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Polar Bears And Humans Coexisting On Barter Island

Alaska Polar Bears in Kaktovik - Photo (c) Laurent Dick - Wild Alaska Travel.
Along the barren, wind-scoured coast of Alaska’s icy Beaufort Sea, an unexpected mix of humanity and wildlife co-exists within a vast expanse of Arctic isolation. Barter Island, Alaska is home to Kaktovik, a small Inupiat Eskimo village of about 200 residents who maintain strong ancestral ties to the land. It’s also the temporary home of  dozens of polar bears who come here in the late summer and fall when the Arctic Ocean’s ice cover moves hundreds of miles aways from the coast. The bears’ presence at Barter Island relates to the Inupiat subsistence lifestyle: polar bears feed on unused portions of whale carcasses that are deposited at a “bone pile” a few kilometers from the village during Kaktovik’s subsistence whale harvest season. The village of Kaktovik and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have developed a partnership aimed at deterring bears from entering the village and keeping everybody safe. So far, this community-based conservation model has worked.
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