Manitoba, Canada Home To "Bearly" Believable Experience
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NY1’s Valarie D’Elia went on a trip to that was “bearly” believable and filed the following Travel with Val report. Kathy Shively of Reno, Nevada, did not simply take a tundra buggy tour of polar bears in sub-arctic Canada, she checked it off her bucket list.
“I’m just so excited,” said Shively.
“I’ve enjoyed watching and seeing the bears, but seeing the joy it brings my wife is even better,” said her husband Bruce Shively.
“This is actually the only place that you can see polar bears up close in the wild,” said Alicia Shelley of Polar Bears International.
You can thank the special eco-system of the sub-arctic Hudson Bay for that.
“The bears will stay on the ice and move to where it melts last, right in this area,” said Frontiers North tour leader Hayley Shephard. “And the fact that they return, here, linger here and wait for that ice.”
As a result of global warming, experts say hungry-for-seal bears are waiting longer for the ice to freeze.
“They have lost about three weeks of hunting time and the population has dropped from 1,200 to 900,” said Shelley.
Despite that ominous decline, there was no shortage of bears on our trip.
“They’ve been coming at us one after another all day,” said tour-goer Barry Lane of Quebec City.
They provided a veritable field day for photographers of all levels.
“I’d have to say that this is one of the top five experiences that I have ever gone out and shot,” said Alison Wright, a photographer with National Geographic.
“I’ve got some images in my mind that I’ll always have,” said Shively.
Whether you capture it with a lens or your mind’s eye, you are bound to take home once-in-a-lifetime memories.
“We saw a mother with two cubs, which is getting to be rare now, coming across,” said one tour-goer. “So the story of the three bears, we had it.”
But this isn’t a fairytale, it’s reality – a sometimes harsh one.
"It does put it into perspective that you realize this might not be around for that much longer, or as long as we would like it, unless we hopefully do something about it in our own backyard,” said tour-goer Christal Kuiper of Toronto.
In Part II of her report, Val looks at how to plan a trip to see the polar bears. .