Polar Bears
Svalbard June 2016

I am extremely taken with polar bears. Have been for many, many years. The bear at our local zoo (they were different time) was my number one favorite when I was 5, and little has changed.

The stunning photos in the David Attenborough program, which rendered the bears black (silhouettes on a spooky moonscape) didn't hurt. In fact, my conscious awareness of Svalbard began with polar bear documentaries.

And then, there is my "before Svalbard" special experiences with polar bears. (More anon.)

But! To get to the point!...

The ships' officers of the National Geographic Explorer and the naturalists guiding us through Svalbard did a fabulous job of putting us in the right places to be lucky.

All eco tourism involves luck. But "prepared luck" yields rewards far more often than "dumb luck". What each group sees (and doesn't see) varies. You can't "expect" anything, in eco tourism.

Were we lucky? Fantastically.

Our first "sighting" was a delicious tease. On the morning of the 15th, our second full day out, we'd sailed up a fjord, to see what we could see, and what we could see was a seal, perfect species, just asking to be a polar bear's breakfast. (Resting on a smallish ice flow, so near the edge, in a mix of ice which gave any swimming bear some chance of a successful ambush.)

After we'd admired Mr (Mrs?) Seal for a bit, and wondered if there was a bear watching the seal too, we saw tracks of a polar bear in the snow, nearby.

A good "appetizer"!

Our next bear... I'll try to supply date/ time/ place... I'm still building this page... was not anxious to "play", and left his ice flow, started swimming away from us. There was no reason to "chase" the bear, and reasons not to chase it, and so we moved off in search of another. But we'd seen a bear! This is "Bear 1".

Our second bear was a star! Gave us a great show. If we'd seen no other bears, we could not complain.

He was spotted in the distance ahead of us late on the 15th. He was peacefully snoozing on the ice, in a nice little windbreak he'd found. We gradually approached. He started paying attention, not quite sure what to make of this strange big thing making the rumbling noises. Didn't appear particularly anxious. When you are "the 800 pound gorilla" of the neighborhood, "anxious" is something that doesn't really occur to you. People around you get anxious. You just go where you please; do as you wish.

But no wild animal welcomes something strange. I heard of an adult polar bear deciding to go someplace else after an old lady escorting her grand-kids to school clouted it on the nose with her hand-bag. (Was worth a try... and she got lucky. The bear wasn't particularly hungry.)

To anthropomorphize a bit, as we nudged ahead against and through the thin broken ice, he became.... restless. "Do I move from my nice wind-break? Or shall I just ignore it?"

... more to say about this bear, this encounter!.. but first I will sketch others...

Bears 3, 4, 5 and 6

We struck gold. Or should I say platinum, that being closer to white?

We saw something rare. We saw it extremely well. While we looked at something rare, the adult engaged in hunting behavior.

My heartfelt thanks to John Toohey for these excellent photos. I was having too much fun experiencing the bears to operate my camera properly.

More?

We really could not have complained, if that was "all" we saw... on the trip!... let alone of bears. But we were still happy that it wasn't.

This one we saw a long way off. The first announcement was at 8:50 on the 16th. I was just finishing breakfast. (Thank you, bear.)

Bear 7 was ambling around on a largish ice flow... hundreds of meters long, one of several long narrow ones in the area. (qMore to be said.)

Bears "chilling out" on sea ice.

On the 17th, between 9 and 10 in the morning, we made our way through a large patch of ice... and had more "normal" sightings... three bears at sundry points off our bow, in the distance, doing not a lot. Bears 8, 9 and 10.

I don't mean to disparage or dismiss these sightings... but we'd been spoiled. They were GOOD sightings... but we'd seen "great". (qMore to be said here... but I need to take a break, but would like to get this page at least "roughed in".)

Rich Reid tried to give us one of the trip's illustrated talks in the lounge from about 10:15. Bear sightings had postponed it several times already. It was becoming something of a joke that if bear sightings tailed off, the thing to do was to announce a talk for a half hour in the future... and the magic worked again...

10:50: A mother with a feeding cub (Bears 11 and 12. And.. my notes aren't good here... at least another bear, in the distance (Bear 13)... maybe two, or maybe Bear 14 is a figment of my imagination, or one we saw later. The Grand total was 13 or 14

So... Thank you, Lindblad / National Geographic

We had fantastic experiences of polar bears. Out and about, in a stupendous environment. The interactions handled with consideration for the bears as well as the humans. Some sleepy bears, some active bears. Hard to want or imagine more.

As I briefly mentioned at the start, this was not my first experience of polar bears. Previously, I'd been lucky enough to travel with the BearTrek film crew. (Feature length film, written and presented by Chris Morgan, appearing in a cinema near you, probably before the end of 2016. Polar bears and three other species, and why they matter.)

The foot in the photo is connected to me, and the trainer was with me in Svalbard. The paw in the photo is connected to a living, breathing, adult polar bear... who, I'm glad to say, was at the time full of Ketamine so that a scientist could collect important data for the monitoring of the Churchill Manitoba population.

The bear wasn't as big as polar bears get, though neither was he "small". NOW do you begin to see how magnificent they are? Hard to judge from the photos of them out on the ice, isn't it? The day a big male, not full of Ketamine, was becoming curious about us as we worked with a darted bear was "interesting", too. (Photo at the site referenced below.)

Which is "better"? Svalbard/ Churchill? Do you like steak or ice cream? Can you go to Churchill with a film crew? I'm very glad to have done both! (I've also done a web page on my Churchill experience.)

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