2018/10 Churchill trip - Churchill Tundra - 1 |
|||||||
Churchill Tundra 1 |
|||||||
Monday August 22nd
It was snowing gently as we walked across to breakfast, still in the dark. Breakfast was chaotic. The restaurant and bar had been combined into a single breakfast buffet with over a hundred people milling around. Someone had forgotten to tell our group that tables were reserved for specific groups. I went to get food just as Sandie was told that she was at the wrong table, and then she was moved on again. By the time she found our table she felt she had to stay there as I‘d never know where to go. This wouldn’t have mattered if the kitchen hadn’t kept running out of food. As one of the Swiss members of our group put it, at the top of his voice, “Zerr ees no fud!” A long time later I made it to the table and then Sandie went through the same experience. We were about the last to leave, the last to get on the bus that took us to the buggy dock, and the last to get on the tundra buggy.
The tundra buggies have large wheels with knobbly tyres. They seat forty guests and a driver, all under cover, and they have an open deck behind, high enough to be above the bears. The front windows tend to fog up so there’s little advantage to the front seats. The top pane of the side windows slides down for photography at the expense of wind, cold, and snow. No one takes a coat off. As last on, we had the back seat, just in front of the kitchen cupboards and across from the toilet. We had three rows of windows we could access and, as closest to the back door, I was usually the first out the back door onto the deck, so we’d lucked into the best photographic position.
Buggies have a large diesel with four gears, but our driver only used bottom gear, about 4-5 mph. We were driving on tracks across the tundra, sometimes through ponds. The most important rule was not to stand up while the buggy was moving. Even so, it was sometimes difficult not to fall out of our seats.
 |
Tundra Buggy (0.56) |
 |
|---|
Neil was our driver. His other job is as a raft guide in Jasper, on the Athabasca. He lives in Tete Jaune Cache, though he insists on calling it Teet John; as he said, privately, “We don’t have any French in town so we can pronounce it however we like.” Our group was mainly North American, with eight Swiss and some Japanese and French.
We were following trails in the Wildlife Management Area to the east of town and close to Hudson Bay. Off to our east was Wapusk national park, home to a caribou herd and the denning areas for pregnant polar bears. The terrain was mostly flat with shallow ponds, partly frozen, patches of willow /and thin straggly white spruce, and low winding ridges, possibly eskers from some ancient glacier.
|
First Bears (3.15) |
 |
|---|
We were all on the lookout for bears and it didn’t take long to find our first, though it was far away and lying in a heap, Our second, a few
minutes later, was a little closer and standing up, but after a while it too lay down. Neil would move on as soon
as we stopped clicking at a distant bear, “There’ll be closer bears”.
And there were. This bear was asleep amongst the willows alongside the trail. It woke up, checked us out, and put its head back down.
The bears have little to do. They are not actively hunting anything on land and it’s doubtful whether they’d get enough payback from hunting down ptarmigan or arctic hares even if they could catch them. They aren’t fast enough swimmers to hunt seals in the water. Sometimes they’ll be lucky enough to catch a seal that’s fallen asleep on a rock and not noticed that the tide’s gone out. Tides around Churchill can be 15 feet, which really surprised us. Maybe that’s 
the incentive for the bears to go on patrol: there’s always the chance of something.
There were plenty of snowshoe-size bear tracks to be seen, interesting and exciting to us safely in our buggies, but a terrifying sight if you were trying to walk across this country.
Like on any safari trip, there was a fair amount of radio chit chat between drivers, some of it in code, to stop the competition from benefitting. An “Einstein” is an MC2, a Mother Cubs 2. But anytime there are a couple of buggies stopped together, it’s worth going over there to see what’s going on. Our company has the most buggies; we were #17. Their term “tundra buggy” is 
trademarked so the competition has to use other names.
The weather was reasonable for us, around 0C, windy with snow showers, a bit warm for the bears. We’d been worried that falling snow might wipe out our view, but Neil said that a complete white-out is rare.
|
Tundra Lodge (0.24) |
 |
|---|
We drove around the company’s lodge. Each fall, these lodge components are towed out onto the tundra by buggies and then assembled into a train of bedrooms, dining cars, kitchens, and bathrooms. Guests have the advantage of being able to look out at bears from their bedrooms (on the left). Bears like the lodges too, as they smell offood and humans. Tours that included a lodge stay were a couple of days longer than ours and cost about twice what we paid.
This picture shows why radio collars don’t work for male bears. They do for females as their necks are thinner than their heads. Radio ear tags work but can’t transmit as many signals. The picture also shows the bear eating. Neil said that they eat 
vegetable matter but no one’s sure why as they need meat and fat to survive. He said it was kale, but even though kale is a tough plant it isn’t native to the Arctic so we doubted this. He also referred to it as kelp and that seemed likely along a shore line with 15 foot tides, but not as far inland as we were. It remains a mystery. Bears that live further north with year-round ice don’t eat any veggies.
Neil would find us a bear, like this one, to watch at close range and then serve up a hot drink, soup, and sandwich, tasty and good enough for this type of trip. We were there for the bears, not gourmet food.
The bears have a predator’s mouth, with incisors clearly evolved to grab and shred flesh. Unlike grizzlies and black bears they don’t eat grass, so they 
don’t need grinding molars. They have beautiful eyes, but they are best gazed into at a distance. Their fur is not white like that of an arctic fox but rather a creamy colour.
Does a bear shit in the woods? Obviously not in this case; polar bears have 
to use the tundra. Maybe this is a clue to why they eat veggies, just to keep the digestive system going until they chomp onto their first seal of the season.
We were stuck in a buggy jam when this bear strolled between the buggies 
checking us out. I reckoned it was coming around the rear corner of our bus, so I switched to my little wide-angle camera and hung out over the back rail waiting for it. I’d guessed right and it came around the corner but with one fluid lunge it was standing up next to me. I got this one shot before retreating.
The guy with the camera got a great video before scrambling out of the way.
|
Bears around buggy (8.35) |
 |
|---|
The bear then strolled over to the next buggy, #1, the original, which is now a scientific lab, picking up signals from tagged bears and 
streaming polar bear video. After checking out the buggy’s undercarriage the bear rolled around in the willows having a good scratch, mostly hidden by the 
buggy. We drove around and there was the bear at its most cuddly
.
|
Afternoon bears (17.24) |
 |
|---|
This last bear of the day was furiously digging, looking for veggies and giving us a comical picture.
We returned to the buggy dock and our bus, arriving at the inn before dark. We’d heard that the Dancing Bear had a restaurant and bar but we couldn’t drink wine with our meal so we two little bears danced over to the Tundra Inn again.