Revelstoke resident JP McCarthy has spent the past six summer seasons in Churchill, Manitoba where he works as a tundra buggy driver, leading polar bear sightseeing tours.
He’s hosting a slide show at the Revelstoke Community Centre on Oct. 6 where he’ll share his best photos of the bears and tell of the impacts climate change is having on them — or in his words: “things are changing up there.”
“It was a very rare thing to see a bear die,” McCarthy said of his first seasons in Churchill. “In the last three years, every year there have been three to five. They’re dropping dead in front of us, skin and bones — totally starved because their feeding season is being cut short.”
McCarthy’s not prosthelytizing about climate change and his presentation isn’t about global issues – just the changes he’s seeing on the ground in northern Manitoba.
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Photo: Revelstoke-based photographer JP McCarthy (above) will share photos of polar bears he’s taken over the past six seasons while working as a driver and tour guide on polar bear bus tours near Churchill, Manitoba. Photo courtesy JP McCarthy
His presentation, entitled Chronicles of a Buggy Driver, will inform about the polar bears, their biology, physiology and adaptations. It’ll be combined with a look at the effects of changes to the Arctic ice-pack.
The U.S. Geological Survey predicts that two-thirds of the world’s roughly 20,000–25,000 polar bears will disappear by 2050. The key issue is malnutrition and starvation due to habitat loss — mainly attributed to changes in sea ice cover, which is a key seasonal hunting ground for the bears.
McCarthy will also share stories and anecdotes about life around the bears — he tells me one of getting bogged down in thawed land, bringing the deck of the extra-tall buggy down to an uncomfortable eye-level with the polar bears.
The Oct. 6, 7 p.m. show at the Revelstoke Community Centre is free. McCarthy, a ski guide at the Mustang Powder cat-ski lodge, is raffling off a four-day cat-ski package, with benefits going to Polar Bears International, a research, stewardship and education organization.
McCarthy hopes a few Revelstoke residents will get a chance to see the bears themselves. “They’re going to be gone soon,” he predicted.
PHOTO: Polar bears jostle near Churchill, Manitoba. JP McCarthy photo
