Polar Bear Studies

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I’ve started on a new manuscript, hoping to get it done in a year or so. My working title is From Polar Bears to Porcupines. No subtitle yet, but obviously something to do with wildlife vets.  Met with my writers group yesterday for a first run through with one of the chapters about bears that will likely be somewhere in the middle.

Here is the first draft of the last 580 or so words. The events took place in the early 1980s and were part of a large study of bear ecology and population structure in the days before the polar bear became the poster child for global warming.

We have finished working with a sow and her two tiny cubs south and east of Pond Inlet on Baffin Island. They have been weighed and measured. All the samples have been collected and there is one last task to carry out before we let her go back to a normal life. I’m working with wildlife technician John Lee and helicopter pilot Tex Walker.

Out on the sea ice near Pond Inlet. John weighs a cub during our work on the bears

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Now came the last mucky task. Once more into the bag. This time John emerged with his tube of Lady Clairol hair dye and a brush. Before long a huge black X, each arm about sixty centimetres long, followed by the number 5 covered the bear’s back from side to side. I had deduced, on the first bear we had worked on, that this unconventional use of a famous product was to prevent us from capturing this bear again this same year.

“How long will it last?” I had asked. “Quite a while,” John had replied. “Long after we are done with our capture program this year. It’ll be gone by next year.” 

There was no need to paint the cubs, as they would be with their mother for the rest of the season. I wonder if the folks at the Clairol company had ever imagined the scene we now saw.

I did the rounds with the stethoscope again and John read off his checklist to make sure that we had not forgotten some vital element. I took care to avoid getting the dye on myself, as John had inevitably had after dippng his brush into the black goo, and smearing it over the bear.

Now we had to hunker down and wait for the cubs to recover.  For the mother bear I had an antidote to the carfentanil that we had used to immobilize her. Not so for the ketamine/Rompun mixture that was keeping the cubs quiet. Of course I could not wake the mother up until we knew that the little guys were alert, but that did not take long. In fact they had already started to show signs of recovery, moving their tongues and heads as we finished up collecting our various samples. From that point their recovery was rapid and they soon snuggled up to their mother.

Ten minutes later, and after yet another check of the vital signs, I drew up the antidote into a syringe and injected it into the vein on the underside of her tongue. John and I had already packed up a our bags and closed the lids, as neither of us wanted to be fiddling with that sort of detail when the bear awoke, as she would do within a couple of minutes, if our experience was anything to go by.

John had already signaled Tex to start up his engines by whirling an arm above his head. Tex needed time to get his machine warmed up and airborne. Again, should my patient decide to turn and come for us we wanted to be up and away before she reached us, and a bear can cover a lot of ground very quickly if it decides to.

We walked as briskly as the snow would allow, rather than run and risk falling, back to the chopper and climbed in.  Tex upped the revs as we put on our headsets. When the bear rose, stumbled once and moved away Tex lifted us off.

         With the work on this bear finished we climbed above the site and I looked down. I could see our tracks and the trampled snow where the helicopter had been and realized that the evidence of our approach and work pattern closely resembled the symbolic shape of a Valentine’s Day heart. The chopper had been at the pointed bottom. Our own footprints and the deeper scars left where we had crawled made the arches and the trampled snow where we had worked on the bears was the point in the middle where those arches meet. 

I looked over to where she was walking with her cubs.  The hair dye stood out clearly and we could avoid harassing her again. It was time to move on.

Sage Hill and Writing

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Getting over the highs and lows of my ten days at the Sage Hill Writing Experience, which took place at St. Michaels Retreat in Lumsden, in Saskatchewan’s beautiful Qu’apelle Valley.

The Highs?

1. Meeting an amazing array of writers, about fifty of them, from all across Canada. Nine were faculty, working in poetry, fiction and non-fiction. You can see their mug shots and bits about them on the Sage Hill website.

2. Watching Philip Adams conduct, compére, entertain and organize everyone. While not as tough as herding cats, his job required him to sleep little, laugh a lot, drive to and from the aiport at crazy hours and keep us all on track.

