Northern Lights, Wolves, Owls and S'mores. Nanuk in March.

Christoph and Fabienne Jansen of ArcticWild.net will make there 30th departure with Churchill Wild this fall.

Note: This year, Christoph and Fabienne Jansen of ArcticWild.net will reach their 30th departure with Churchill Wild. They are currently at Nanuk Polar Bear Lodge for back-to-back departures of both the Nanuk Emergence Quest and the Cloud Wolves of the Kaska Coast safari and are providing us with weekly updates and photos. This is their third wildlife update of 2024 for Nanuk Polar Bear Lodge. You can see all of their updates from Nanuk for spring 2024 at the end of this post, and they’ll be back with more from Nanuk Polar Bear Lodge in the fall. Thank you Christoph and Fabienne!

by Christoph Jansen

While we didn’t see a mom and cub on our second departure, we had plenty of wonderful wildlife encounters. We saw snowy owls (pretty skittish), a great grey owl and our first Northern Hawk Owl. And we watched a fox (successfully) hunting lemmings for some time. We also had wonderful wolf encounters.

Red fox pouncing on a lemming at Nanuk Polar Bear Lodge. (Fabienne Jansen / ArcticWild.net)

We first saw a group of four wolves. Later we saw another group of five wolves. They all looked pretty much like members of the original Opoyastin Pack and also seemed at ease around the lodge. We have not seen all of them together, though. It will be interesting to try to find out more during the wolf program.

Wolf friends. Nanuk Polar Bear Lodge. (Fabienne Jansen / ArcticWild.net)

And the northern lights were just incredible! Lately, it has been unusually warm up here, which brought some overflows to the rivers. They are still frozen, but the tides are pushing water through cracks that then flow on top of the ice. In other places, the ice on the river is completely clear. There, we spotted suspended rocks: big rocks basically trapped in the ice.

Northern lights over Nanuk Polar Bear Lodge. (christoph Jansen / ArcticWild.net)

But our last two weeks were not just about wildlife and landscape, but also about having very nice fellow guests. We had a bonfire out on the sea ice, including s’mores. And we had quite a few lunches out in the field, sometimes roasting smokies over the open fire. We also did some sunrise and sunset photo shoots, which were pretty cool.