Walking with Polar Bears in Canada

When tourists and wildlife photographers think of polar bears in Canada the first area that comes to mind is Churchill in Manitoba. They think of tundra buggies in the fall filled with tourists driving around seeing the bears as they are waiting for Hudson Bay to freeze. That was not what Dr. P’s trip was about as you will soon learn from his trip with Arctic Kingdom and MT Sobek.

You are guaranteed to see a polar bear on this trip, starting at the Winnipeg airport

In this series of pages on Dr. P’s October 2024 to Canada at a polar bear migration route you will learn about the following:

Camp Gellini and the migration route
What it takes to get to this camp that is 118 miles north of Churchill, Manitoba
The camp staff that protected us and kept us well-fed (yea Meesh)!
How the camp is set up with an electrified fence to help dissuade the bears from coming into the camp
How our main guide Dave Brigss kept the polar bears out of our camp with his knowledge of their behavior
Many photos of bears as they walked past or up to our camp
Photos of a bear we we walked up to outside of Camp Gellini
What Churchill Manitoba was like on our way back home
After these posts there will be links to his three trips to Svalbard, Norway (don’t miss the snowmobile trip) photographing them

Polar Bear Fun Facts

The latin name for polar bear is Ursus maritimus (sea bear). They are a true marine mammal, and can swim long distances.

Polar bears are the largest land carnivore on our planet, and live up to 18 years. They descended from the grizzly bear (a type of Brown Bear) 250,000 years ago. Their primary diet consists of ringed seals that are blubber rich.

Polar bears catch the seals mostly in the wintertime on frozen Hudson Bay in the dark and cold when the seals make holes in the ice and come up onto the ice to breathe. It is an amazing feat of physical prowess as the bears smell them from long distances (or swimming under the ice), and even crash through the ice head-first to grab one.

There are 935 polar bears (of around 25,000 in the world) in the western Hudson Bay area, some of whom you will meet in the following posts on Dr. P’s trip.

Polar Bear Migration

Hudson Bay melts completely in the summer, so the polar bears migrate to the land throughout Manitoba province around the town of Churchill. They live on their layer of fat, with the occasional meal of beluga whale or seal carcass that washes up on the shores of the Bay. During these summer months the bears literally just hang around the area.

In October, as the weather gets cold and the freezing of Hudson Bay slowly starts, the polar bears migrate northerly along the western edge of Hudson Bay in anticipation of this freeze. The more northerly they go the sooner the bay freezes, and this path they take moving north is where our camp was set up.

Our camp was literally on the path they take along Hudson Bay

Some of them would come right up to the electrified fence that surrounded our camp

The polar bears are quite curious, and we need to be aware of their potential aggressive nature since they have not eaten in many months. Even though they are walking by us in anticipation of a frozen Hudson Bay soon and access to seals at breathing holes on the pack ice, it is hard for them to pass up the potential for an easy meal from our camp.

Here is slow motion video of one of those bears smelling our food as he walked right by the camp.

Camp Gellini Location

Instead of a tundra buggy trip in Churchill with all of those fuddy-duddy tourists, Dr. P and 3 other guests stayed at a camp called Gellini (named after the river it is located at) along the shores of Hudson Bay 160 miles north of Churchill. It was in a province called Nunavut, which is the ancestral land of the Inuit Indians. It is these native Indians, along with some expert guides from the company called Arctic Kingdom, that allowed us to literally stay at a camp along the migration path of the polar bears, and even walk amongst them.