Inside the polar bear prison: Forget death row. The scariest inmates in the world are behind bars (on starvation rations) in the terrified town where they outnumber people



World's only prison for polar bears is located in former aircraft storage hangar in the remote northern Canada town of Churchill, Manitoba

Animals flood the town at this time of year because it is located on their winter migration route north up Hudson Bay

In October and November the number of polar bears passing through the area outnumbers Churchill's population of 800 humans



The guard moves from cell to cell, passing water through a small window or peering through the thick bars at the prisoners inside. Although they don’t realise it, with good behaviour, they could be out in weeks.



But when one of those reinforced doors finally opens, winched up like a portcullis, the jailers had better be ready.



For this is no ordinary prison — and its inmates are certainly not to be trifled with.



The former aircraft storage hangar just outside the remote northern Canada town of Churchill, Manitoba, is the world’s only prison for polar bears. Nature’s most fearsome land predators flood the town at this time of the year because tiny Churchill sits slap bang in their winter migration route north up Hudson Bay.

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Locked up: This creature is in the world's only polar bear prison - a former Canadian aircraft storage hangar Because of the town's position in the middle of the polar bear's winter migration route north up Hudson Bay, Churchill, north Canada, is always flooded with the fearsome land predators at this time of year

An uncomfortable spell in the prison is reserved for those animals who won’t take the hint and keep coming back to the town. Eleven of its 28 cells were occupied with ‘bad bears’ when I visited Churchill, although it was soon to be only ten.



As I watched, the jail’s large steel gates were opened and two prisoners were brought out — a mother and cub.



Knocked out with tranquilliser darts fixed to the end of a long pole stuck through the cell’s barred ceiling, the bears were heaved on to a trailer pulled by a quadbike and towed outside.



There, the mother — so dead to the world that conservation officers could check the number tattooed on her gums and rub green dye on her back to show she had been in jail — was manhandled into a net.

It was then attached to a helicopter which, with the comatose cub sprawled over its back seat, flew the bears some 40 miles away. By the time they woke up, it was hoped, they would be too far away to return to Churchill — at least not this year.



The self-proclaimed ‘polar bear capital of the world’, Churchill — a pinprick in the splendidly bleak, snow-covered tundra wastes on the western coast of the vast Hudson Bay — has more polar bears passing through it in October and November than it has people.



As many as 20 a day can be spotted around the town — with around 1,000 bears making their way through a community of little more than 800 people during the season.



Many ignore the settlement but the problem, say experts — and everyone’s an expert in Churchill — is that the creatures are so quiet, cunning and unpredictable that you never know when and where they will turn up.



Last week, Halloween night proved particularly terrifying for the town after a bear attacked two people.



Polar bears caught entering Churchill are sent to the jail until they can be airlifted and flown away

Bill Ayotte, 69, heard a woman screaming outside his home at around 5am on Friday.



Finding a bear with 30-year-old Erin Greene’s head in its mouth, he undoubtedly saved her life by hitting the animal over the head with a shovel.



The bear turned on Mr Ayotte, but — Churchill community spirit being what it is — he in turn was saved by neighbour Didier Foubert-Allen.



The 18-year-old dashed out into the freezing cold in just his underwear, firing off 18 shots with his shotgun.



Two shots hit the bear as it dragged Mr Ayotte across the ground, biting his face and smashing him with its huge paws.



It barely flinched, so Mr Foubert-Allen jumped into his truck and accelerating towards it, honking his horn.



The bear finally ran off and, along with another bear, was later shot dead by state wildlife officers.



Mr Ayotte suffered serious lacerations to his face, ears and stomach while Ms Greene had deep gashes to her head and arm.



They were taken to hospital in the state capital Winnipeg, where Mr Ayotte was recovering and Ms Greene was later discharged. Officials said they were lucky to be alive.



Sometimes the victims are rather more vulnerable. Two years ago, Gloria MacDonald pulled into a car park to drop her two young children off at nursery on a sunny July day.



Aurora, four, had already got out of the car and was walking round to join her mother as Mrs MacDonald concentrated on getting two-year-old Adam out of his car seat.



