Why is Australia flying this polar bear to Canada?

Tuesday, October 6, 2015, 2:11 PM - It seems our friends in sunny Australia heard we were losing our polar bears, so they decided to help Canada out by sending one of theirs to us.

Does this sound like a Monty Python sketch to you? You'd be forgiven for thinking so, but Henry, a two-year-old, 700-pound bear, left Australia Tuesday en route to the snowy north.

It's not quite a homecoming, as Henry was actually born at Sea World on Australia's Gold Coast, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, which also says he was the first polar bear cub born in Australia in 30 years.

Rather, he's more like reinforcements. His final destination is the Cochrane Polar Bear Habitat in Ontario, where he'll take part in an international breeding program.

The habitat has been expanded to make room for the new arrival, and includes five hectares of space, some forest and a natural lake.

"We don't have other animals here, we only do polar bears," the habitat's manager, Karen Cummings, told the Herald. "We decided that if we were going to do something we were going to concentrate fully on the one animal."

Transporting such a large animal halfway across the world isn't an easy undertaking. According to the Cochrane Times-Post, Henry's journey was due to start Tuesday aboard a Royal Australian Air Force plane bound for Sydney from Brisbane. 

From there, he'll be loaded onto a Cathay Pacific plane, bound for Vancouver with a brief stop in Hong Kong. From Canada's west coast, he'll be flown in a chartered plane to Timmins, then driven to the habitat, with a scheduled arrival Wednesday, if all goes as planned.

"There is an unbelievable amount of coordination necessary for polar bears when they’re moved," Cummings told the Times-Post. "Permits, blood tests, health certificates, microchipping, specially designed crates for air travel, fork lifts and operators equipped specifically for the task, inspections – and the list goes on – making the number of players involved a small army."

There are no more than 25,000 polar bears remaining in the wild, and Environment Canada says 16,000 of them live in the Canadian Arctic. They are classified as a vulnerable species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which says their population is declining.

SOURCES: Sydney Morning Herald | Cochrane Times-Post | Environment Canada | IUCN