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When you've studied polar bears for as long as Ian Stirling — nearly 40 years — you become so familiar with your subjects that you sense changes intuitively, before you can find the scientific basis for your discovery. That's what happened in the mid-1990s, when Stirling and his colleagues began to notice declines in the weight and reproductive rates of polar bears on the western coast of Hudson Bay.

“We started to realize,” says Stirling, a senior research scientist with the Canadian Wildlife Service and an adjunct professor of biology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, “that we were onto something fairly significant.”

That “something” is the effect of the warming climate on the sea ice where polar bears hunt. Earlier ice breakup in the spring is depriving the bears of critical time to prey on seals and fatten up to survive the ice-free months without food. As a result, they weigh about 15 percent less than they did 30 years ago. Between 1987 and 2004, the population in the western Hudson Bay region declined to approximately 950 animals from 1,200, says Stirling, who will share his expertise about the polar predators in April as part of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society speaker series.

Based in part on Stirling's research, the Polar Bear Specialist Group of The World Conservation Union, of which Stirling is a member, recommended in 2005 that polar bears be classified as “vulnerable.” And last December, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

While he grew up in Kimberley, B.C., and spent most of his career tracking polar bears throughout the Arctic, Stirling got his start studying seals in Antarctica as a doctoral student at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the late 1960s. The experience he gained there opened up research opportunities in the Canadian North when he returned to Canada in 1970.

Stirling downplays his accomplishments and adventures as one of the world's leading polar bear researchers, but his work has thrown him into some extraordinary situations. In his 1998 book, Polar Bears, he recounts how he performed artificial respiration for nearly three hours when a bear he had tranquilized stopped breathing, a rare occurrence. (“And just how do you give artificial respiration to a polar bear?” he writes. “Mouth to mouth? Not quite. You lay the bear on its side, take a handful of fur over the rib cage, and lift.”) Then there was the day, in the early 1970s, when Stirling entered a bear den thinking it was unoccupied and came face to face with an adult male — the largest recorded in Canada at the time, weighing 660 kilograms.

Stirling will appear on April 18 and 19 at Ottawa's Centrepointe Theatre. For more information, see the Lectures section of this website.

Monique Roy-Sole

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Heather Penner spent her summer vacation last year snorkelling with belugas — for a good cause. If the Brandon University geography student has her way, visitors to Churchill, Man., will soon be able to observe the whales in their natural habitat without altering the animals' behaviour.

The high concentration of belugas in the Seal, Nelson and Churchill river estuaries during their spring migration to western Hudson Bay has made whale-watching the region's fastest-growing tourist attraction. But there are no protocols in place in Churchill to prevent boats from veering too close.

With funding from The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, Penner set out to measure the distance between the animals and the boats, monitoring clusters of whales and recording their actions.

She found that juvenile animals are more likely to approach tour boats, but they risk being injured because "they're big mammals, and it's hard for them to move out of the way quickly," says Penner. "We want a more controlled environment, such as a travelling corridor, where tour boats move in straight lines." Penner will present her research to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, which plans to review its marine-mammalwatching regulations.

Ashlee Starratt

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Karen Lochhead (LEFT) and Michael Schmidt (RIGHT, at left) received the Camsell Award for outstanding service.

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Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean took along a little light reading for his 13-day mission aboard the space shuttle Atlantis last September. A mountain enthusiast, MacLean packed the Sept/Oct 2001 issue of Canadian Geographic in his official flying kit, which also included a rock from the summit of Mount Everest and a hand-embroidered crest from Grise Fiord, Nunavut, which is north of Devon Island and home to the Haughton Crater, a site used for Mars research. CG hovers in front of the commander’s window (above), 220 nautical miles from Earth, with the Canadarm2 in the background. On his most recent journey, his second time in space, MacLean became the first Canadian to operate the Canadarm2 in space and the second Canadian to walk in space.

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