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Day 2: Churchill

Mark Lender with Polar Bear

Mark Lender sees Polar Bear

Polar Bear looking for food

Day 2:  Churchill, Canada

 
The bear perambulates the perimeter with a mild curiosity, looking occasionally, vaguely, towards where I stand.  He lies down like a big white dog.  Gets up. Sits down in the grass.  Turns and yawns… As if there is no one there. Certainly, he knows exactly where I am.  And yet, though he sees at least as well in daylight as a human being, if I did not know better I would tell you I have not been seen.  That is his sine qua non:  Apparent disinterest.  When in fact he is aware of every smallest thing. Invincibility is a very particular thing.

 

Day 1, Churchill

Standing Polar Bear coming toward Mark Lender

 

Polar Bear on the rocks

 

Large Polar Bear on rocks with Mark Lender

 

Day 1:  Churchill, Canada

The length of day misleads.  What looks and feels like a coastal summer 6 PM anywhere between Boston and Ventura is closer to 9.  Only come 10 o’clock does night at last arrive and even then, for a long time still the quality of the sky is twilight.

Likewise Polar Bears mislead.  What is big – bigger than you would believe if you have not seen it for yourself – is also remarkably calm.  Why shouldn’t he, the biggest thing around and this he knows, and only the others of his kind worthy of consideration.  He looks at you with soft eyes that belie intention and that intention is this:  Everything he sees, is food. Including you.

Here on the seal river, Churchill Wild provides two guides with every party out on foot.  Terry in the back, Andy in front, both of them with pistols that fire screamers, and flares that explode load as a shotgun.  And if that fails, there are the shotguns. But what keeps us safe is their expertise, not the armament.  They know the bears, the bears know them and by long association what the limits are.  And the beneficiary of this is me, and you, close up and personal, with a creature most of us never get to see at all.

 

Oak Hammock Marsh

Migrating Western Kingbirds
Three Western Kingbirds in Oak Hammock Marsh near Winnipeg

 

Leopard Frog in Oak Hammock Marsh
Leopard Frog

 

Boy catching frog
Eliot, my toad catcher with a Yellowbear

 

Oak Hammock Marsh

The land around Winnipeg gives “flat” a new meaning, and the meaning is pavement.  But if you head north and keep on going you come to marshland that at once justifies that evened landscape, and explains what once might have been. The place is called Oak Hammock Marsh.  Migratory birds make their rest stop here.  I may have seen the beginnings of that, these juvenile Western Kingbirds all together on one branch. Perhaps too young to know I am by definition a threat, they looked and looked and did not fly away.  But the great show was on the ground.  Leopard frogs  – appropriately spotted as their name implies, and the size of two victorious fingers.  Canadian toads, small enough to fit comfortably on a copper Loonie, with jewel-like markings and deep all-seeing eyes. I was able to photograph the toads with the help of my intrepid assistant Eliot, A/K/A The Dreaded Wild Canadian Boy, whose gentle, frog-catching skills were unparalleled.

[Author’s Note:  After their respective photo-ops, all frogs and boy were returned safely to their respective homes.]

Going to the Hudson’s Bay

2 Great Egrets

The Last Arctic Voyage

© 2011 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

In 36 hours – less now – I will be leaving for the Arctic.  I’ve gained a new appreciation for my predecessors, Mackenzie, Bering, Franklin, Shackleton – they are many and not all of them faired well.  The high latitudes are an unforgiving place even now in what passes for summer.  If you fall into the water and do not drown, you will freeze.  But my risks are slight compared to theirs and I am not likely to lose my fingers or parts of my face to frostbite.  Not yet.  If as planned I return in winter, there are cautions to be observed that are more severe.  No matter:  Unlike Nansen I will not freeze my ship into the ice or set out on foot with a single companion. As much planning as this has taken and as tired out as I am it is nothing compared to what was required to pack – everything – for a voyage lasting years.  The men who were the first where the most brave.  Bravest of them all were the Inuit who crossed into terra incognita in the true sense, into a land where no human being had ever been, cleaved to the thin ground at the breaking edge of ice towering a mile into the air, cleaving off with the force and roar of an exploding volcano, following the game, and beyond that having no idea what they would find or where they end up.