‘When I looked back at Aurora, I saw a polar bear standing right behind her,’ she told me. ‘I think she’d walked right past the bear without noticing.’



The 7ft female bear took two steps forward while staring at Mrs MacDonald, who desperately sought to move her daughter behind her.



She was an arm length’s away from the bear when she let rip with everything she had — a flimsy cotton bag containing paper files and her lunch, and her vocal cords.



‘I just frantically waved the bag in front of its nose while letting out this blood-curdling scream,’ she recalled. Quite what might have happened if, at that moment, Churchill’s bear response team hadn’t screeched up — someone had reported the bear’s presence — is something that has given Mrs MacDonald sleepless nights.



The bear had to be shot dead after it evaded its pursuers and ran off into the town centre.



But even now, long after her terrifying encounter, Mrs MacDonald won’t go out alone after dark.

Visit Churchill and you’ll quickly appreciate what she means.

Around 1,000 bears travel through Churchill, which has a population of 800 people, at this time of year

Deathly quiet even during the day, at night only the foolish step outside into its freezing, empty streets and poorly lit alleys without experiencing a frisson of anxiety.



And the 10pm siren, signalling a curfew for children, puts an added spring in your step to get where you’re going.



This is a town where, to quote the Green Cross Code, you would do well to look right, left, and right again — though it’s not a speeding car that might hit you, but 2,000lb of hungry bear.



After months of eating little more than berries and seaweed, the bears are starting to get hungry. What they really want is to find a frozen spot along the coastline where they can venture back on to the ice and hunt ringed seals, but many smell the town and just can’t pass up the opportunity to seek a meal — human or otherwise.



Polar bears are protected in Manitoba, so local conservation officers are forced to take elaborate measures to keep the humans and the bears apart. Relying purely on reported bear sightings, they can’t always manage it.



In September, a bear chased Garett Kolsun down the main street, ripped open his jacket and pinned him against the door of a bakery.



It’s traditional here for townspeople to leave their cars and homes unlocked so anyone can dash inside at a moment’s notice. But the off-duty border guard, walking home from a bar in the early hours, found the bakery unhelpfully locked. The bear bit him on the hip and swiped him with a paw.

Mr Kolsun escaped only when he pulled out his mobile phone — not a textbook anti-bear measure — and its white glowing screen momentarily startled the creature.



Churchill is so cut off you have to reach it by rail or plane - but the bears have no trouble finding it

The bear took a step backwards, knocked over a flower planter and looked around at it — giving Mr Kolsun the chance he needed to run to safety. It had to have been a small bear, locals mutter, arguing that he would never have survived against a full-sized one.



Most of us would probably run in blind terror from these killing machines, which can grow up to 12ft, but perhaps one should expect natural courage from Churchillians.



For it takes a hardy type of person to live in this town (which was named after Sir Winston’s illustrious ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, a former governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company — originally a fur-trading concern).



Here, temperatures plunge to minus 26c in winter, and there are no human communities for 200 miles in any direction. No roads lead to Churchill — it’s so cut off you have to reach it by rail or plane — but the bears have no trouble finding it every year.



The job of dealing with them is usually left to a six-man team at Manitoba’s Natural Resource Office. They bristle with firepower and pride themselves on a 30-second reaction time to calls to their Polar Bear Alert line.



As I sat in the passenger seat of Brett Wlock’s pick-up truck, nestled up against a shotgun — one of two on board, along with two handguns and ammunition — the wildlife officer took off on patrol. A reportedly 10ft male bear had been attacking the large tundra buggies that take tourists out on £300-a-day bear-spotting trips.



Mr Wlock and his colleagues will initially try to ‘haze’ an intruder bear, working in pairs to move it out of town by blasting their car horns and sirens.



When that doesn’t work, they approach the bear on foot, firing loud ‘cracker’ shells into the air that explode like fireworks. They also sometimes shoot them with paintball guns, which to a bear feels like a nudge, he says. Killing a bear is a last resort if the animal is threatening people.



Persistent offenders are either taken down with a tranquilliser gun or lured into traps. Enticed by a piece of seal meat hanging from a hook, the bear shuffles into the giant tin-can-like contraption and a spring releases a door, blocking its escape.



