Clark first spotted a grizzly in Wapusk National Park on June 6, 1998. As the newly established park’s first chief warden, he had hitched a ride with a Coast Guard helicopter to the mouth of the Broad River for the season’s first foot patrol, a five-day trek to Nestor 1, a camp near Cape Churchill. As he glanced out the window, he saw a huge brown mass with a shaggy, loose coat, galloping along a beach ridge.

“Funny, I don’t see the horns on that muskox,” was his first thought, though he knew full well that the last muskox in Hudson Bay had been shot and traded at York Factory in 1908. “We were in a big, loud, Vietnam era Bell 212, and I had to hammer on the pilot’s shoulder and gesture to get his attention,” he recalls. “We swooped down and none of us could believe our eyes. It was a huge grizzly bear — so fat we could see the flesh rolling on his hindquarters.” 

After that fateful day, stories about grizzlies in the region began to find their way to Clark. He became known locally as “the grizzly bear guy,” and the mystery of that well-fed bear along the Hudson Bay coastline followed him into his career in academia. 

In 2010, by then working at the University of Saskatchewan as a professor, Clark was asked by Parks Canada to analyze trail camera images of polar bears at research sites throughout Wapusk. When he reviewed the footage, he was shocked to once again see the unmistakable humped shoulder of a grizzly bear. “I yelled for my colleague to come see, and
it was very clear to us. We could see the bear’s long claws and we thought, ‘Yeah, that’s not a black bear out there.’”

The grizzly was fat and healthy. And the image taken in early May suggested the bear could be denning nearby. As Clark’s work continued in Wapusk, he began to see the same bear in the same location year after year, nicknaming it the King of Wapusk. And the king still lives — it was last spotted in April 2023 on one of the remote cameras Clark set up at research sites in the park.

Analyzing trail cameras is just one part of Clark’s work. Another is logging reported sightings. His research stems from the fundamental belief that “local people know bears.” The Sayisi Dene, Inuit and Cree know bears — they have been co-existing with bears in the region for thousands of years. People in Churchill know bears. They’ve been living with them since the community was founded in 1931 at the terminus of the Hudson Bay Railway, right smack in the way of a polar bear migration route. Today, the town of about 870 residents is known as the “polar bear capital of the world,” its economy boosted by tourists spending their dollars — in the order of tens of millions each year — to glimpse polar bears during their fall migration from Wapusk out onto the frozen Hudson Bay to hunt seals. 

“Even if people have never seen a grizzly before, they know bears well enough that they know when something is different,” says Clark. “And very often, they are able to precisely describe what’s different.”

Local trappers, tourism operators, researchers and cabin owners have reported lone grizzlies travelling down the coast in spring and summer, encountering them while out on the snow goose hunt or spotting tracks along riverbeds. In 2013, local trappers observed a small grizzly bear emerging from a den in the north end of Wapusk. Since the mid-1990s, tourism operator Mike Reimer has reported seeing grizzly bears “nearly every year” along the Seal River and from the air. And last July, Jim Baldwin, a longtime polar bear buggy driver, spotted a grizzly bear much further along the coast, east of Churchill. 

In 2020, Clark began to formally record these stories. He decided to reach out to Vicki Trim, a regional wildlife manager with Manitoba’s department of economic development, industry, trade and natural resources, based in Thompson, Man., who’d also been recording grizzly bear sightings. The two agreed to share data based on their mutual interest in understanding what grizzly bears were doing in northern Manitoba, says Clark.

Morris Spence looks out the back window of the helicopter, then at his phone to cross-check a GPS location. He has advised Clark to check out a ridge that he travels every winter by snowmobile where he thinks we might find a grizzly bear den.

“I know we’re not going to find [a grizzly den] around a polar bear den,” says Spence. “Even though I’ve never worked with grizzlies, I know it’s a different animal. A grizzly’s got to be dry. It’s not going to have the same kind of fat as a polar bear. Seal fat helps polar bears withstand the cold. But the grizzly will need a high and dry area to get covered up with snow.”

