Polar Bear Mother and Cubs in Manitoba: Andrew Manske’s Footage

A polar bear mother walks through the snow of northern Manitoba with her cubs pressed close beside her, and at times riding along with her. Wildlife filmmaker Andrew Manske caught the family on camera, and the footage shows how tiny even a growing cub looks next to an adult bear.

Andrew Manske’s polar bear footage

Manske filmed the family in northern Manitoba, Canada, one of the best places on Earth to see polar bears. The clip has since been shared on YouTube by the Canada Wild channel under the title “Polar Bear Love – Sweetest cubs take a free ride from mom”. Close shots pick out the cubs’ faces and paws; wider shots put the family back into the open, white landscape.

How polar bear cubs grow up

Polar bear family life starts in a den. Pregnant females dig maternity dens in snow, earth or both between August and October, and the cubs are born there in the middle of winter. Most litters have two cubs.

• At birth a cub weighs only about 600 g, with fine woolly hair, pink skin and eyes that stay closed for about a month.
• Leaving the den: mothers and cubs emerge between late February and early April, when the cubs weigh 10–15 kg.
• Growing up: cubs stay with their mother for up to two and a half years and are weaned at two to two and a half.
• Adult size: females weigh 150–300 kg, and a well-fed pregnant female can reach about 500 kg. Males are much larger, at 300–800 kg.

That long childhood explains the closeness in Manske’s footage. Everything a young bear needs to know about hunting seals on the sea ice, it learns by following its mother.

Churchill and Wapusk National Park

The town of Churchill, on the western shore of Hudson Bay, calls itself the Polar Bear Capital of the World. Each autumn bears move from inland toward the coast and wait for the shallow bay to freeze so they can return to hunting ringed seals. October and November are the peak season, when visitors watch the bears from tundra buggies, large off-road vehicles built for the tundra. Bears that loiter in town are tranquilised and held in the “polar bear jail” until the ice forms, then released.

About 45 km south of Churchill, Wapusk National Park protects one of the world’s most important polar bear denning areas. Created in 1996, it covers 11,475 km² of peatland and coast, where pregnant females shelter in peat dens and emerge with their cubs in March. Access is tightly limited, and most visitors are scientists, students and park staff.

Getting to Churchill, Manitoba

No road reaches Churchill. Visitors arrive by Calm Air flights from Winnipeg or on the Via Rail train from Winnipeg, a journey of about 40 hours. The town has only around 870 residents, so tours and rooms for bear season are usually booked well ahead.

Polar bears are listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN, with an estimated 22,000–31,000 left in the wild, and their future is tied to the sea ice they hunt on.

Related reading

• Gerda and Her Cub: Vera Salnitskaya’s Polar Bear Photographs
• Churchill’s Polar Bears: A Seasonal Gathering with a Human Community Nearby
• Churchill in Google’s Panoramic Imagery: Looking around the Tundra
• Gordon Buchanan’s Close Encounter with a Polar Bear
• Mark Dumas and Agee: A Polar-Bear Filming Relationship
• The BBC’s Snowball Cam Meets Svalbard Polar Bears
• Polar Bears and Dogs in a FirstScience Film Excerpt

Sources