3. Listening to everyone read from their work. On three evenings about a dozen of the “students” had five minutes to read something. Each was introduced by the person who read before them. On three other evenings faculty had the chance to read for a longer period, up to half an hour.

4. Camaraderie and friendly chats over a glass or two of whatever takes your fancy.

5. Good food, amazingly good for institutional grub. Hats off to the team in the kitchen.

The Lows?

1. First up, the fact that I found out that my camera had been stolen on the way to the retreat. It almost certainly happened at a Subway stop in the town of Davidson. Not only my little point-and-shoot digital, but the specialized and expensive 400 mm lens that I use for bird photography. I have quite a number, like this one of a hammerkop who looks as if his eyes were bigger than his stomach at this spot on my website.

The one below, of a kildeer in our driveway with her newly hatched chick, is the last one I took with the big lens. With neither piece of equipment to use I cannot give any new photos here.

2. My bum knee – I won’t bore you, except to say “think twice (or many more times) before you go for a full knee replacement.”

There was a joint class for “beginners’, but from the quality and tone of their readings they were far from neophytes. There was a poetry colloquium. There were sessions on creative writing and on mystery.

I was in the smallest group, who were all working on non-fiction stories. Here we are. From left to right, Jean Crozier, Me, Myrna Guymer, Ted Barris, Ayelet Tsabari and Evonne Garnet.
We were led by award-winning military historian Ted Barris.

Ted has not only won awards for his books, but he had to leave early in order to attend a ceremony for veterans. As he said himself, “I am not a veteran,” but his work has highlighted many veterans issues and he has told their stories from both world wars, Korea and other conflicts. His commendation read, in part:

"Ted Barris has made such exemplary contributions by generously giving of himself and so both benefiting veterans and making manifest the principle that Canada’s obligation to all who have served in the cause of Peace and Freedom, must not be forgotten.”

Jean Crozier, Evonne Garnett and Ayelet Tsabari were my class-mates. One other person, Myrna Guymer, started with us but had to leave at very short notice on the second day when she received news that a tornado had ripped through her home town and knocked everything, including her own home, sideways. With her husband unwell and awaiting surgery she felt she had no choice but to head home.

Jean is working on the tricky subject of widowhood, her own and the same for others. Her initial idea had been to document her life with her late husband, whose photography she so admires, but Ted persuaded her that the subject may have a much wider scope.

Evonne has, as Ted put it in his blog written on the 26th, “the greatest and worst story to tell.” "She is struggling with her mother’s story of growing up in a household where rape, paedophilia and abuse were the norm." Her mother kept a meticulous journal of everything she suffered and Evonne’s challenge will be to find a way to use it. Ted quotes Evonne when she writes “with only the aid of her (her mother’s) journals and her faith, she broke free of the abuse cycle to find a measure of peace and freedom.”

Ayelet is working on what she delightfully calls “a suite of essays” that Ted stated “explores her own travels as a woman apparently unable to settle in one place”. Ayelet read from her darkly comical story about her time in the Israeli militry and being subjected to a lie detector test on suspicion of gun theft.

Ted has also steered me in a new direction and urged my to write about bears, and drop the “porcupine” segment of my planned book. He reckons there is enough about bears, particularly polar bears, to make an important book. I’m still wrestling with that as I last worked in the Arctic in the mid-1980s, but with lots of research and interviews I might be able to tackle it. I suppose that I did this with Of Moose and Men, with interviews and emails to over 80 people world-wide.

Of Moose and Men

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UNDERSTAND JOB OFFER SASKATOON STOP ON SAFARI IN RWANDA TRANSLOCATING ELEPHANTS STOP WILL MAKE CONTACT ASAP ON RETURN TO KENYA STOP HAIGH.

It was 1975, and I was working in Rwanda on an elephant project. The team had taken a brief break and come to Kigali, the capital, in mid-April 1975 and had not long come off the phone with my wife Jo, who was at our home in Kenya. After the normal greetings she said, “A man called Nielsen called from Saskatoon in Canada. They have offered you the job at the vet college.”

