Close encounters with great white bears

There is something so wondrous and emotive about a polar bear.  In a way, the polar bear is the Arctic. The sight of such an impressive, solitary, silky white bear wandering the frozen Arctic ice in search of seals symbolises the cold, isolated nature of the Arctic perfectly as well as the great strength and endurance required to live there.

Here are some fascinating facts about polar bears that I gleaned from my research

Polar bears are the only bears to be classified as marine mammals because so much of their life depends on the ocean when it comes to food and habitat. The polar bear is the only marine mammal with powerful, large limbs and feet that allow them to cover kilometres on foot and run on land.

They are huge; by far the largest carnivore on land. Males can weigh up to 800 kg which is over half the weight of a Toyota Corolla and over twice the weight of the largest male lion. 

The preferred habitat of polar bears is the annual sea ice in The Arctic where the ocean is relatively shallow. This is the habitat that allows them to hunt seals by ambushing them at breathing holes or creeping up on them. Stealth hunting is by far the most energy efficient way for a polar bear to hunt.  Walking bears use 13 times more energy than resting bears.

The fur of the polar bear appears white due to the way it reflects and refracts light, helping to camouflage the polar bear. However, the hairs are actually not white but hollow and semi translucent like optic fibre, allowing the sun to reach the bear’s black skin where it is absorbed, providing a much-needed boost of heat. 

Polar bears like to be clean and dry because matted, dirty, and wet fur is a poor insulator. 

Human polar explorers have to wear special goggles to avoid snow-blindness, countering the dazzling reflection of sunlight off the white terrain. Polar bear eyes have built-in membranes that perform the same job, filtering out damaging UV radiation.

Polar bears have massive 30 cm wide paws that are the size of a dinner plate.  They have considerable fur on the underside and they act like snowshoes to distribute their weight over a larger area. This helps them walk on thin ice and traverse deep snowdrifts.

Polar bears have an extremely acute sense of smell. According to the Guinness Book of Records, if the wind is in the right direction, they can detect a seal as far away as 30 km, which gives them the most sensitive nose for a land mammal.  Through smell, a bear can also detect a seal buried under 1 m of snow.  Since their sense of smell is better than their sight, when they stand up on their hind legs, it is to smell the breeze rather than to look.

Polar bears are so well insulated that they have more problems with overheating than they do with cold, especially during the summer and if they run.   If they begin to overheat, they go for a swim or dig a hole into the ground and lay against the permafrost to cool off. 

Despite their seemingly unwieldy gait and enormous weight, polar bears are strong walkers.  A polar bear's home range is far greater than that of other bears.  They can travel up 3,000 kilometres per month and can have home ranges bigger than the state of California. While most polar bears limit travel to home ranges of a few hundred kilometres, one satellite-tracked female was recorded trekking 4,796 km — from Alaska to Greenland to Canada and back to Greenland again!

Polar bears are also very strong swimmers.  Despite their bulk, polar bears regularly swim distances of 75 km at a time. They can sustain a swimming pace of 10 km per hour.  According to The Guinness Book of records, the longest distance swum by a polar bear in one go is a staggering 685 km in the frigid Bering Sea which equates to 20 trips across the English Channel – logged over a period of 9 days straight in 2008. During the swim, the bear lost 22% of her body mass.

Polar bears spend over 50% of their time hunting for food and they have to be very persistent.  A polar bear might catch only one or two out of 10 seals it hunts, depending on the time of year and other variables. 

The diet of polar bears mainly consists of ringed and bearded seals. Polar bears need an average of 2 kg of fat per day to survive and these seals are rich in blubber. They can eat more than 45 km of blubber in one sitting. One of their most remarkable adaptations is the ability to thrive on this fat-rich diet without heart damage.

Unlike brown and black bears, polar bears are capable of fasting for up to several months during late summer and early fall, when they cannot hunt for seals because the sea is unfrozen. Instead of hibernating like other bears, they live off their fat reserves. To build these fat reserves, they have the capacity to eat large amounts quickly (holding an estimated 15 to 20 percent of its body weight in their stomach) and then go for weeks or even months without feeding.

