News from Pierre Richard is that somebody took this picture of the Clipper Adventurer in the Port of Gdansk last November. She was looking good! It was posted on Marinetraffic.com and it is noted that the ship is now out of dry dock,obviously ready for adventure cruising next spring.That is good news for people planning northern travels next summer.
Another interesting piece of news I found was in the Ottawa Citizen last week was about polar bear traps used to count the number of polar bears roaming the Canadian North.
Open-ended small corals are being organized every 15 kms along 700 km of McClintock Channel; they are baited with chunks of meat, and will have barbed wire strategically positioned to snag the bear's hair when they come to investigate. Several hundred tufts of hair have been caught in the traps so far and they belong to 82 'unique' bears according to an analysis done by Peter Boag's lab at Queen's University where researchers extract the DNA from the samples.
This new method of counting polar bears will be much more accurate than the old method of using helicopters, than tranquillizing them and collecting blood samples for recording size, sex, and physical well-being. This old time-consuming and expensive method was only done once every 12 to 15 years.
I look forward to hearing much more about the polar bear population in the near future. This article entitled 'Study uses 'bear' essentials' was published in the Citizen on Sunday, January 9th, 2011, on page A3.
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