She read out the long number, which I tried to memorize, and then I realized that with the nine-hour time difference it would be 4 a.m. in Saskatoon. Not a good time to call. Conversely, by the time Nielsen would be in his office it would be 1 a.m. in Kigali, and I would not be able to use a phone, as the post office would be closed. In those pre-Internet, pre-fax days, a telegram was the only solution to my problem. And I was intent on getting my response to him as quickly as I could.

In the half-dark of a crowded post office jam-packed with Rwandans and three other “Europeans” (as any white person was called), I struggled to compose the telegram.
Eventually I got to the front of the queue, where I found that I could hardly see the clerk behind the grime-covered glass sheet. I bent down and spoke through the grate.
“I’d like to send this cable to Canada,” I said to him, only to receive a blank stare. I had forgotten that I was in a francophone country. I switched to French, which was also a mistake, as I ran out of vocabulary after the initial, “Je veux.” I changed gears again to Swahili, which allowed us to understand one another.

Dr. Nielsen was offering me a post as a zoo and wildlife veterinarian at the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine. I had applied several months earlier and been waiting to hear for some time.

It was this opportunity that has led to my 36 years in Canada and the writing of Of Moose and Men. Moose are the first free-ranging species on which I carried out research work and they have fascinated me ever since. Here is the first moose that I ever worked on and his new collar. The book is now in the editing stage with publisher ECW Pressof Toronto, so I’m moving on to the next phase. Tomorrow, Monday I head to Saskatchewan’s Quapelle Valley and the Sage Hill Writing Experience (see more here) to start work on anew project that I’m calling, for now, From Polar Bears to Porcupines. Let’s see if that title holds up after 10 days of work, but meanwhile, here is one of the pictures I would likely include.

I'm not sure how good the Internet contact will be at the retreat, but if it works I will certainly keep you posted.

Wildlife Disease Association, book marketing, The Trouble With Lions, Polar bear, bison

Writing from the forecourt of the Coles bookstore in the Edmonton City Centre Mall, where I am surrounded by copies of The Trouble With Lions and the big 2’ x 3’ poster that the U of Alberta Press made up for me. I’ve never tried this sort of selling before, but I’ve discovered that selling books can only really be done by the author getting out there.

This has been best exemplified over the last 3 days in Edmonton. I have been here attending the annual meeting of the Wildlife Disease Association, with its great website (here) the world’s premier group of like-minded scientists who concern themselves with wildlife in general and the diseases that affect them in particular.

The major themes of this year’s conference have been the overarching concern with global warming, and the more specific field of northern wildlife. Neither was any surprise, first because global warming is having a huge impact as animals move ever more northwards as the climate gets warmer and the habitat changes, allowing species to push at the edges. When I say species, most of us will think of things like white-tailed deer or moose, but as students of disease systems we have to remember that microscopic worms that can kill their hosts can also move into warmer climes because they can overwinter when conditions allow it.

The “poster child” species that has grabbed the attention of the media is the polar bear, and there is no doubt that they are charismatic, dangerous and already in trouble as the polar regions are warming faster than any other on earth. Over a period of about 12 years, starting in the early 1980’s I made several trips to the north, sometimes twice a year, to work on polar bears and wood bison. One publication from those days is about the development of a new drug for polar bear capture. You can find an abstract here but I'll have to put the pictures in when I get home. Home and now able to get at pics. Here's a favourite polar bear picture.

I'll also have to add pictures of our bison work, but a couple of abstracts of the original work are here, the first about the capture, the second about reproductive studies (pregnancy diagnosis). And here are some bison pictures.


With both species I was of course working with teams of biologists who were studying a range of issues centred on the ecology of the animals.

Who knows, one of these days I will put together a book about those trips, but right now it lies in 2nd place on the mental Rolodex of work as I have begun the research on my next big project, which I am calling, for now at least, The Virus and the Vaccine: How Cattle Plague Changed World History.