Having spent the last couple of days fruitlessly driving the few roads around Churchill trying to find some Polar Bears, we joined a Frontiers North Tundra Buggy tour. After a short bus ride from the town, we boarded the tundra buggy near the Northern Studies Research Centre and set off along the bumpy "tracks" in search of bears.
We hadn't been travelling much more than 15 minutes when one of the passengers at the front of the buggy spotted a Polar Bear asleep in the shelter of some rocks ahead. As we trundled our way closer, another passenger saw an Arctic Fox sitting a short way off to the side, and thankfully it stayed put as we scrambled outside the buggy onto the back viewing platform. Unfortunately, my binocular strap chose that particular moment to come undone and so I only managed to quickly grabbed a couple of photos before trying to fix the strap to stop them falling on the floor. By the time I'd fixed the strap, the fox had ambled into some willows and out of sight.
Going back to the bear, the driver was excellent, and slowly crept us along the ridge above where the bear was resting. On hearing the buggy above her, the bear appeared looking over a rock at us, and then decided to come and check us out properly and walked to within a few feet of the buggy, often sniffing the air to try to work out what all these thing were making clicking noises.
After a few moments, she walked away and then turned around, and came back for another look, before deciding we weren't really that interesting and set off toward another group of rocks. The driver, left her be for 10 minutes, which having seen the behaviour of some tour guides in Africa particular was incredibly responsible, as the inhabitants of the buggy all regaled how incredible a view we had just had. As we set off again and had to go past her, she had settled again in the lee of some rocks, and hardly batted an eyelid and she slept on some rocks and we left her to resume her sleep.
We trundled on across the tundra, seeing occasional groups of Snow Bunting and Shore Larks and then some Willow Ptarmigan (sorry, Willow Grouse, they call them Ptarmigan over here to confuse things even though they are the same Red Grouse we get in Britain, though these guys turn white which ours don't!) which kept in among the willow scrub.
After a stop for lunch, we began to head back, and came across another bear, though it was much further away, walking along a spit, but after the earlier views of the young female, this bear was nowhere near as exciting.
As we retraced our steps and headed back to shore, we passed the original bear, who by this time was out walking around along a spit looking for a snack. It was nice to watch her in her environment as the tour guide told us tales of how he once saw 27 bears from one spot but nowadays, in a good day you may see 10 in a day. The population in Hudson Bay has nearly halved in his 20 years doing tours here, and who knows what the future holds for these magnificent animals?
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