#Churchill polar bears

[travelernight]

Ultimate Canada Journey: 10 Stops You Need to Make

[highways-are-liminal-spaces]

Churchill highlights —Day 1, with Nanuk Operations

Taken November 2024

[unbfacts]

[littlepawz]

In Churchill, Manitoba (Northern Canada), one of the few towns where polar bears roam freely, it is common (and strongly encouraged) for residents to leave their car doors unlocked. This practice is not due to negligence but is instead a crucial safety measure - in the event of an unexpected encounter with one of these massive predators, the person can quickly seek shelter in a nearby vehicle. Known as the "Polar Bear Capital of the World," Churchill faces unique challenges in coexisting with wildlife, prompting the community to adopt unusual strategies in effort to ensure the safety of people, as well as of wildlife.

[vox-anglosphere]

Wildlife

[sitting-on-me-bum]

A polar bear wanders around the Tundra Buggy Lodge at Cape Churchill, overlooking Hudson Bay.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAISY GILARDINI

[kaelula-sungwis]

🇨🇦🐻‍❄️🐻‍❄️🐻‍❄️ by Dave Wong Via Flickr: Family portrait of twin polar bear cubs with mom :)

[mum-earth]

In Churchill, Canada, one of the few towns where polar bears roam freely, it is common for residents to leave their car doors unlocked. This practice is not due to negligence but is instead a crucial safety measure: in the event of an unexpected encounter with one of these massive predators, anyone can quickly seek shelter in a nearby vehicle. Known as the "Polar Bear Capital of the World," Churchill faces unique challenges in coexisting with wildlife, prompting the community to adopt unusual strategies to ensure the safety of both residents and visitors.

Credits: Conocimientum

[notbornwithit]

Churchill, MB August 2022

[withaninotay]

so apparently I'm going to lean into the Churchill MB metaphor.

Just keep the door unlocked, you never know when you might save something amazing.

#onions

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

[le-agent-egg]

omg… canadian mondo would live in churchill i think… northern manitoba… taka would live in ottawa… southernish ontario…

[highways-are-liminal-spaces]

A large male Polar Bear passes through the trees, Churchill, MB

Taken November 2024

[littlepawz]

Polar bear under the Northern Lights