Once they have been tranquillised with a dart gun and dragged to the bear jail like Wild West drunks, the bears cool their heels in 20 ft by 16 ft boxes with reinforced concrete walls and thick steel bars across the roof and door. They are given just water, no food, and sleep on woodchips.



The conservation officers check on them twice a day but they don’t have a vet, a fact which upsets some local people. They also complain the bears are starved, but Mr Wlock insists they don’t eat much at this time of year anyway.



Still, his team admits they do try to make the bears’ stay as unpleasant as possible. They don’t want to encourage the animals to come back. Bears generally stay in the jail for up to 30 days before they are helicoptered out. So far this year, 15 bears have been released back into the wild. A few who are considered too risky to release can stay in the jail for months.



These are the most aggressive and sneaky ones who, Mr Wlock told me as he showed me the bears’ favourite stomping grounds, have a nasty habit of disappearing and then suddenly coming out behind you.

The bears move silently, hugging the sides of buildings rather than ambling along the middle of a road.

Erin Greene (left) was rescued on Friday when Bill Ayotte (right) found a polar bear with her head in its mouth Mr Ayotte, 60, first tried to save the 30-year-old woman by hitting the bear on the head with his shovel (pictured), and when it turned on him he in turn was saved by neighbour Didier Foubert-Allen

‘You always have to be on your toes when you’re approaching one, not only for the bear you can see, but perhaps for the one you can’t see.’



Of course, they’re horribly powerful, too. He points out recent damage caused by just one persistent offender, a rubbish-bin aficionado who knocked through the side wall of a timber-frame house and twice broke into the local hospital, battering its way through a steel door.



Last week, the Bear Patrol had the annual headache of Halloween to worry about. With so many children trudging through the streets in fancy dress — for obvious reasons, they are not allowed to dress as polar bears — a security cordon is set up around the town with the help of the police, fire and ambulance services as helicopters hover overhead.



Safety tips are drummed into Churchillians from an early age: keep to well-lit areas, make noise as you walk, avoid being out alone after dark and, if you see a bear, back away slowly and get to safety.



Avoid eye contact but throw down a bag or coat if you can to distract it. Perhaps more by luck than anything else, there hasn’t been a human death from a polar bear attack since 1983.



Penny Rawlings, a gift shop owner who has lived in Churchill for 35 years, recalled how the victim had been removing meat pies from the freezer of a fire-damaged hotel next door to her late at night.



‘He was on crutches. Maybe the bear sensed he was crippled, maybe he didn’t drop a bag in time,’ she said. ‘My husband saw the bear drag the man across the street with his head in its mouth.’



Another neighbour rushed onto the street and shot the bear dead.



Others had narrow escapes that would be enough to drive most of us to drink.

After firing 18 shots at the bear, Mr Foubert-Allen, 18, had to drive at the animal in his truck to scare it off

Taxi driver Lenore Johnson got stuck in the snow one night outside the town when a huge bear suddenly appeared, shaking her car and trying to get in. It eventually gave up and left. But had it? Abandoning her car, Lenore had to walk more than a mile through the darkness to safety.



‘I walked in circles all the way so I could see if it was coming up behind me — it took me ages,’ she said. ‘It was so cold but I didn’t even have a coat. I kept thinking: “Come and get me now, bear — at least I’ll be spared freezing to death.” ’



When she got to the closest building, an airport office, the woman inside told Lenore she looked as white as a ghost.



Locals will happily regale you with other, more humorous tales, such as the man dressed as a monkey returning from a Halloween party who suddenly found he was being followed by a bear — a real bear.



Tony Da Silva, owner of the Gypsy Bakery, says he used to turn up for work to find a bear rummaging inside his rubbish bins before he turned the area into a fortress.



‘They’d turn round, look at you and turn back as if to say: “Get along, I have enough to eat here,” ’ he said.



But he shares the view of many of his neighbours when he says: ‘We moved to the bears’ land, so we have to take them as they are. There could be one right now under this building, fast asleep, and we wouldn’t know.’



Let’s just say that when I bade Tony farewell, I didn’t dawdle on the front step.