The Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police service, warned residents this weekend that a polar bear had been spotted near the town of Madeleine-Center – the first time the Arctic’s predatory spot had been spotted in the community. The bear is believed to have wandered off the sea ice north of the community, but would need to swim sections of the St Lawrence River to reach the northern tip of the Gaspé Peninsula. He was shot Sunday morning – a result that experts say was inevitable. “The moment I heard about where this bear was, I thought, ‘This is a dead bear,’” said Andrew Derocher, a professor of biology at the University of Alberta. “I was worried he would show up somewhere he shouldn’t, cause trouble and be shot.” Map Officials sent drones and a helicopter to help locate the bear. “We work with a lot of things, we work with elk, with deer, with black bears, with everything, but we never dealt with a polar bear,” Sylvain Marois, area commander at the Quebec Wildlife Service, told the Canadian Press. . Derocher, who has spent the past few weeks watching polar bears over the sea ice in Hudson Bay with his research team, said meetings like this are extremely rare and difficult to schedule. “These bears have never been found there in modern history, so this is not something I think wildlife services can prepare for.” In recent years, sea ice levels across the Arctic have become increasingly volatile and unpredictable – a challenge for polar bears, which rely on vast expanses of ice for winter and spring. “We’re seeing more bears spending more time on land – including places they’ve never seen before,” said Geoff York, chief executive of Polar Bears International. “The deck is really being rebuilt for polar bears – they have less consistency and variability. “Things that may have worked for them in the past do not work for them today.” Bears who spend more time on earth mean the likelihood of encounters with communities only increases, Derocher said. “I can not draw a straight line between climate change and events like this. But in general… these events happen more and more often. And we anticipate that they will become more common. “ But successfully capturing and relocating a bear can cost tens of thousands of dollars and require the proper equipment, which officials at the Madeleine-Center did not have access to. While the shooting made headlines across the country, Derocher points out that Inuit and First Nations hunters catch more than 500 polar bears each year. “It’s a sustainable crop and we’re not really looking at it. It may sound a little harsh, but this is a bear that got into a place where it could not stay. “There were too many risk issues.” Maintenance officers could wait hours for the necessary equipment – but the risk to the community was too great, York said. “The last thing one of these conservation officers wanted to do was put down a bear,” he said. “They just try to keep people safe and ideally they try to keep wildlife safe when they can.
