The Ragged Edge of the World (26 page)

Wade has observed that the bears they've encountered recently have been thinner than in the past. Little wonder: In normal times, they would go on the ice and feed until late July or early August before having to leave for their annual summer sleep in peat dens on terra firma. (Ian Stirling, a noted polar bear expert, told me that some of the dens show evidence of having been used for hundreds of years.) The ice now forms later and melts earlier, and summer has lengthened from two to four months. Consequently the bears sometimes don't get out onto the ice until New Year's and then have to come ashore in early June. This means less time feeding and more time burning stored fuel.

This is an entirely different adaptation from that of more northern polar bears. Their strategy is to go onto the polar ice when they mature, and to stay on it, retreating north with it as it melts in the summer. Land is for breeding and rearing the young. Warming has created a different set of problems for these bears. For instance, in the late 1990s the ice retreated north of Wrangel Island before cubs were old enough to go out on the pack ice. This forced mother bears and cubs into close quarters with mating marine mammals, and reportedly created sheer mayhem as the upended cycles of predator and prey left them together when they should have been hundreds of miles apart.

The cold calculus of the lower Hudson Bay bears' adaptation leaves little margin for error. On average a bear loses 2.2 pounds a day once it leaves the ice—not a huge problem for a 1,200-pound male, who might lose 200 pounds during three months off the ice. That same weight loss is very significant for a 300-pound cub or a smaller female with cubs.

Bears are quite adaptable, but the challenge posed by global warming is not a simple matter of finding a new food source. For instance, it takes ten to fourteen days to shut down a bear's digestive system during estivation, the summertime version of hibernating. If the bear starts eating blueberries or scavenging seal carcasses at times when it would ordinarily be estivating, it delays that shutdown, leaving the animal in the worst of positions, as it will continue to lose weight on this low-quality, intermittent diet, while not having the benefit of the 10 to 15 percent daily energy savings it would achieve if it simply went to sleep for the summer. Still, the bears are trying to get by; while in Churchill, I heard reports of female bears hunting during the summer, a behavior that had not been previously observed.

These animals might be trying to adapt, but as of my visit their strategies were not working. The survival rate of cubs had dropped to below 50 percent from nearly 75 percent. Bears that used to breed every two years were now breeding every third year—a reproductive rate more typical of northern polar bears. Brood sizes were smaller as well.

Local entrepreneurs confirmed the grim picture described by wildlife officials and scientists. Mike Macri, who at that point had been running whale-watching and bear-watching tours out of Churchill for thirty-five years, confirmed that bears had started hunting in summer, saying that he had reports of bears killing seals that had become marooned on rocks. He'd also seen bears switching from hunting ringed seals to preying on bearded seals, deep divers that are better adapted than ringed seals to floe ice. The big bears are highly motivated to find a way to survive.

While I was visiting Mike's office I noticed a photograph of a polar bear standing nose-to-nose with a sled dog. It looked as if the huge bear was about to have a snack, but Mike explained that, in fact, the two were friends. The female bear's route onto the ice took her directly past the dog, and the dog had reacted (either stupidly or brilliantly) with a playful attitude, and, incredibly, the wild bear had responded in kind. Apparently the bear would break her trek onto the ice to stop by and see the dog.

Mike had other unusual animal stories. My trip to Churchill coincided with the annual migration of beluga whales up the mouth of the Churchill River. The highly social whales, with their distinctive melon-shaped forehead (essentially a sonar dome), followed the spawning capelins. Mike was taking out a group and invited me to go along.

As we entered the river on his boat, we picked our way past a regatta of brilliant white ice floes and encountered a sea of belugas. Mike lowered a hydrophone into the water so that we could hear the incessant chatter of the whales. He is convinced that the whales are highly intelligent and use their extraordinary communication abilities not just for echolocation but also to convey information. For instance, he believes that the whales had figured out that the watchman at a whorehouse on the coast was alerting hunters to their presence, and they would vacate the river whenever they saw him.

He also told a story suggesting that the whales could distinguish between human friends and foes. Once, when a beluga had become entangled in a monofilament Arctic net, Mike jumped into the water to set the animal free; remarkably it didn't struggle as he cut the net away from its teeth and around its eyes. “If it struggled I would have lost a finger,” said Mike. “In fact I have lost two fingers, but that's another story.” Once he cut a large enough hole in the net, the beluga swam calmly away. It seemed to know he was being helpful despite the fact that he was approaching it with a large knife. I've subsequently heard similar stories about humpback and sperm whales, so I'm open to Mike's interpretation.

The Churchill residents I spoke with offered varying opinions about global warming. All had noticed a change, but a few wondered whether it reflected normal variations in climate. One group, however—the Hudson Bay Port Company—was prepared to take advantage of the warming. About 600 miles of flat land separated Churchill from Canada's grain belt, and if global warming doubled the window of time during which the port could remain open to shipping, it was preparing to benefit.

I sought out several longtime port employees for their opinion. Allen Johnson fit the bill, having worked in the port for thirty years. He said that he started noticing change roughly around 1980. Churchill's propinquity to the grain belt made it more attractive than Vancouver on the Pacific or Thunder Bay on Lake Superior—but only if Hudson Bay stayed clear of ice during the harvest season, so that shippers did not have to use expensive ships clad to protect against ice. “The harvest comes off in August and September,” he said, “so there's a huge advantage to us if the normal shipping season extends into November.” At that point the window for non-iceclad ships was from July 20 to October 31. Johnson also saw great potential for the port in shipping copper, zinc and nickel extracted from Canada's vast interior. He speculated that there would be even bigger opportunities if the Northwest Passage was navigable, which would put Churchill in a very favored position to ship to Asia.

