CHURCHILL, Manitoba (AP) — Sgt. Ian Van Nest rolls slowly through the streets of Churchill, his truck equipped with a gun and a backseat with bars to detain anyone he has to arrest. His eyes dart back and forth, then settle on a crowd of people standing outside a van. He scans the area for security and then quietly addresses the group's leader, unsure of the man's weapons.
“How are you today?” asks Van Nest. The leader warily replies, “Are we okay with you here?”
'You're good. You have a lot of distance there. If people get out of the vehicle, you have to have a bear monitor,” warns Van Nest, a conservation officer for the province of Manitoba, as the tourists stare at a polar bear on the rocks. “So, if that's you, just make sure you have your shotgun, right? Slugs and cracker grenades if you have them, or a stun gun.'
It's the start of polar bear season in Churchill, a small town on a headland jutting into Hudson Bay, and protecting tourists from hungry and sometimes ferocious bears is an essential job for Van Nest and many others. And it has become more difficult as climate change shrinks the Arctic sea ice that the bears depend on for hunting, forcing them to sneak inland earlier and more often in search of food, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a group of scientists who research how endangered species are.
“You see more bears because there are more bears on land that you can see for longer periods of time” and they are willing to take more risks and get closer to people, says Polar Bears International research and policy director Geoff York. There are about 600 polar bears in this Western Hudson Bay population, about half of what it was 40 years ago, but that's still almost one bear for every Churchill resident.
Yet this remote town not only lives with the predator next door, but also depends on it and even loves it. Visitors eager to see polar bears saved the city from disappearing when a military base closed in the 1970s, dropping the population from a few thousand to about 870. A 2011 government study calculated that the average polar bear tourist was about spends $5,000 per visit, pumping more than $7 million into a small town with upscale restaurants and more than two dozen small places to stay amid dirt roads and no traffic lights.
“We're obviously used to bears, so when you see one, you don't start to shake,” Mayor Mike Spence said. “It's their area too. How the community coexists with bears and wildlife in general is important to really get along. We are all connected.”
It's been more than a decade since a bear mauled two people in an alley late on Halloween night before a third person scared the animal off.
“It was the scariest thing that ever happened in my life,” said Erin Greene, who, along with a 72-year-old man who tried to fend off the bear with a shovel, survived their injuries. Greene, who had come to Churchill the year before for a job in the tourism industry, said it was Churchill's other animals — the beluga whales she sings to while organizing paddle boat tours and her dozens of rescued retired sled dogs — that helped her recovery of the trauma.
There have been no attacks since then, but the city is vigilant.
During Halloween, trick-or-treating takes place when the bears are hungriest, and dozens of volunteers line the streets to keep trouble at bay. At any time of year, troublesome bears that wander into town too often can be put in the polar bear prison – a large Quonset hut-like structure with 28 concrete and steel cells – before being released back into the wild. The building doesn't fill up, but it can get busy enough to make noise from the banging and growling inside, Van Nest said.
Residents show the pride of polar bears in a way that combines terror and fun, a kind of roller coaster.
“You know we're the polar bear capital of the world, right? We have the product, it's about getting out there to see the bears safely,” says Dave Daley, a gift shop owner, dog sled owner and talks about the city like the former Chamber of Commerce president that he is. “I always say to tourists or whatever, 'You know what, they look like the T. rex from the dinosaur era.' They are the Lords of the Arctic. They will eat you.'
Usually not.
The military base's rocket launch site seemed to keep bears at bay, and when it closed in the 1970s, more bears came calling, longtime residents said. So Churchill and county officials “put together a polar bear alert program to ensure community members were cared for and protected,” said Spence, mayor since 1995.
The city's old curfew siren blares every evening at 10 p.m., alerting people that it's time to head home for safety from bears. But on this Saturday evening, three different bonfire parties are taking place on the town beach – a spot next to the school, library and hospital that is a particular hotspot for bears coming inland. Yet no one leaves.
Then a truck appears and a lone figure – one of the government's paid guards – steps out, armed with a shotgun. He walks into the dunes about 100 meters from the parties and scans the horizon for polar bears. The guards are expected to scare away any bears with warning shots, flares, bear spray or noise – and not kill them.
“It's just everyone looking out for everyone else,” Spence said. “So it's just, it's just normal. It's moving as a community living next to polar bears, you're always used to coming out of your house and you look like this and you look ahead. And that is now just in your DNA.”
Georgina Berg remembers growing up in the 1970s outside Churchill, where many First Nations people lived, and how differently her mother and father reacted to the sight of a bear. Her father, she said, saw a bear rummaging through the trash and just kept walking.
“He said, 'If you don't bother them, they won't bother you,'” she recalls.
When a bear came near in later years after her father died, her mother became afraid.
“Everything was like pandemonium. Everyone was screaming, and all the kids had to come in and everyone had to go home. And then we stayed quiet in the house for a long time until we were sure the bear was gone,” Berg recalled.
For Van Nest, the county officer, the group he encountered that day was safe enough from a bear about 300 yards away. He said the bear was “putting on a bit of a show” for the tourists.
“This is a great situation to be in,” he said. “The tourists are at a safe distance and the bear does its natural thing and is not bothered by anyone.”
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