When Leo Ikakhik saw this weekend’s viral video of an emaciated polar bear rummaging through the garbage in search of food, he wasn’t shocked.
“I wasn’t totally surprised. These things happen,” the Nunavut polar bear monitor told As It Happens host Carol Off. “Mother Nature is going to do part of that. You know, it’s just part of the cycle.”
Ikakhik has been monitoring polar bear activity in and around Arviat, a small community on the western shore of Hudson Bay, since 2010, working with organizations like the World Wildlife Federation to keep the creatures away from human populations and reduce polar bear deaths.
“Everybody probably was shocked to see a really skinny bear, but this is not my first time seeing something like this.”
In the clip, an emaciated bear, bones visible through its yellowing fur, struggles to walk as it searches for food in an abandoned fishing camp on Somerset Island, near Baffin Island in Nunavut.
It was shot in July by National Geographic photojournalist Paul Nicklen for his conservation organization SeaLegacy, which runs regular expeditions in the North to document the effects of climate change.
“When the animal first got up and we could see that he was actually in the late stages of starvation,” SeaLegacy co-founder Cristina Mittermeier told As It Happens on Friday.
“All of our team was in tears and feeling completely helpless to do anything about it except to roll our cameras and share it with the world.”
Mittermeier said that while…