Canada shuts Arctic research station as eider duck population crashes again

CHURCHILL · Environment and Climate Change Canada has quietly shut down a key Arctic wildlife research station in Hudson Bay, a closure that coincides with a dramatic crash in the nesting eider duck population it was established to protect. The station near Mitivik Island, in what is now the Qaqsauqtuuq Migratory Bird Sanctuary, was established in the 1990s to study a steep global decline in eider ducks. Over three decades, Inuit partners from nearby Southampton Island worked with scientists to track the birds' winter movements and identify threats, leading to hunting regulations that helped populations recover to 8,000 nesting pairs. That number has since plummeted to just a few hundred pairs.

The station's closure in 2024 is part of a broader decline in Arctic wildlife research. Federal research now continues in only three of the 14 migratory bird sanctuaries in the Arctic. The Canadian Wildlife Service has faced high operational costs, increased polar bear encounters due to receding sea ice, and a series of funding cuts. The federal government committed in 2025 to reducing the Environment and Climate Change workforce by 10 percent. Larry Hinzman, an expert in Arctic change at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said funding for Arctic monitoring has historically been tied to resource development. "But as the search for Arctic oil and gas began to ramp down in the late 2000s, due to low natural gas prices and breakthroughs in fracking for oil and gas that spurred new production in the south, climate change became a priority," he explained. Hinzman said the current decline in circumpolar funding stems from governments shifting priorities once again, this time from climate change to national security issues and the search for rare minerals.

While research support wanes, Canada is investing $405 million to advance construction of a new highway to the Arctic coast, part of a $40 billion plan to assert sovereignty over its territory. Research in other Arctic regions has also been hit. In the United States, hundreds of climate collaborations with Russia were suspended after its invasion of Ukraine, and the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States closed last year. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of US research publications on climate change in Greenland fell by 32 percent.

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"There have always been ebbs and flows in the support for environmental monitoring in the Arctic," said Hinzman. "But what we are seeing now is unprecedented. It’s heartbreaking because we need to know more than ever how to respond to a warming Arctic that is affecting almost every facet of life." The research decline comes as at least 96 Arctic and sub-Arctic mammal and bird species may be responding to warmer winters and earlier snowmelt by migrating earlier and traveling farther, studies show.

The Mitivik station was instrumental in earlier conservation successes. Researchers implanted satellite transmitters in eiders to learn where they overwintered, leading to tighter hunting regulations in Canada and Greenland that boosted numbers. The population later crashed again due to disease and polar bear predation. In 2005, station founder Grant Gilchrist and his colleagues identified an outbreak of avian cholera, a disease rare in the Arctic and likely linked to global warming, that killed as many as 3,000 nesting females in 2006.

Gilchrist also witnessed how receding sea ice forced polar bears onto land during the eiders' nesting season. "The bears were like grazing cows leisurely moving through a pasture, stopping to feed [on eggs] whenever they were hungry," he said. Herring gulls learned to eat the eggs the bears missed. Canadian Wildlife Service scientist Jennifer Provencher and her colleagues discovered that while eiders hosted large communities of gastrointestinal parasites that benefit from warming temperatures, those parasites reduced the ducks' exposure to contaminants like mercury and lead. Polar bears and eiders are among many animals struggling with rapidly warming northern marine environments. Without researchers in the field, it is difficult to predict how these species may adapt. The Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs reports that geopolitical tensions are undermining the work of the Arctic Council, an international forum that plays a key role in monitoring environmental changes in the region.

With files from Mother Jones