Tonight I am catching up on my photos from last week’s Polar Bear Tour, and it was almost impossible to choose a photo to share with you in this newsletter!
We had a few very special encounters with bears, and one of them was this pair of inseparable bear best friends. (BBF) These two large adult bears played together, slept side by side, wrestled and hung out together, as they waited for the ice to freeze, so they could feed. At times they were very tender with each other, and at other times they were sparring and generally fooling around like brothers. Who knows, maybe they were brothers?
Our guide explained that every bear had its own personality, its own habits, and its own unique behaviors based on its background. The bears are very curious, and are not afraid of humans, so they would wander over to our Polar Rover and hang out near us for an hour or more.
We went the last week of the season, just before everything ices up and the town of Churchill closes up for the season. Even though we were the last group of the season, the ice had not frozen and the bears were wandering around town, *really* hungry. The locals all were talking about how the ice had not come, so the bears could not eat. (They go out onto the ice and eat seals.) One hungry male bear killed and ate a cub.
This summer the Canadian Ice Service reported Arctic Ice melting 2-4 weeks earlier than usual, and now it is freezing later than usual, so that means the bears have even less time to hunt and feed on the ice. When there is no ice, they don’t eat. That is a long time to wait for their favorite meal!
Most bears spend their time waiting for the ice, curled up in the snow and sleeping, trying not to waste calories. They look like big dogs. We saw a couple bears pouncing on snow drifts but it turned out they were breaking through the snow to find thick piles of seaweed, so they could make a nest in the dark brown kelp beds. Their fur is a light yellow, but the kelp nests turned their fur a reddish cast, so we could tell the handful of bears who loved to dream in the seaweed.
We’ve made sure to stock fabrics related to the Arctic – including polar bears, snowy owls, Northern Lights, and Inuit people. You can see some of these fabrics in a collage around my “Bear Hug” photo.
All of us at eQuilter wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving, with your friends and family. We know you will be giving and receiving lots of Bear Hugs on Thursday!
eQuilter will be closed on Thursday, but we’ll be back in the office on Friday morning.
sharing your Passion for Fabric…
Luana
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