In some areas, polar bears will occasionally take adult walruses, but walruses are formidable prey (twice the size of a polar bear with long tusks) and are very difficult and dangerous to subdue.  Polar bears have also been known to prey on beluga whales  and narwhals by swiping at them at breathing holes. Studies have also photographed polar bears scaling near-vertical cliffs to eat birds' chicks and eggs.

Bears leave behind their scent in their tracks which allow individuals to keep track of one another in the vast Arctic wilderness. During mating season, a male may follow the tracks of a breeding female for 100 km or more and after finding her, engage in intense fighting with other males over mating rights.

After the female mates, the fertile eggs don’t implant and develop until the autumn, 4 to 5 months later, and only if the female has enough fat to sustain herself and her cubs during the long denning period. This process is called delayed implantation.  During these months, the pregnant female eats huge amounts of food, gaining up to 200 kg and often more than doubling her body weight.  She needs to do this because the process of gestation, giving birth and raising her cubs in the early stages (which all happens in the den) may require her to fast for as long as 8 months despite not properly hibernating.

Polar bears can breed with brown grizzly bears to produce fertile bear hybrids known as ‘grolar bears’ or ‘pizzly bears’ and do so sometimes do so in nature.  As wild hybrids are usually birthed from polar bear mothers, they are raised and behave like polar bears.  The ability for polar bears and brown bears to interbreed is unsurprising when you consider that polar bears evolved from brown bears as recently as 150, 000 years ago.

Polar bears hold great spiritual and cultural significance for indigenous communities.  The word "Nanug", which is Inuit for polar bear, means an animal worthy of great respect, or the ever wandering one. The Ket (a Siberian tribe) uses the name "Gyp" meaning grandfather. The Inuit have many folk tales featuring the bears including legends in which bears are humans when inside their own houses and put on bear hides when going outside.

Polar bears are normally aggressive to dogs but not always.  In 1992, a photographer near Churchill took a now widely circulated set of photographs of a polar bear playing with a Canadian Eskimo Dog, a tenth of its size. The pair wrestled harmlessly together each afternoon for 10 days in a row for no apparent reason.

Want to know more?  Here is our research on polar bears.

We encountered 7 polar bears during our Arctic adventure

Polar bear have always captured my imagination and they were the animal I was most excited to see and photograph on our Arctic expedition.  Aurora Expeditions told us that they see polar bear on virtually every trip that they do but a little voice in my voice occasionally said, "Oh dear, what if we are the exception!"

Well, I needn't have worried. During our time in the Arctic, we saw 7 polar bears and had some amazing encounters that will remain amongst my most cherished memories forever. It really was a dream come true and felt quite surreal at times.  Below is an account of our encounters and the photographs I got to take.

Encounter 1:  A bear does a jig on the rocks at Utre Norskoya  (2 July)

After breakfast on the 2nd full day of our expedition and getting ourselves outfitted for some hikes on land, a call came through to the expedition team - a bear had been spotted! We immediately changed from landing operations to Zodiac cruising. 

We made our way towards the location where the bear was last spotted and kept a lookout for it along the shoreline. As we went, Gavin jokingly said something like, "Imagine if a bear were to suddenly appear and get onto that rock over there and do a dance for us!"  We laughed. Yes, wouldn't that be something.

Then suddenly, one of the kayakers spotted the bear!  It was swimming in the icy water, just off the shoreline.  It can be much harder to spot a bear in the water due to its low profile, so it was a lucky break. From our zodiacs, we watched in wonder for about 10 minutes as the bear swam. 

Then, to our absolute delight, the bear clambered up onto the shore of the small rocky island and walked over some beautiful, photogenic rocks, allowing me to to get my first proper photos. It climbed right up onto the tallest rock as Gavin had uncannily envisioned and while it didn't exactly do a dance, it did a little shimmy and stretch.  Then it ambled back to the water for another swim, and eventually made landfall on another spit of land where we were able to view the bear in more detail in a round-robin Zodiac dance. I got more photos and even managed to take a bumpy video snippet which I include below. 

Our first ever encounter with a polar bear left us elated and totally and utterly in love with these extraordinary creatures.

My first elated sight of a polar bear, swimming though the icy waters

Against a stunning backdrop, the bear gets out of the water  (photo courtesy of Tanya)

The bear heads back towards the water...

... and gets back in...

...only to clamber onto another spit of land.

Who could have asked for a better encounter!

The zodiac was moving so the video is shaky. But what a memory!