Subsequently, the Northwest Passage has opened up, a development no one would have predicted as recently as 1970. Explorers since the time of Sebastian Cabot have dreamed of a route between Europe and Asia that would not involve a detour of thousands of miles, either around the southern end of South America or through the Mediterranean (with the opening of the Suez Canal). That prize is now at hand, though it is the result of the nightmare of human-caused global warming.

The price of this newly opened route will be steep. Apart from starving polar bears, disoriented birds, scrambled predator-prey relationships, melting permafrost, and innumerable other symptoms of ecosystem chaos, the economic consequences of climate change could overwhelm any narrow geographic advantage that it makes possible. It doesn't really benefit a town like Churchill to be in an ideal place for transcontinental shipping if global trade itself faces collapse.

Y
ellowstone Park today is a very different place from the park I trekked through in 1992 looking for wolves. As I write this there are over 1,500 wolves in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Since the reintroduction of 66 animals in 1995, after a seventy-year absence, the wolves have had a profound impact on America's greatest wild preserve. Elk, which had become relaxed about most predators before the wolf returned, have changed their behavior, and this in turn has relieved some pressure on seasonal plants. Coyote numbers have been cut in half.

In the fall of 1992, just as the U.S. government was preparing to reintroduce gray wolves to Yellowstone, a hunter shot what looked like a wolf just south of the park. This caused an uproar, not so much because the hunter might have shot an endangered species, but because the very indication of the presence of wolves in Yellowstone would pose a huge bureaucratic problem. If the wolves had indeed managed to make it back to Yellowstone on their own, it mooted an arduously crafted management plan to install a new population of the animals.

I was told about this killing by Renee Askins, who then ran the Wolf Fund, an NGO she had set up to promote the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone. Renee is smart, telegenic and very persuasive, and she played as big a role as anyone in lifting the profile of the issue to the point where the government had to act. As for myself, I came to the story agnostic on whether it was better to reintroduce wolves or hope they would recolonize the park on their own, and saw the killing of this particular animal as a perfect opportunity to frame the issues swirling around wolves and Yellowstone. And so in late October, I set off with Bill Campbell, a
Time
photographer with whom I'd done a number of stories; Dan Sholley, the chief ranger of the park; and Mike, his assistant, on a horseback trip into the most remote area of the park to determine whether there was any more evidence of wolves. We found only one ambiguous footprint, but in the course of this trip I made other discoveries, unexpected and inspiring.

At 2.3 million acres, Yellowstone is the largest park in the United States. It's also the centerpiece of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, an 18-million-acre expanse that encompasses six national forests, two wildlife refuges and two national parks (Yellowstone and Grand Teton), as well as Native American territories and some private lands. It is the largest intact temperate ecosystem in the world, though “intact” has become a relative term since a number of invasive species now threaten the region. For instance, its meadows are being overtaken by thistle—an introduced species—and Yellowstone Lake's native fish are being crowded out by lake trout, also introduced.

Yellowstone is also the oldest park in the United States, established by an act of Congress in 1872. It came into existence partly as the result of lobbying by railroad companies. The railroads were looking for attractions (such as Old Faithful) to tempt tourists to travel to the West on their newly laid tracks. The potential park's other big asset, stressed frequently during congressional hearings at the time, was that the land had “no economic value.”

The park is indeed remote. A place called the Thorofare (so named because Native Americans used it as a migratory route before the arrival of the Europeans) in the southeast part of Yellowstone is more than 30 miles from the nearest road in every direction, making it the most remote place in the lower forty-eight states. If there exists a part of this country where wolves could live without being spotted by humans, this was it. From a wolf's point of view, finding itself in Yellowstone in the early 1990s would be akin to the first European's discovering North America, a boundless cornucopia with giant trees and limitless game.

Dan set up a route that took us from the Heart Lake trailhead up onto the Two Oceans Plateau and then down into the Thorofare. For Dan, the trip was all business. As chief park ranger, he gets pressure from all sides—from conservationists with conflicting views on how to balance access with the needs of the park's species and ecosystems, from the many commercial interests who make their living off the park, and from outfitters and snowmobilers who covet Yellowstone for very different reasons than the environmentalists do. Dan handled these pressures with diplomacy and humor. He looked every bit the ranger out of central casting—square-jawed and easy in the saddle. Still, this little expedition was anything but casual.

If we did in fact find evidence of wolves, both Dan and the wolves would face a problem. For one thing, the animals would have absolute protection under the Endangered Species Act. While good for individual wolves, this would cause problems for human-wolf relations because the plan worked out for reintroduction of the animals included provisions for killing the predators should they venture off the reservation and start taking livestock. More than any other animal in the American West, the wolf has evoked irrational loathing among ranchers, and this so-called predator paranoia made and continues to make the reintroduction of the animals a matter of delicate diplomacy.

For me the trip was a twofold adventure. On the one hand, I had the rare privilege of traveling through what is arguably the most glorious wilderness in America. On a more personal level, I was about to renew my relationship with horses after a fifteen-year hiatus, and my last horseback outing had not ended happily. I had been riding in Asheville, North Carolina, when my mount decided to bolt. He took off like a rocket, trying to scrape me off by running through an apple orchard. I managed to stay on only by virtually gluing myself to the horse's neck. After that experience I was happy to let horses pursue their thing while I took a different path. Now I was back in the saddle. Sure enough, not an hour into this expedition, Prince (who was anything but) got spooked and took off through the scrub pine of this part of Yellowstone.

This time, however, I was better prepared. I'd been told that the trick was to reach up and grab one of the reins just below the bit and pull the horse's head hard to the left or right. The horse is going to go where his head is pointing, and if that means a sudden turn to the left or right, it's going to slow down. So that's what I did when Prince rocketed through the trees. To my (and probably Prince's) astonishment, it actually worked.