Tundra Wildlife

On the first day of August of this year, we headed north into Manitoba, Canada all the way up to Churchill on the Hudson Bay with a stop or two along the way. It was the furthest north we had been on our planet (other than a stop in Iceland's Keflavik Airport) since December of 2013 (which coincidentally was ALSO Iceland but for a real vacation there). Our most important priority for this trip was pretty simple: see some polar bears in the wild in the last stop on the trip in Churchill. 

We succeeded. Four days in Churchill, six polar bears. Mission accomplished. 

We've been on enough nature trips in our lives to know that when it comes to truly wild wildlife, there are no guarantees. But I have to say if we hadn't seen any white bears on this trip, I think we would have considered the whole excursion a failure. That attitude may have been a little unfair to our tour operator of choice and even ourselves and that's because there were other experiences that were worthwhile other than seeing polar bears, including finding other mammals and birds in the Great White North that were thrilling in their own way. 

Those other species are blog-worthy but I still would have declared the trip a failure (again...harsh...I know) if we hadn't found polar bears. So in the spirit of blog-worthiness, I thought it would be worthwhile spotlighting what other wildlife we saw on our Canada 2026 trip. I'm going to do that through three posts and, truth be told, the first two will be mostly a photo dump at some point (and yes, that means the last one will be different). 

I'm going to start those three posts on our last full day of the trip in Churchill.

Three Hudsonian godwits. Churchill Wildlife Management Area.

The last day of our four days in Churchill was spent inside the Churchill Wildlife Management Area, a slice of tundra adjacent to Wapusk National Park, a Parks Canada property. This is the spot to find polar bears in August and it worked. We found five in our six hours that day looking out the windows of a Tundra Buggy, a sort of giant, jacked-up school bus designed to off-road within the Management Area to maximize wildlife viewing. Most of our day while we were driving was spent looking through two giant front windows shown in the cover photo of this post.

And yes, we were driving over tundra. Maybe this is the time to talk about life on tundra.

Here's the thing: nothing much really lives on the tundra, the top layer of soil and vegetation that supports life up north. The tundra (apparently it's a Russian word and it's for sure cold in Russia) sit on top of the permafrost, a strata of the Earth that is perpetually frozen, although these days (and in the future) the reality of permafrost will cease to exist more and more. 

There is vegetation on the tundra, but think small. Moss. Lichens. Grasses. Shrubs. The odd flowers like the purple-pink fireweed. Maybe some single trees or small stands of trees together but again, think small. Like really small. Like low to the ground. Sure there are trees there but if there's a single tree anywhere around, it's a flag tree, a tree subject to maximum wind effect, which usually causes all the branches on a tree to grow on one side in the direction of the prevailing wind. Our tundra buggy driver joked that in Churchill you need a minimum of two trees to make a Christmas tree during the holiday season.

Considering all that, and pretty well knowing that we had a shot at polar bear or two (or five!), our sights for other animals were set low. I mean if there's no vegetation, then there's no life. African safari this was not.

Churchill tundra. Not in the Wildlife Management Area (can't get this close to the ground in there).

Species spotting proved to be hard work on the tundra. There's just not a lot out there, a reflection of just how inhospitable this environment really is. Need to grow to a pretty good size? You really need some pretty good sized food or a whole lot of it and generally speaking there's just not a lot to eat unless you are a polar bear (which eat seals when they are on the frozen ice) and caribou, which eat...get this...caribou lichen. And lichen there is aplenty on the tundra. 

We did manage to find some new birds for our life list, including some godwits, snow geese and golden-plovers, and we got a good look at some red foxes with mother and kits at play and sometimes trying in vain to hunt the nearby golden-plovers and in one case successfully catching a vole. I can see foxes (or find fox poop) in our driveway at certain times of the year so I'm not going to be super excited about any species of fox I can find in Churchill. 

Well, except maybe an arctic fox. We did not see an arctic fox.

Red foxes and American golden-plovers.

