Ice melt forces polar bears into paths of Alaska schoolchildren

Luke Skywalker · Apr 22, 2016

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Native villagers say climate is changing the behavior of polar bears. Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY

Terri Magby scans the sea ice from a hill above Wales, Alaska, during a polar bear patrol.(Photo: Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY)

WALES, Alaska — Melting ice off the coast of far-west Alaska is forcing polar bears onto the land, dangerously close to*villages where children often walk unaccompanied across the snow-swept tundra.
In these isolated*communities, fears of a fatal encounter*between stressed predators and the towns'*most vulnerable*members*have forced residents into action: they*now train for*polar-bear*patrols.
"Our main concern is the kids,”*says Clyde Oxereok, 57, who leads the patrol in Wales, the most western town in the mainland U.S.

Children walking to school in Wales, Alaska, provide the only color in an otherwise all-white landscape of snow and ice and cloudy sky. *(Photo: Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY)

The problem is a lack of ice. Each winter, the narrow strait between Russia and the United States melts faster.The ice that*does form seems weaker, more susceptible to breaking up.*While that's opened up new areas for oil exploration and opportunities for*shipping through the Northwest Passage, it's also destroying the habitat of the polar bears who hunt seal from that ice.
“The weather has changed a lot, and it has made the animals change their behavior,”*said Oxereok, a*ninth-generation resident of Wales.
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Yes, Mrs. Palin, you really can see Russia from here

Bears on land are easily distracted by towns — and the easy food.
“When you’re out on the ice, everything is white, so anything that’s not, you’re going to check out," says*Elisabeth Kruger, Arctic program manager for*the World Wildlife Fund.**"And anything that could be food, you’ll try it,” she says.

Fresh polar bear tracks mark the snow near Wales, Alaska, where villagers have started to patrol around their homes to ensure bears don't pose a danger to kids walking to school.*(Photo: Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY)

Walking back to the snowmobile that carried her out to the frozen edge of the Bering Strait, Kruger stops to point out fresh polar bear tracks. Sometime in the past few days, a large bear walked down the ice in a path that paralleled both the ice’s edge and the front of the town a mile away.
Village elders say while there are fewer polar bears living in the area, they’re near town more often.
That's a terrifying thought.*Polar bears can be 10-foot-tall, weighing in at more than 1,000 pounds and willing to tangle with whales and walruses.
Now, with Kruger’s help, residents in Wales have created the Kingikmiut Nanuuq Patrol to monitor polar bears near their homes. They've learned how to “haze” the bears away from town with shotgun-fired noisemakers and pepper spray.
There’s pretty much no one else to call on in Wales. The town lacks any routine law enforcement presence. An Alaska State Trooper flies in for a few hours every so often to check up on the residents.
Other tribal communities might simply kill and eat any polar bears that come into their village.*Polar bears are protected by federal law, but Inupiat hunters like those in Wales are allowed to kill some polar bears to maintain their traditional way of life.
'THAT'S NOT A DOG'
There have already been polar bear encounters in the town: in 2012, a teacher walking to school was briefly chased by a polar bear before Andrew Seetook chased it away on his snowmobile. For parents accustomed to letting their young kids walk to school, the encounter was unsettling.
“I said, 'That’s not a dog, that’s a bear,'” Seetook recalls.
Federal officials don’t know how many polar bears live in the western coast of Alaska. They know the populations have been declining elsewhere, and polar bears are formally considered “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The WWF and federal officials are hoping to create a network of patrols that can provide routine surveillance of wildlife, including bears, whose behavior is expected to become increasingly unpredictable.

Sunlight reflects off the sea ice as clouds gather on the distant horizon above Russia, as seen from Wales, Alaska.*(Photo: Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY)

It’s a lot of work, especially when native hunters’ first inclination might be to simply kill any bear threatening their community.
“That’s the whole key – it there’s a better way we can teach people, and they want to be taught, that’s what we’re trying to do,” said Craig Perham, a polar bear biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
On a recent survey, Oxereok and Perham spotted polar bear tracks on the ice about a half mile away from Wales. While there were no other signs of the bears, the dinner-plate-sized footprints, complete with claws, hint at the danger they pose, especially ones that are hungry.
Kruger, who has also worked in Siberia, says it’s common for polar bears to move across the Bering Strait. The bears can easily swim 100 miles at a time; at its narrowest, the strait is only about 50 miles and ice often bridges much of that.
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DISASTER TRAINING
With 150 residents, Wales is one of the smallest settlements in the area. Residents still talk about the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 that killed more than 200 people, a warning of how outside forces can bring devastation.
It's no accident that part of the training given to the patrol, from radio protocols to their command structure, will also come in handy in case there’s a major disaster in the area. Wales is 800 miles away from the nearest rescue station, which means the men and women of the village would likely be the first responders to any major shipping disaster in the strait.
Along*with wildlife, the melting Arctic ice has shaken up the shipping industry.*Freighters and oil tankers are starting to more often use the Northwest Passage over the top of Canada and then down through the strait to the American west coast.
A shipping disaster could potentially contaminate the otherwise pristine western Arctic environment, and while Kruger is here to help with polar bears, she’s also worrying about the impact far-off consumers and petroleum users may ultimately have on the people living close to the edge.
“It’s decisions that are being made really far outside this community … and yet the community is taking on that burden, that risk, of managing it,” she says. "To me, it’s unimaginable.”
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Ice melt forces polar bears into paths of Alaska schoolchildren

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