Polar bears in western Hudson Bay in northern Canada are rapidly disappearing, according to a recent government study.

Researchers counted 194 bears between late August and early September 2021.flying over the Churchill region, a city near the Arctic in the Canadian province of Manitoba, which calls itself the “capital of the polar bear”.

Based on this census, they estimated that there were 618 polar bears in the area. The previous census, carried out in 2016, estimated that the number of these animals was 842 in the same area.

“Comparison with aerial survey estimates from 2011 and 2016 suggests that the abundance of the Western Hudson Bay population may be declining,” the study concludes.

The researchers noted that bears and cubs are most affected by this decline.

They also indicated that they were unable to confirm the reasons for this drop in the number of individuals.and cite as possible factors the movement of these animals to neighboring regions or even hunting.

“The observed declines are consistent with long-standing predictions about the demographic effects of climate change on polar bears,” the scientists found.

According to the most recent studies, Global warming in the Arctic is up to four times faster than in other regions of the world.

It is important to remember that after climate change and global warming that melts the poles, among other events, one of the populations of fauna that depends on this ecosystem would migrate to other nearby human-inhabited areasand although still cold, they would not be completely covered in ice and snow.

The situation became apparent after a photographer posted a series of images, which competed for the 2022 Drone Photo Awards, in which you could see how a group of polar bears lived in abandoned houses in the middle of the island of Kolyuchin, located in the Chukchi Sea, in the Arctic.

This is the Russian photographer Dmitri Koj, who with his photographs managed to win the aforementioned competition in the series category, and highlighted in the description of his job that the island had once served as a weather station for the Soviet Union.

As he revealed, he noticed the group of polar bears one day when he took a boat trip to Chukotka and Wrangel Island, but when a big storm broke, he decided to take refuge on the island of Kolyuchin, it was there that he found the animals, also refugees.

“After seeing the strange movements in the windows of an abandoned town, he saw the faces of polar bears through his binoculars! There were about twenty specimens, mostly males, wandering among the abandoned houses while the females stayed away with their pups,” he explained according to the 2022 Drone Photo Awards portal.

So he continues to assure that since it is dangerous to go down to inspect the island, the photographer He decided to take his drone and approach the animals, without disturbing them, with propellers that have noise control, and in this way the magnificent photographs were achieved.

*With information from AFP