I debated whether to post this photo, because it’s gruesome and sad, but decided to do so because it’s part of a larger, interesting story. Like grandma used to say, “That’s nature.” But nature, as it changes with changes in the climate.
The photographer, Don Gutoski, won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2015 award for his image “Tale of Two Foxes,” showing us the consequences of the struggle for survival in subarctic Canada.
But the larger story is part of an Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled, “3,000 Miles From Glasgow, a Town and Its Polar Bears Face the Future,” about Churchill, Manitoba, which calls itself the “Polar Bear Capital of the World.” The story is about how Churchill is adapting the climate change, and how climate change is affecting the local ecosystem.
The photographer of the foxes photo explained his photo in an article about his photo published by the Nature History Museum:
Gutoski, an emergency-ward doctor, was on a photography trip in the Cape Churchill area. Here, in Wapusk National Park, the ranges of the red fox and the Arctic fox overlap. He saw the red fox chasing prey and soon realised it was hunting an Arctic fox.
‘By the time I got close enough to capture the event, the fight was over and the victor was feeding’, said Gutoski. He took several photos of the hunter feasting on its prey, and eventually the red fox dragged away the remains to store for a later meal.
Jury member and National Geographic magazine’s senior editor for natural history projects, Kathy Moran, said of the winning image, 'What might simply be a straightforward interaction between predator and prey struck the jury as a stark example of climate change, with red foxes encroaching on Arctic fox territory.
And this, from the New York Times Op-Ed, about the effects of climate change on the Hudson Bay ecosystem:
Warmer weather is endangering Arctic species, in part by opening the gates for other animals, like red foxes, wolves and brown bears, as well as a host of smaller species, to move north. “We haven’t found anything that isn’t changing” in the Hudson Bay ecosystem, said David Barber, a professor at the University of Manitoba who studies climate change as scientific director of the Churchill Marine Observatory. “From the viruses and the bacteria right up to the whales, every single thing is being affected by climate change.”
One immediate impact of global warming is that the [polar] bears are spending more time around Churchill as the sea ice forms later in the year and melts earlier. On land, polar bears lose about 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of their weight each day. As ice season shrinks, the bears face the double pain of fewer days of hunting and more days of fasting. Between 1980 and 2019, the weight of the average pregnant polar bear in the Churchill region declined by 15 percent, according to Nick Lunn, a Canadian government scientist. New births are in decline. The number of polar bears in western Hudson Bay fell by 30 percent from 1987 to 2016, and some experts think the population already is in terminal decline.
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