National Post (National Edition)
FENCES MAKE GOOD POLAR BEAR NEIGHBOURS
Thanks to a Coca-Cola sponsored system of fireworks, electric fences and ATV-mounted bear guards, the Arctic community of Arviat, Nunavut, is celebrating 12 months without having to shoot a marauding polar bear.
It is, it notes in a press release, “the first time there have been no kills in at least three years.“
Dubbed the Arviat Human-Polar Bear Conflict Reduction Project, it hired local hunter Leo Ikakhik to keep a midnight to 8 a.m. watch during peak the peak October-December polar bear season.
If any bears approach it is Mr. Ikakhik’s job to scare them away with spotlights, small explosive “bear bangers” and, if all else fails, a few well-placed rubber bullets.
The program also supplied locals with steel containers to store their wild meat and installed seven electric fences around sled dog yards.
Located on the western edge of Hudson Bay, the 2,500-person community “has reported more and more polar bears” in recent years, according to hamlet official Ed Murphy. As a result, Nunavut’s secondlargest community has been thrust into uneasy proximity with one of the world’s most deadly predators — and one of the only species on Earth to actively view humans as prey.
The community shot eight bears in 2010 and three bears in 2011. “What happened before 2010, I’m not sure,” said Keith Collier, the community’s economic development officer.
Polar bears are a fixture at the town’s open-air garbage dump — the unfenced dump is typically host to “seven or eight” polar bear scavengers — and are known to make regular forays into town to kill sled dogs or dip into a family’s cache of caribou, fish and whale meat.
“Any place that attracts their attention, they’re pretty good at breaking into them,” said Mr. Collier.
Community-wide alerts of approaching bears are an almost daily occurrence and locals are strongly advised to be armed when stepping foot outside the settlement’s limits.
“Anybody involved in tourism, anybody camping in na- tional parks; they are always advised to have a rifle or a shotgun with them and know how to use it,” said Mr. Collier.
In October, Arviat resident Peter Suvaksiuk publicly pleaded with the Nunavut government to loosen hunting regulations, allowing locals to shoot more of the bears circling their community.
“A bear was near one of the windows of our house and some of them are looking into people’s homes. I don’t understand why they are so tame now,” he told the CBC in Inuktitut.
Three years before, amid reports of children being stalked by bears, residents had similarly called on the Government of Nunavut to initiate a program of tranquilizing approaching bears and dragging them out onto the sea ice by helicopter — similar to how unwanted polar bears are dealt with in Churchill, Manitoba.
The Arviat project does not necessarily reduce the number of polar bears killed; it just changes how and where they are killed. In previous years, when locals shot a polar bear, the animal was simply credited to their annual hunting quota.
“This is about reducing … the number of people who are injured or killed by polar bears,” said Pete Ewins, with WWF-Canada’s Arctic Program, which co-funded the project with Coca-Cola.
Ultimately, Arviat’s “conflict reduction project” is meant as a “showcase” for other communities that are plagued — or soon to be plagued — with the carnivore, with Mr. Ewins.
Arviat’s polar bear problem is relatively new, after all, with some locals remembering going entire seasons without seeing the carnivore in years past.
The reasons for the polar bear boom are “unclear,” notes the Jan. 31 press release, but hamlet officials credited a combination of bears being driven inland by melting ice — as well as the increasingly tantalizing target Arviat provided as its population grew.
While most Canadian cities are well-equipped to fend off the occasional visit by a wandering black bear or grizzly bear, they are wholly unprepared against a bear that is nearly twice the size.