Last month, a wildlife biologist for the federal government took a phone call from a manmade island north of Alaska, where a polar bear had emerged from a snow drift perhaps 6-10 feet deep on top of the artificial ground.
It wasn't a joke. An ENI Petroleum worker called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on March 18 to report the sighting on Spy Island, an offshore drill site a few miles off the Beaufort Sea coast near Ooliktok Point.
Christopher Putnam, a marine mammals biologist for USFWS, was dispatched to the icy North Slope. The 50 or so construction workers had been moving equipment onto and off of the island by ice road from the coast. Putnam's job was to make sure that the manmade island and all manmade products -- foods, waste, fuels, trash -- were secured from the federally-protected animal, which had denned there sometime in late October to give birth, unbeknown to wildlife officials or work crews.
In less than 12 hours, Spy Island shut down and was evacuated. A different kind of development was given precedence on the oil platform and it would be governed by the pace of the polar bears, not the construction schedule for pumping oil from beneath Alaska. The new islanders would get to decide whether they wanted to extend their stay at Spy Island. And until that decision was made, a one-mile buffer zone would be enforced around the bears, meaning that the entire project was officially off-limits to humans, except for Putnam and other scientists.
The mother polar bear emerged from her den "behaving vigilantly" -- she sniffed the air, rolled around to clean off her fur, eyed her new neighbors. Putnam said this is what healthy mother bears do; after all, the cub had not yet stepped out into the world and she was making sure it wouldn't be in danger during life's most vulnerable moments -- when the world is utterly new.
Read the complete story and see video of the mother polar bear and cub only at AlaskaDispatch.com.