Last month, a wildlife biologist for the federal government took a phone call from a manmade island north of Alaska, where a polar bear had emerged from a snow drift perhaps 6-10 feet deep on top of the artificial ground.
It wasn't a joke. An ENI Petroleum worker called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on March 18 to report the sighting on Spy Island, an offshore drill site a few miles off the Beaufort Sea coast near Ooliktok Point. Christopher Putnam, a marine mammals biologist for USFWS, was dispatched to the icy North Slope. The 50 or so construction workers had been moving equipment onto and off of the island by ice road from the coast. Putnam's job was to make sure that the manmade island and all manmade products -- foods, waste, fuels, trash -- were secured from the federally-protected animal, which had denned there sometime in late October to give birth, unbeknownst to wildlife officials or work crews.
In less than 12 hours, Spy Island shut down and was evacuated. A different kind of development was taking precedence on the oil platform and it would be governed by the pace of the polar bears, not the construction schedule for pumping oil from beneath Alaska. The new islanders would get to decide whether they wanted to extend their stay at Spy Island. And until that decision was made, a one-mile buffer zone would be enforced around the bears, meaning that the entire project was officially off-limits to humans, except for Putnam and other scientists.
BACKGROUND: Polar bears halt Alaska offshore drilling project
The mother polar bear emerged from her den "behaving vigilantly" -- she sniffed the air, rolled around to clean off her fur, eyed her new neighbors. Putnam said this is what healthy mother bears do; after all, the cub had not yet stepped out into the world and she was making sure it wouldn't be in danger during life's most vulnerable moments -- when the world is utterly new.
Over the coming days, Putnam shadowed the bear, always a respectful half-mile or so away. The federal agents tracked mom and cub on snowmachines that ENI provided as a courtesy. They headed away from the shore ice, thick and connected to the land beneath, and over the weaker sea ice for several miles. The further out they headed, the less dependable the ice became, forming ridges underneath the snow drift.
Mama bear has not had a meal in five months. Mamma is hungry and she needs open water in order to hunt.
It's in this "jumble ice" that polar bears search for holes of open water, possibly camouflaged by drifting snow. It's in this environment the bear most likely would find seal dens or holes, Putnam said. Seals are the Arctic equivalent of fast food for polar bears: they're fat and they're everywhere.
As light faded on the evening of March 21, Putnam and his team lost the bear tracks. So they waited around. Their job isn't to ensure that these bears will survive in a dangerous world. The job for biologists tracking the bear and her cub is to make sure they do exactly what they want, on their own time, in their own space.
"The best we can do is make sure she has no disturbance after she decides to leave that den. We have no idea what her fate is. We made sure ENI didn't come back and right away return to business as usual," Putnam said, adding that the company had done a very good job securing Spy Island for the bears.
"Whenever we have a den near industry, it's a case by case basis," he said, and that might be the best strategy available for protecting nomadic seafaring bears that quite literally drift about the Arctic.
Contact Eric Christopher Adams at eric(at)alaskadispatch.com