The polar bears of Hudson Bay: cubs, climate, and calories, part 1

How the changing seasons of our planet are shifting the traditions of the place, the polar bears, and the people of the north.

This sea ice of Hudson Bay is what makes life possible for polar bears. It’s as important to them as the air they breathe.

Every year, hundreds of bears move through this area and they’re forced to come ashore in the summer when the ice melts — a grueling annual migration that pushes the bears from ice to land and back to ice again.

But there’s one group of bears that’s not out on the ice: mother polar bears. Right now, they are still on the land, cozy in their dens, nursing their new tiny cubs. Those families are about to start an epic springtime journey from the land to the sea ice, emerging from their snow-covered birth dens into a bewildering new world to join the other bears out on the frozen bay.

The life of any polar bear is astonishingly brutal, but the life of a new mother is an extraordinary tale of determination and grit against the forces of weather and time.

Here, it’s possible to watch how the changing seasons of our planet are shifting the traditions of the place, the polar bears, and the people of the north. These bears are the litmus test for all of it.

Check out the behind the scenes footage of our Churchill journey.

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