But in our six or so hours roaming around the Management Area in our Tundra Buggy, we did find a couple of signature wildlife experiences worth remembering and sharing. And sure enough, and again reflecting the scarcity of mammals out on the tundra, most of our non-polar bear excitement came while finding things with wings. Things with wings can migrate easier than things without wings.

Here's what we found that I will remember.

Willow Ptarmigan

If you had asked me which bird I wanted to see most of all before we set off on our Tundra Buggy journey, it would have been a ptarmigan. We'd seen a singular ptarmigan once before in Denali National Park in Alaska but I wanted more on this trip. These birds are a sort of dirty brown in the summer but turn completely white in winter to camouflage against the snow. We knew we'd be getting the dirty version of the bird at this time of year and that was going to have to be OK.

The flock of ptarmigans below (of which the one above was one) was the first wildlife we saw in the Management Area. 30 minutes in and we saw nothing but a few ptarmigans. No polar bears (yet) so even though I really wanted to see ptarmigans, seeing these birds without a giant white bear nearby was frustrating. Do we stop and look at these or just keep going? We stopped. 

This was, after all, part of what I wanted. To look at some birds that with the right light and imagination in non-winter, look pretty much like chickens.

Here's the astonishing thing about these birds, and I know this is not the first time I've written something like this on this blog...these things in summer are about impossible to see against the tundra floor. Seriously. Take a look at the photograph above. There are six ptarmigans in the picture above but it's not a sure thing. There may be more here and there or it may just be dead vegetation on the ground. On a mostly green floor, it's amazing that there's really much doubt about the number of brown birds there are in the view above.

Would these birds have been cooler in winter, all white on all white? Sure they would. But it was August and this encounter was pretty exciting, particularly because of the quantity all in one spot. I am not likely to come back this far north in the willow ptarmigan's range for a long, long while (although my travel habits sometimes surprise me) so it's likely this spotting will need to last me for a good amount of time.

Caribou

While it appears to be a matter of some online debate, caribou are often credited with the longest annual terrestrial migration. The numbers? About 1,500 miles annually and some herds number over 200,000 individuals. That's a lot of caribou.

Caribou migrations start as early as August and includes a range which covers part of Manitoba. We were in Manitoba in August and caribou live on the tundra. Cool! 

We saw one caribou.

Wrong place, wrong time. I don't really think that there are ever hundreds of thousands of caribou migrating through the Churchill Wildlife Management Area at any time of the year, let alone August. If there was a mammal species that I was hoping to see in the CWMA other than the polar bear, it was the caribou. We did it! One counts, right?

In many ways, caribou for us are the mammal equivalent of the ptarmigan. We'd only seen them once before and, like the ptarmigan, it was in Alaska's Denali National Park. They also blend in remarkably well with an environment which on the surface of things seems totally dissimilar in color from a caribou's coat. Nonetheless, the colors do blend into the tundra colors. 

Not much more to say on this one. There was only one and we saw it for probably less than five minutes. Exciting...but we need to move on.

Sandhill Crane

I don't have a lot of cranes on my bird life list. In fact, after visiting Churchill, I have just two on my list: some type of crowned crane (I'm not totally sure if I saw a grey or black crowned crane before) and the sandhill crane. Truth be told here, there are only 15 species of crane in the entire world.

We've flirted with seeing sandhill cranes in the past while also coming nowhere close to these birds. There is a large gathering (like a million) of these birds annually in Nebraska which we looked into when we sneaked into the northwest corner of Nebraska a few years ago. And there is another large population that winters in New Mexico just south of Albuquerque (I feel we will get here eventually). These birds migrate very south (like Florida and Mexico) in the winter so it's possible to see them in a lot of different places. But until Churchill...no sandhill cranes in person.

Our sandhill cranes were in the Wildlife Management Area were at a pretty good distance but we did see a few seconds of their famous dance. This is like the star activity of these birds. And by a few seconds and a pretty good distance, I really do mean that. We managed to see a couple of different groups of cranes but very fleeting. Still, pretty thrilling. Hopefully we'll see many more on a specific sandhill crane trek some other time. Maybe.

Arctic Tern

Who was impressed by that 1,500 mile annual caribou migration? It's OK if you were. It's a long distance. It's OK to be impressed.

But the caribou's got nothing on the Arctic tern. 1,500 miles? Child's play. For some reason, the Arctic tern has decided it has to breed in the north of the globe in the summer and spend the northern hemisphere winter all the way down on the other side of the planet in the Antarctic. How far do some Arctic terns travel in a year? Maybe as much as about 56,000 miles. Take that, caribou!

We've seen terns in the wild before. They are plentiful all over the planet including in the Forster's tern variety as near as the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland about an hour or so away from our house. But we'd never seen Arctic terns before. 

Like a lot of other species of tern out there, I'd wager that most people see terns and think gulls and then are surprised by how well put together terns are on a second look and decide they are not gulls at all. Whether this is true or not for anyone else besides me, I have no idea. But I am not interested in gulls and I am particularly interested in terns. Where gulls are ungainly and brash (not in a good way), terns are smooth and suave and are gorgeous flyers, able to hover on the wind without flapping and suddenly dive for food. Maybe it's just me but I like terns.

I spent a lot of time on our tundra day watching and photographing terns in flight after our lunch in the Tundra Buggy. Most efforts were fairly disappointing but I'm OK with the picture above. These birds really are some of the best to photograph on the wing with a camera like ours. I tried.

We also managed to see a very young Arctic tern in a nest. And by "in a nest", I really mean sort of loosely located in or around a pile of rocks, rarely standing still but with no boundaries to confine him or her, how can you blame it? It seemed to be getting fed. Our guide mentioned that this one was quite late in the season to be this size. It's got some serious flying to do in the very near future. Hopefully it made it.

Bald Eagle (although really short-eared owls)

I can be at a bald eagle nest in about 30 minutes if I leave my house at the right time of the day and week and I can pretty reliably find one or both eagles that live in the nest at most times of the year. If I'm at my parents' house, I can cut the time to a bald eagle nest in about half.

So given that introduction, it might be surprising that a bald eagle viewing would be in this post, right? Although to be honest, the picture above is about as good a picture of a bald eagle as I've ever taken. But it's also not the reason why I'm remembering our bald eagle encounter at the Churchill WMA.

We saw (I believe) one bald eagle in our time in the Management Area. We actually had two encounters with eagles that day but I'm fairly sure it was the same eagle both times. The second time we saw it, I got the photograph above. 

The first time we saw this same eagle, it was perched on a similar lone tree that also looked too light to support the eagle's weight (check out the bend in the tree on all these pics). But it had company. And the company was not friendly.

We see small birds chasing larger birds all the time when we are birdwatching. In the US, these larger birds are usually crows or hawks, although we've also seen blue jays making a ton of noise around owls. That Sunday out on the tundra, it was a pair of short-eared owls chasing this massive bald eagle, likely too close to the owls' nest which would have been somewhere nearby on the ground.

This whole thing lasted maybe a minute but these tiny little owls were aggressive and drove off the eagle in pretty short order. But considering I'd never seen a short-eared owl in my life before and that I'd never really been able to photograph a cool small bird chasing away a cool large bird (meaning NOT sparrows chasing crows or something like that), this brief look at a conflict on the tundra, which was literally the only drama we saw in six hours, is etched into my memory as an important part of our last day.

Once we left the tundra, our remaining time in Churchill was counted in hours. 4 p.m. dinner (not joking) reservation and then straight to the airport. The Wildlife Management Area was the highlight of this trip. For sure. Maybe. Probably. It's debatable. But polar bears and then a mix of other birds and mammals? Pretty hard to beat on this trip.

Snow goose. Another first-time bird species for me. Churchill Wildlife Management Area.