Here is my only claim:  These were the first.  It is likely that I am among the last. The tundra is not just melting. It is burning.  What more warning do we need?  I am reminded of the spiritual, written by women and men who, though chained in slavery, knew the truth:

God gave Noah
The Rainbow sign,
Won’t be the water but the Fire
Next Time.

The bird in the photo above is a Great Egret. They stay here in New England later and later every year, this past winter well into November.  Perhaps they know something we do not…

 

In the field: Sea Otter

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In the Field: Sea Otter

© 2011 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

Sea Otter, floating, flat on his back, (feet straight out at a slightly knock-kneed angle), paws folded on his chest, like Charlie Chaplin at his Silent best. Rafting together with all the others he lazes into the hazy morning shift, in sixes and eights, fours and fives and a dozen. Then, buoyant as butter, all drift apart. Sea Otter, that fur bundle, soft and wet and lumpy as a bag of spuds.

As the warmth of the morning paints the bay, otters rub their eyes awake and begin their ablutions. Old Boys dignified of demeanor, widely mustachioed under the nose like the off-white foam of an oversized cappuccino; Subadults, a sophomore class not yet mature enough to sport mustaches of their own; Semi-delinquent Juveniles, rambunctious, rough -wrestling the peace and quiet into turbulent foam. No one seems to mind, it is not Discipline but Clean that is Sea Otter’s credo.

Paws scrub and brush with great dexterity. Even behind the ears and in them, legs and backs and bellies, and under the chin. Arms and elbows; noses and the webbing between the toes. Formidable teeth are flossed bright by fingers brushing like toothbrushes. From the back of the neck to those broad hind feet chewed in the mouth like mukluk leather, not a centimeter is neglected.

In water hovering near 40 degrees (even with the thickest coat known to Nature) after a few hours an otter starts to freeze. The need to maintain Body heat fuels an otter’s hunger, and throughout the day drives him to dive in forests of green kelp and golden water, there to wrest his dinner from the bottom of the sea.

Sea Otter bobs to the surface with his breakfast.  With the most ancient of tools  – the anvilstone balanced on his belly and the hammer of his arms – he will part any shellfish from its flesh. Each otter is a specialist, some preferring crabs, others eating only sea urchins. Many take only sea clams broad as a hat brim, quickly cracked open, chewed and swallowed, then down again for more.

Kelp, the source of all this richness owes its life to Sea Otter. Without him urchins multiply unrestrained, consuming everything, ruling again where they have not ruled in four hundred million years. Even the kelp disappears, forcing evolution back from where it came. If the otter dies out, the Past becomes the Present; a time and place in which humanity played no part, transformed into a Future you don’t want to know.

 

Mark reading “Sea Otter” on Living On Earth on NPR:

Audio MP3

 

Back Story: A conversation with Mark about his field work on Sea Otters:

Audio MP3

 
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Otter Using Anvilstone in Kelp


* * *
FIELD NOTES:
As part of the research for this story I interviewed Tim Tinker, who is an internationally known expert on the southern sea otter. We were outside Elkhorn Slough, a large marsh complex on Monterey Bay. It was early and the otter raft was just breaking up to return to foraging. He told me how the otters keep the sea urchins in check and how, where the otters have been killed off, the urchins have obliterated the kelp bed and all the life that depends upon it vanishes. Urchin barrens are a type of sea floor that has not existed for 400 million years, not since the Ordovician. That makes sea otters unique. As well as being driven mostly by climate, to evolve, they are themselves a force in evolution: Climate’s partner. For a long time we watched the youngsters wrestle and tussle and dunk each other like kids in the municipal pool until hunger finally overcame the need to play, and they followed their uncles and fathers and older brothers down the channel, and out to the kelp beds to feed.

 
Tim Tinker on otters & biodiversity:

Audio MP3