly heard the other man at work, and listening for a moment he started towards him at a gallop, while the man he left sprang to his feet and ran for his life for the village and reached it safely. At midday, when the sun had risen a little above the horizon, a large party went out to the spot and found the bear finishing his feast upon the other hunter and soon dispatched him. Cases similar to this occur occasionally all along the coast where the bear is found in winter."  (Nelson was an Army signals officer stationed in St. Michael, Alaska, in the 1870s and 80s).

Kaktovik is a small Inupiat village on the coast of the Beaufort Sea. Kaktovik residents participate in annual bowhead whale hunts, and slaughter the animals at a spot on the coast near the airport.  The remains attract polar bears to feed, and people drive down to watch them.  The bears also wander along the shore and into town.  This guy got out of his truck.  Comments on this post at other sites suggest that a professional photographer is involved from the sophistication of the tripod leaning against the truck (TractorByNet - scroll to bottom).  I've been researching this somewhat since I first posted; my guess at this point is that this guy is a Kaktovik resident working as a guide for professional photographers and that he is used to being around bears.  This may have been taken near the bowhead carcasses, but I'm no longer as certain of that:

This is one of a whole series of shots, here.  It looks like they went around this truck and a second one.  I don't know how the guy got away, but he did.

Tom Smith and Steve Herrero have taken a careful look at the data and have only found documented account (between 1900 and 2002) of a person who was killed by polar bears in Alaska: A Century of Bear-Human Contact in Alaska: Analyses and Implications. That's far fewer than the numbers of people killed by black bears and brown bears over that period.  However, as S. Stringham notes, you have to take account of the smaller numbers of polar bears, the smaller number of people who live or visit their habitat, the high level of polar bear savvy of those people, and potentially poorer documentation for these remote, rural, areas: Attack Stats (4) - scroll down to the section on polar bears.

We don't just need to protect bears from human development impacts, we have to protect people from the bears.  People living and working in the Arctic have to take precautions, and these precautions impose costs.  Two Canadian biologists, Peter Clarkson and Ian Stirling take a look at the security issues raised by the presence of polar bears.  At they time they wrote (1994) there hadn't been any studies of the costs:

No specific studies or reports have documented the economic costs of polar bear damage in the Arctic. Past polar bear problems have ranged in cost from nothing to several thousands of dollars. With the remote locations of camps and communities and the expense of transporting food and products in the Arctic, replacement costs are high. Lost work time of personnel and programs can also be substantial because of polar bear problems. In September 1983, Esso Resources Canada had to suspend drilling until a wildlife officer could drug and remove a bear that had happened onto the artificial island, costing Esso about $125,000. A similar incident occurred in 1985, and cost Esso approximately $250,000 in lost work time.

Hiring bear monitors can cost up to $250 per day to protect personnel, a camp, or an industrial site from polar bears. The cost of government staff and programs that are responsible for handling polar bear problems will depend on the number of problems. Churchill, Manitoba, has the most intensive government program to handle polar bear problems. This program costs the Manitoba government approximately $120,000 per year (M. Shoesmith, pers. commun.).

Purchasing detection and deterrent equipment and educating people on the proper procedures to prevent and handle bear problems will cost companies and agencies. These costs, however, are minimal when compared to personnel safety, replacement costs of property in the Arctic, and long-term polar bear conservation concerns.

Since this was written in 1994, the costs will have increased considerably.  Protection is necessary at remote work sites, and established communities like Churchill in Manitoba.

From 1929 to 1961 the Canadians operated a navigational aid and weather station on remote Radio Island, just to the northeast of Hudson Bay.  Following closure, several buildings and ruins of buildings, a helicopter pad, other debris, and heavy metal and hydrocarbon contaminants were left behind.  In 2006 and 2007 Hazco Environmental Services and Earth Tech Canada undertook contract work to clean up the site, disposing of all materials off site.  Contractors spent six weeks on site in 2006, and additional time in 2007.

Radio Island was a known polar bear denning area, consequently the contractors implemented a polar bear management plan to protect their workers.  Five wildlife monitors with guns, radios and bear bangers provided continual, 24-7 monitoring.  The camp was surrounded with a two meter, 10,000 volt electrical fence.  Unfortunately the project review slides don't say what this added to the cost of the contract.  They saw 10 polar bears in 2006 and two in 2007.

Churchill Manitoba, on the shore of Hudson Bay, is famous for the large number of polar bears that congregate nearby. These support a tourist industry that is important for the community. However, they don't like the polar bears in town:

Although mostly a management program, the Churchill Polar Bear Alert (PBA) Program is an important source of data on polar bears near Churchill, Manitoba. Each year in the autumn, bears that approach too closely to the town area are held until the ice forms, or are airlifted away from the townsite. Every bear is marked and measured as part of the overall mark and recapture program in western Hudson Bay, and the data are logged with the National Polar Bear Database. In the past 12 years, most handled bears have been sub-adults, with more male than female bears in both adult and sub-adult age classes.

One of the best measures of the success of the PBA program is the reduction in problem bear kills. During the 10-year period from 1970 to 1979, there was an average of 17.2 bears killed per year (109 by the public and 63 by the department). In contrast, the 10 years from 1990 to 1999 had an average of 4.4 bears killed per year (18 defense kills and 26 bears killed by the department). This reduction in bear deaths occurred even though numbers of bears handled under the PBA program during 5 of those years were the highest recorded (range = 79 to 113), and seven years had higher than average numbers of bear occurrences in the control zone around Churchill. It appears that the combination of public education in bear awareness and prevention of food conditioning of polar bears are the main factors contributing to fewer problem bears.

This text is from the 13th IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group meeting in 2001 (page 57).

I haven't said anything about brown (grizzly) bears, but these occur in the Arctic in addition to polar bears.  I've heard that they appear sometimes at the same whale carcass sites, and that the polar bears are very shy of them.  In any event, these considerations would apply to the brown bears as well.

Edit: Account of the Kaktovik chase revised and the reference to the Smith-Herrero information added, on August 9, 2008. 

Comments

[Mykle]

In my opinion, those photos of the polar bear chasing the man are faked. Look at the right rear paw in the first and second photos. They are malformed blurs. Also, the right front paw or forearm is incomplete in the third photo.

[Scooter]

This seems to have originally come from KTVA, but the URL is obsolete: "Polar bear chases man in Kaktovik - KTVA" http://www.ktva.com/ci_8964167

[rmzalbar]

Mykle, you don't seem to have much experience with photography.

The phenomenae you describe are artifacts of motion blur. The shutter is open for a finite amount of time. The faster-moving objects in the photo appear blurred, indistinct, or misshapen. On the first photo, you can see this some of this effect on the man's right leg as well.

Sports photography is done with very large light-gathering lenses so they can use very short shutter speeds to prevent this effect. This was probably a smaller digital camera, or it may have been darker outside than it looks in the photo.