Polar Bear Attack Highlights Dangers of Warming Arctic

By: By Terrell Johnson

Published: November 5,2013

 

 

 

 

 

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An attack by a polar bear on two people last week in a tiny Canadian town has left many local people shaken and scientists wondering anew whether attacks like this one could become more common as the Arctic warms.
The incident took place early Friday in Churchill, a town of about 900 residents along the western shore of Hudson Bay. A group of people leaving a Halloween party in the pre-dawn hours found themselves under attack when a young polar bear "crept up behind them, unheard and unseen," according to the U.K.-based Guardian.
The bear cornered a woman in the group (a native of Montreal, identified only as Erin by a friend), who was pinned to the wall of a home and suffered injuries to her head, ear, and arm.
Her injuries might have been much more severe were it not for a 69-year-old man named Bill Ayotte, who rushed to her rescue after he heard her screams. He distracted the bear by hitting it with a shovel, which gave the woman a chance to run away.
But the bear then attacked Ayotte, leaving him "badly mauled," according to the Winnipeg Free Press.
"It was dragging him around," Ayotte's neighbor Mitch Paddock told the Canadian Press. "It was pouncing on him. That's what polar bears do. They take both their paws and they kind of smash. He was kind of jumping on Bill's chest."
Churchill bills itself the "Polar Bear Capital of the World" thanks to the hundreds of polar bears that converge here each fall to wait for the sea ice to form on Hudson Bay. As the Guardian reports, walking in groups is commonly done here for safety reasons in October and November, when polar bear numbers are at their peak.
That apparently wasn't enough to deter this bear, which was shot dead and identified as a "sub-adult" by Manitoba conservation officials after the attack.
Doug Webber, another neighbor of Ayotte's, later told the Canadian Press that the attack left both Ayotte and the woman covered in blood. "He was on his feet with three people helping him," Webber said. "There was a lot of blood around his head."
This attack was the second by a polar bear this fall in in Churchill. In September, a polar bear chased Garett Kolsun onto the porch of a local bakery, and began swiping at him with its paw. Kolsun pulled out his cell phone and waved it at the bear, distracting it enough to allow Kolsun the chance to run away.
They're still very rare, according to interviews with locals there.
"There's only been a handful [of attacks] in the last 50 years I've been here," Webber added in his interview with the Canadian Press. "We tend to get fairly blase about polar bears until something like this happens."
The attack is another reminder of what can happen in the warming Arctic climate, when sea ice loss means hungry polar bears can't hunt in their native habitat.
"The number of bear-human interactions, bear-human conflicts, may be somewhat on the rise," Steven Amstrup, chief scientist at Polar Bears International, told the Guardian.
"Scientists expect human polar bear-encounters to increase as the sea ice continues to melt and hungry bears are driven ashore," the organization's website notes.
"Over the past few years, sea ice losses have led to more polar bear sightings in northern coastal communities and an uptick in human-polar bear encounters. Some of these have had tragic endings, for both humans and the bears."


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This polar bear was found dead in July on the Arctic island of Svalbard, the northernmost territory of Norway. Experts who discovered the bear said it had been reduced to skin and bone, and likely starved and died on the spot. (Courtesy Ashley Cooper/Global Warming Images)