Encounter 2:  A bear frolics in the snow on White Island's ice cap  (5 July)

Kvitoya, otherwise known as the 'White Island' is the real ‘Wild East' of Svalbard: a polar desert, rugged, cold, desolate - you get a true sense of what surviving in the arctic is like upon visiting this island.  The island was enveloped in a dense fog as the Greg Mortimer approached the coastline this morning. However as breakfast wrapped up, the fog lifted and one of the passengers spotted a polar bear on the snow. The Expedition Team confirmed the sighting from the zodiacs and we went out on zodiacs to observe the bear, who was frolicking in the snow upon the massive Ice cap of Kvitoya. The bear was very far away, virtually a faint speck on the horizon, and so my photos are very blurry but I include them below as a memory of our 2nd bear sighting.

Encounter 3:  A bear pays its respects to Salomon Andrée at his monument on White Island  (5 July)

After the bear encounter described above, we made our way along the coast of White Island towards the monument that exists there commemorating Salomon August Andrée, a Swedish engineer and polar explorer, and his 2 crew who died on the island after a failed hot-air balloon attempt to cross the North Pole in 1897. The balloon went down, laden down by ice, and they then managed to get to White Island by trekking over the sea ice for two months. However, within two weeks of reaching landfall, they perished.  Their fate was a mystery until their bodies, dairy and photographic plates were discovered 33 years later. There is controversy over how the men died. One theory is Salomon died by eating the toxic liver of a polar bear and another is that he fell into the ocean and drowned while hunting a polar bear.

Salomon August Andrée (1854 - 1897)

Photo of the balloon shortly after its descent onto pack ice. Photo plates were found near the bodies.

The reason I mention all this is that as we neared the monument to Saloman Andrée by zodiac, another bear was spotted!  The bear walked along the shore near the monument and then, wonders of wonders, it slowly strolled right up to the monument and ponderously sniffed it as if to as if to pay its respects to Solomon Andrée or investigate if  he was still around!  I managed to capture this special moment as you can see in a photo below.

That day was the only occasion I was on a different zodiac to Gavin, Richard and Tanya.  They also got to see the bear from their zodiac and managed to do something that Gavin had dreamed of doing ever since conceiving the idea of teaching lessons directly from the Arctic ice: Introduce his lesson on polar bears with a real polar bear lurking behind his right shoulder!  There were other passengers on the zodiac that day (also unusual) but they were only too happy for Gavin to do his short introduction while Richard filmed away and then panned to the bear over Gavin's shoulder.  When Gavin finished his introduction in his distinctive, animated style, the other passengers on the zodiac spontaneously applauded, all of them very much caught up in the moment and Gavin's passion and excitement.

The bear walking along the shore ...

...towards the monument...

... then stopping at the monument as if to investigate if Solomon Andrée is still around

Encounter 3:  2 adult bears and a cub delight us at Kramerpynten (5 July)

After the two bear sighting described above, The Greg Mortimer repositioned along the East coast of White Island to Kramerpynten - the most eastern point of Svalbard - for the afternoon's excursion. The white of the ice cap was stunning with the contrast of the bright blue sky and the dark gray of the seas.  Immediately upon reaching the shoreline, our zodiacs discovered a bear walking towards the beach and, two minutes later, a mother and a yearling cub popped up from their hiding place directly in front of the other bear - 3 bears just in front of the zodiacs!  We watched in awe as the cub snuggled lovingly with its mother on the shore. The wind was raw and cold but nobody seemed to notice.  To experience a mum and her cub was one of the undoubted highlights of our entire trip.

The beautiful mum and cub

Bears are usually solitary so it was quite unusual to see two adult bears together like this

Encounter 4:  A young bear journeys along the coastline at Torellneset (7 July)

After an absolutely idyllic, sunny morning exploring the sea cliffs of Vegafonna, the world's 3rd largest polar cap, we headed by ship onto Torellneset, a headland at the southwestern side of Nordaustlandet. There we got onto zodiacs to explore. Almost immediately, we sighted a young polar bear moving along the coastline at a steady pace.  As we  watched from a distance, the bear, unperturbed by our presence, continued his journey for a kilometre or more until we left him in to continue his journey and went to see the frolic of walrus further back towards the ship. Yet another wonderful bear sighting.