Spence was born and raised in Churchill. He’s worked on the land close to bears for over 50 years. His father, a Cree trapper from York Factory, taught him how to trap and survive on the land. Growing up in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, he heard endless stories from his
family about polar bears and black bears — but never a story about a grizzly bear.

The only grizzly he ever saw was when he was a kid: a captive bear they called Charlie was shipped up on the train from Montana and kept in a cage at the former Institute of Arctic Ecophysiology in Churchill for the purpose of physiological studies. “It was his long nails that caught my attention,” Spence recalls.

Spence knows the land better than most. Even before Wapusk was established, he spent years travelling by snowmobile, observing the tracks and dens of female polar bears and their cubs. For nearly 30 years, he and his brother have been hosting filmmakers and photographers looking to document polar bear families emerging from their maternity dens. And like other locals whose lives revolve around polar bears in one way or another, Spence isn’t sure what a rise in the grizzly bear population will mean for polar bears in the future. 

If you want to understand grizzly bears in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, says Clark, you need to look across the border into Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. 

In recent years, when Clark visited Ulukhaktok, N.W.T., for a study related to a polar bear research project, he showed images of the King to community members and the hunters and trappers committee. People were excited, he recalls. They didn’t want to talk with him about polar bears — “we’re good with polar bears,” they told him. Instead, community members wanted to talk about the increase in sightings and encounters with grizzlies, and how more bears could impact the land.

Similarly, communities in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut have been observing a higher frequency of grizzly bears since the 1990s. When a grizzly bear mother and cubs denned under an unoccupied house in Baker Lake, the whole town was shocked and shut down. “People in Nunavut talk about a [grizzly bear] population expansion,” explains Clark. “They locate the Thelon as the source of this.”

The Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary, a protected area of 52,000 square kilometres, has a contentious history in Inuit communities in Canada’s Arctic. Straddling the border of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, the sanctuary was established in 1927 with the goal of protecting muskox populations. From the beginning, hunting there became off-limits to the Inuit, creating hardship and resentment. And as the muskox population in Thelon flourished, the grizzly bear population in the sanctuary — believed to be feeding on the increased number of muskox — also thrived.

Clark’s working hypothesis, informed by Inuit knowledge and mapped sightings of grizzly bears prior to the 1990s, is that grizzly bears are dispersing out of the region encompassing Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary. “A wave of grizzlies,” says Clark, hitting the coast, first in Baker Lake, then Whale Cove, Arviat — and now into Churchill, Man., and Wapusk.

The home range of a female barren-ground grizzly bear is significantly smaller than a male. Female brown bears often bequeath territory to their female offspring as a reproductive strategy, whereas males tend to disperse farther away to eke out a home range to forage and mate. Both Clark and Spence speculate that dispersing males are wandering south down the coastline, “riding the ice like a great conveyor belt,” in search of a home range. “It would not surprise me if climate change has a fingerprint on this,” muses Clark. “But it’s not necessarily a direct one.”

For example, food abundance may be shifting in the Hudson Bay Lowlands as a result of warming temperatures. Red fox are also on the rise, competing with the smaller Arctic fox for food and territory. 

John Markham, a professor at the University of Manitoba, is studying how fox den sites are creating nutrient hotspots for plant growth on the tundra. In 2018, Markham had an unnerving encounter with a grizzly bear at a research site in Wapusk. His student spotted the bear at the edge of a pond. The bear sniffed the air and went about his business. “It wasn’t very comforting because usually, if it’s a polar bear, they’ll just start to move away,” says Markham. They climbed up on a roof and watched the grizzly stalk the edge of a pond and wade out toward a flock of moulting snow geese. “It was such a quick kill for him,” he says. “I thought, ‘man, their table is set every day.’”

