Polar bear makes presence known in Churchill

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This article was published 20/10/2022 (1369 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Residents in two northern Manitoba communities have become even more bear aware, after close encounters with polar bears in recent days.

A woman in Churchill posted a video she took of an adult bear somewhere in the town, banging its nose repeatedly against the main floor window of an apartment building early Wednesday.

“Was scared, looked out my window at 4 a.m., wasn’t expecting this,” Sylvia Beardy said with the video she posted on Facebook and which quickly went viral in the community.

The bear, in the almost minute-long video, was standing outside the building and was so tall its head was halfway up the window. It kept looking in and hitting the window with its snout, before walking off to the street.

At the end of the video, someone off-screen fires some type of pyrotechnic device, likely to scare the bear away.

The video comes just days after the province said a large adult polar bear was captured Tuesday at Shamattawa First Nation and released on the coast of Hudson Bay, after wandering around the community for days.

Shamattawa is more than 100 kilometres away from the coast of Hudson Bay.

Drew Hamilton of Discover Churchill, one of several companies which drive tourists around for polar bear encounters, said he has seen the video.

“It is going around up here,” Hamilton said Thursday. “But residents here are pretty well polar bear aware.

“When I walk out of my house — even if just to walk the dog — I have bear deterrent with me. The people who live here deal with it fairly regularly,” he said. “We are called the polar bear capital of the world.”

Hamilton said the polar bears may be out on the ice during the winter months, but the rest of the year, many of them hang around Churchill, especially in the boulders and rocks near the edge of the water where they swim to stay cool.

“We have lots of tourists up here now and they do things which residents would never do,” he said.

“You will see some going up and over the rocks — a resident here would never do that. You could go over one rock and there’s a polar bear hiding on the other side. You couldn’t pay me to go on those rocks.”

Hamilton said most residents take either bear spray or some type of device that makes a loud noise when they venture outside.

“You just have to be ready. You don’t get too far from your vehicle. It’s what people just get used to doing here.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca