Polar bears and scrambled eggs

(Large white pig carnivore looking for pigs at Churchill garbage dump - www.worldofstock.com)




From Randy Boswell of CanWest News Service we learn the following horrible news.

Canada's vulnerable polar bear population could survive the effects of climate change by switching a significant part of their diet from seal meat to scrambled eggs, according to a new U.S. study that suggests snow geese nests along the Hudson Bay shore may become a key feeding site for the iconic Arctic mammal.

This is outrageous. Will no one move to save the snow geese young? Does no one care?

The latest study of the Arctic's "most visible and charismatic predator" highlights the energy-rich attributes of geese embryos but cautions that egg eating benefits for bears "will depend on the increasing temporal overlap with the nesting period and on the foraging behaviours of individuals eating the eggs. It is likely that other food sources will also have to play a role if the polar bears are to persist."

Temporal overlap? I think I've heard of that - t'was a central theme of a number of Star Trek episodes, wherein Wesley Wark fell in love with a anarchistic alien lizard ..... or something like that. Just because I'm lighthearted doesn't mean that the polar bears can be. Their traditional way of life rummaging in northern garbage dumps for leftover tuna tins is at stake here. Anyway, I am surviving. Not the least of why is because my nesting period does not overlap my temporal whatever.

Focus here folks. The study is clear and authoritative. It was done by academics.

"It is likely that other food sources will also have to play a role if the polar bears are to persist."

What other food sources? Once those damn furry ice flow foragers have developed a taste for scrambled eggs, can back bacon be far behind? (Note to American readers - back bacon is what you republican revolutionaries call Canadian bacon.) If so, pigs are now endangered. Now this may serve the theological purposes of certain strict bearded Wahabbist mullahs in caves in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but I like my back bacon. Crisp and tasty.

And once those beached arctic landfill foragers get a taste of back bacon they will pillage existing stocks of porkers and hunt them to extinction. They are now empirically proven by American Museum of Natural History biologist Robert Rockwell et al, to be insatiable once they fix their minds on what to eat.

The authors themselves witnessed a young bear as it consumed eggs from about 200 eider duck nests near Manitoba's La Perouse Bay.

The horror! The horror! Al Gore, are you listening? There is celebrity life beyond the narrowing circumfrence of current global cooling. Save Porky and the poor suffering eider ducks from the big bad bears! You'll be a hero - to the bearded mullahs and the little ducks, at least.