Over the past 30 years, the snow goose colony has increased by five to 14 per cent annually at La Perouse Bay in Wapusk. Gorging on agricultural fields in the United States, geese migrate back to the Hudson Bay Lowlands, “so fat they can barely fly,” says Clark. The geese are “nuking the coastlines” of Hudson Bay, grubbing and uprooting vegetation in salt marshes until they die. The population explosion has expanded colonies along the coast, and their eggs, fledgling geese and goslings attract predators, including polar bears, black bears and, possibly, grizzlies.

Clark posits that the grizzly bears are traveling and feeding along the Hudson Bay coastline in the summer and, come late autumn, wandering back into the interior to feed on berries and den. “By now, I’m quite confident to say that we have resident grizzlies in Manitoba,” he says.

“Maybe not every year, or maybe not many — but there’s no two ways about it. In 10 days of flying, we’ve found four dens that sure as heck don’t look like polar bear dens.”

If grizzly bears are now on the move in northern Manitoba, what does this mean for communities in the Hudson Bay Lowlands?

“People are always thinking about polar bears, but they really talk when someone sees a grizzly bear,” Spence reflects. “I think that people are probably more scared of grizzly bears. What would it be like if a grizzly bear wandered into town?”

Chantal Cadger Maclean, a conservation officer with Polar Bear Alert in Churchill, shows me a cell phone video of a polar bear standing up and trying to push through the window of a ground-level apartment, using its body in the same way it would to hunt a seal by pounding through the ice.

“Okay, wait for it,” she says. Suddenly, there’s an explosion of cracker shells, a truck revs onto the scene, and the bear takes off running. “Fifty-three seconds. That was our response time,” says Cadger Maclean. “If it’s a call in town, we try to make it within two minutes.”

The Polar Bear Alert program was established in 1969 to help manage encounters between people and polar bears. Cadger Maclean and her colleagues regularly patrol the streets of Churchill, escort polar bears out of town — “it’s like walking an 800-pound apex predator out of town with your truck” — and manage a Polar Bear Holding Facility where nuisance bears are held until they can be relocated out of town by helicopter.

But Polar Bear Alert responds to other calls in the community — including reports of grizzly bears.

In 2017 and 2018, there were dozens of calls about a grizzly bear breaking into people’s cabins from north of town at Seal River all the way down to the Goose Creek area.

“He kept trying to go in the same place with every cabin,” says Camille Hamilton, a trapper and Churchill resident whose cabin was broken into. “He ripped the siding off and broke through the window and went in.” Hamilton was shocked at the scale of damage caused by the bear. He noticed how the bear had used its long claws to pull back the tin siding and bust in the window.

His cabin was completely ransacked. The bear ate spray foam insulation and broke the necks off bottles of amaretto and peach schnapps. Hamilton found undigested, wholly intact packets of ketchup in piles of scat.

“My cabin has always been polar bear and black bear proof,” he says. “That was something else.”

People in Churchill bear-proof their cabins on the land. A common tactic is to lay down bear boards — wooden boards with multiple nails or screws sticking up out of them, spike side up — in front of the doors and windows or nail them up to doors. The boards work well in the fall when polar bears are most active in town. But come early spring, when grizzlies are emerging from their dens, a layer of insulating snowpack is often covering up the nails.

Katie Manning, one of Clark’s former graduate students at the University of Saskatchewan, wrote her thesis on local perspectives of the three species of bears in Churchill. Tin siding deters polar bears from pounding and pushing their way inside — but grizzly bears tend
to pull rather than push. Manning has heard multiple accounts of grizzly bears using their claws to rip back siding. “Understanding the different direction of force that grizzly bears use to get into a place is something so simple but has huge implications of how people can keep themselves and their property safe,” says Manning.

Hamilton and other locals are now adapting their bear-proofing strategy to also keep grizzlies out, but it’s a costly investment. “I installed metal shutters and more bear boards,” he says. “But if it happens again, I’ll have to use barbed wire — I’m not sure what else to do.”

