Arctic Alaskan Town Of Kaktovik's Patrols See Starving Polar Bear #s Boom As Ice Recedes

[hatrack]

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Now that once-permanent sea ice along the coast is being replaced by unpredictable young ice, more polar bears appear to find themselves stuck on land, he said. "Over the past couple years, we've probably had anywhere from four or five to almost 20 locked on the land and the ice is just too far out that they don't swim," Snowball said.

Sgt. Jose Gutierrez, with the borough police department, says he's worked in the area off and on for more than 10 years. Over that time, the number of people calling to report polar bears seemed to drop, he said, as the borough and other agencies moved carcasses from bowhead whale hunts farther from town. The oil industry has its own protocol for polar bear encounters at Prudhoe Bay and the other fields, with their deterrence plans permitted through the Wildlife Service, officials said.

DO NOT SHOOT

Dangerous, curious predators, polar bears can grow to eight or nine feet from nose to tail and weigh as much as 1,760 pounds. They have rarely attacked humans in Alaska. Under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, people can only kill a polar bear if human life is in danger, Wildlife officials said. The exception is Alaska Native subsistence hunting. Defending your property isn't an excuse, said Bruce Woods, a Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman. "You couldn't kill a polar bear because it was getting into your chicken coop, whereas you could with a brown bear."

THE NIGHT PATROL

In Kaktovik, VanHatten circled the village between 4 p.m. and midnight last fall, Jay-Z's "Run This Town" spilling out onto the tundra. Sometimes she stopped to pick up neighbors walking in the Arctic cold. The bears were hungrier and more bold than when she first joined the polar bear patrol in 2007. "They were like, starving. I couldn't believe the difference," VanHatten said. One night after class she found a mother and two cubs eating outside a home in the heart of town. The bears split, but soon returned to the village and were later killed because the mother was hurt, VanHatten said. The kills were considered a subsistence take, according to the Wildlife Service.

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http://www.adn.com/2010/05/02/1260422/polar-bear-patrols-vital-in-new.html

[Angry Dragon]

1. This world is dying and the people

responsible and in charge do not care.