Time and Place: The Polar Bears of Hudson Bay

This title is an acquisition.

The heat and the flies of the brief Arctic summer are almost more than the polar bears of Churchill, Manitoba can tolerate. Nearly 1000 of the bears have congregated along a stretch of shoreline near this port city, the largest inhabited place on this coast. The bears are hungry. They can only hunt their staff of life, the ringed seal, on the frozen ice of the great inland sea called Hudson Bay. But for two months of the year, the ice melts and the bears are landlocked. Their intense hunger turns them to marauders of garbage that fills the town dump. The more daring bears come dangerously close to town. This unacceptable behaviour is rewarded by live capture and a few weeks in the darkened interior of the only maximum-security penitentiary for bears on the planet. The bears are only released when ice once again covers the Bay. This aversion therapy works, but it's not intended to drive the bears away entirely. For the bears draw some 10,000 curious tourists to Churchill each summer. The tourists fill hotel rooms and ride out into the tundra on unique Churchill tundra buggies, monster busses that deliver the most dedicated bear watchers to temporary lodges made of monster trailers assembled and parked out on the land. From behind the bars and glass of the trailers, the tourists can spend concentrated days or even weeks watching the huge, beautiful bears wait for the sudden blizzards that announce the coming of winter, the return of the ice and the end of another tortured, hungry summer, in this Time & Place.