Twin Polar Bears Born In Holland
POLAR Bear Watch: Anorak’s look at polar bears making news
TO the Ouwehands animal park in Rhenen, the Netherlands, where twin polar bears are frolicking in the spring sunshine.
Little polar bears are always a source of joy.
Potentially fatal to the polar bear, global warming has already left its mark on the species with smaller, less robust bears that are increasingly showing cannibalistic tendencies.
Top experts who gathered this week in Tromsoe in northern Norway to discuss ways of protecting the species sounded alarm bells over the dramatic consequences of the melting ice.
“We don’t have hard evidence about climate change but we have evidence about the numerous symptoms of climate change on polar bears,” Andrew Derocher, chair of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, an international network of researchers, said.
The primary observation is that as the sea ice shrinks away, so are the polar bears — they’re not growing as big as they used to.
But thanks to global warming and ice melting in the spring sunshine, the bears are being protected:
Two hunters returned safely to their homes in Coral Harbour this past Friday, March 13, after spending a day on a patch of ice that broke away from the floe edge.
Greg Ningeocheak and Sandy Pudlat left Coral on Thursday morning to go polar bear hunting about 70 km outside the hamlet…
They became stranded when the ice they were on sheared off and drifted away from the floe edge.
Should polar bear hunters be preserved?
Secret sessions at a five-country summit on polar bears sparked suspicions Wednesday about what Canada and other governments are saying behind closed doors about protecting the iconic creatures.
Some Canadian Inuit, concerned by an overabundance of polar bears “causing havoc” in some Nunavut communities, are concerned hunting restrictions now will be driven by alarm about the impact of climate change 50 years down the road.
A bear is for life:
A stuffed polar bear used to promote Fox’s Glacier Mints has gone on public display for the first time since the 1960s. The bear, nicknamed Peppy, was shot and stuffed in the 1920s and taken to carnivals and football matches. But its career ended when its owners decided it was too “politically incorrect”. It gathered dust in a storeroom until 2003, when it was donated to New Walk Museum in Leicester for restoration. Hayley Thomson, the museum curator, said: “It’d be amazing if we could find out if there were any other bears and add them to the collection.”
There are two in Holland…
Posted: 19th, March 2009 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