He says he’d much rather encounter a polar bear than a grizzly bear. People in Churchill are accustomed to living with polar bears. They can predict their behaviours. But living with grizzly bears is relatively new for many. “Grizzlies have a totally different demeanour,” says Hamilton. “They’re more unpredictable. Up north, they call them ‘wolverines on steroids.’” He points out that barren-ground grizzly bears don’t have the same abundant food sources, such as salmon, as coastal grizzlies. Instead, they survive out on the open tundra and have evolved to be more aggressive, according to Hamilton.

Dave Daley, who was born and raised in Churchill, was working in his dog yard in nearby Goose Creek when he was charged by the same cabin-marauding grizzly bear in 2018. He unsuccessfully fired several rounds of cracker shells at the bear, tried a rubber bullet, and the bear finally sauntered off. “I phoned resources and said, ‘I’m pretty sure it’s a grizzly bear out here.’ And they said, ‘whatever you do, Daley, don’t kill that bear. They’re extirpated. It’s [legally] worse than killing a polar bear.’”

Several hours later, the willows stirred, and the grizzly bear charged again. Daley, a tourism operator who considers himself familiar with the region’s wildlife, was forced to hit him square in the forehead with a cracker shell. “He swung around on the road like Wolverine in the [X-Men] movies, clawing the dirt, and took off in the bush,” he says.

Vicki Trim, regional wildlife manager, recalls that they finally caught the Goose Creek grizzly in a culvert trap in 2018. They aged one of the bear’s teeth and determined it was a healthy 28-year-old male. Conservation officers put a GPS transmitter in the grizzly’s ear and relocated him over 100 kilometres to the north of Churchill.

“We were actually quite hopeful that this would be the first opportunity to track a grizzly bear in northern Manitoba,” says Trim. But the GPS device failed to transmit. After waking up from the sedatives, the bear likely ripped it off. When Clark heard the disappointing news, he told the story to his daughter that same evening. “Just like that badass dinosaur in Jurassic Park, Dad?” she asked him.

“Yeah, just like that.”

It’s early June in Churchill, a few weeks too early to see polar bears. They should still be out on the ice on the bay, hunting seals. But spring 2023 has seen several days of extreme heat in Churchill, the temperature climbing to the mid 20 C range in May. Smoke drifts in from the wildfires down south. The Churchill River broke free of ice by late May, two weeks early, according to locals. The whole town knows it: polar bears could swim ashore any day now.

We’re driving along the gravel road that winds along Hudson Bay. Clark is at the wheel. Across the road from the old dump, we spot a polar bear sleeping on the rocks. Clark points out the yellow-ish cap and collar of seal grease around the bear’s head and neck.

Since the ice is now breaking up earlier on Hudson Bay — and polar bears are coming ashore earlier — there’s evidence that the period of time that polar bears and grizzly bears overlap, on land, could be increasing, says Clark.

“We know grizzlies get out on the sea ice. And from today, we can see that polar bears are on shore earlier on average,” he says. How could polar bear populations, already imperilled by melting sea ice and declining numbers, be affected by a rise in grizzly bears in Churchill? Elsewhere in the Arctic, there’s been evidence of interbreeding between the two species. In 2010, an Inuvialuit hunter from Ulukhaktok shot a bear he thought was a polar bear, but it turned out to be a hybrid species — the off-spring of a male grizzly bear and a female polar bear. In 2013, a genetic study of a population of brown bears on Alaska’s Admiralty, Baranof and Chichagof islands, known as the ABC Islands, found evidence of polar bear ancestry, proving that hybridization between grizzlies and polar bears is viable. While hybridization is an ecological process that requires tens of thousands of years, Andrew Derocher, a professor and bear researcher at the University of Alberta, isn’t sure if polar bears have that long. “The big question is, what happens first, the expansion of grizzly bears or the decline of polar bears?” Derocher expects that the rate of loss of polar bears will likely exceed the likelihood of viable hybridization over the long term.