Canadian police have shot and killed a polar bear that roams a community in Quebec hundreds of kilometers south of the species’ normal territory, in an incident that experts warn could become more frequent as sea ice cover becomes more frequent. unpredictable due to global warming.
The Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police service, warned residents this weekend that polar bears had been spotted near the town of Madeleine Center – the first time a predator on top of the Arctic had been spotted in the community.
The bear is thought to have roamed the sea ice north of the community, but had to cross parts of the St. Lawrence River to reach the northern end of the Gaspe Peninsula.
He was shot dead Sunday morning – experts say the result is inevitable.
“The moment I heard about this bear, I thought it was a dead bear,” said Andrew Derocher, a professor of biology at the University of Alberta. “I was worried that he would show up somewhere he shouldn’t be, create a problem and get shot.”
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Authorities sent drones and a helicopter to help find the bear.
“We work with a lot of things, we work with moose, with deer, with black bears, with everything, but we’ve never dealt with a polar bear,” Sylvain Maroa, district commander at the Quebec Wildlife Protection Agency, told Canadian Press. .
Derosher, who has spent the past few weeks tracking polar bears over sea ice in Hudson Bay with his research team, said such encounters are extremely rare and difficult to plan.
“These bears have never been there in modern history before, so that’s not something I think wildlife agencies can prepare for.
In recent years, Arctic sea ice levels have become increasingly volatile and unpredictable – a challenging reality for polar bears, which rely on the vast ice sheet for their winter and spring food.
“We see more bears spending more time on land – including places they haven’t seen before,” said Jeff York, senior director of Polar Bears International. “The deck is really rearranging for the polar bears – they have less consistency and variability. Things that may have worked for them in the past don’t work for them today. ”
Bears that spend more time on land mean the likelihood of meeting with communities is only increasing, Deroscher said.
“I can’t draw a straight line between climate change and events like this. But in general … these events are happening more and more often. And we predict that they will become more frequent. “
But successfully capturing and relocating a bear can cost tens of thousands of dollars and requires appropriate equipment that Madeleine-Center employees do not have access to.
While the shooting became a nationwide headline, Derosher said Inuit and first-nation hunters gather more than 500 polar bears each year.
“It’s a sustainable harvest, and we’re not really paying attention to it. It may sound a little callous, but this is a bear that has landed in a place where it cannot stay. There were too many risky problems. “
Conservation workers could wait hours for the necessary equipment – but the risk to the community was too great, York said.
“The last thing one of these conservationists wanted to do was kill a bear,” he said. “They’re just trying to keep people safe, and ideally they’re trying to preserve wildlife when they can.
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