I reached for the marmalade as bear ecologist Chris Morgan shadowed the doorway. ‘Cheer up, everyone. There is a bear and two cubs on the ice.”
The dining room emptied. Seven layers of clothing and three minutes later I was on deck with eleven other guests, two guides and Chris. Our binoculars scanned a beautiful black and white landscape: black mountains, gray scree, white sky reflected in a glassy sea, shining like molten silver.
Far away across translucent ‘fast’ ice stuck to a deceptively low-lying glacier, a creamy polar bear led her 18-month-old cubs under a cliff along a narrow coast in search of food. “She’s going to look for the eggs!” Morgan shouted across the wind as a pair of barnacle geese shot into the air.
“The geese are doing well here,” reassured Rickard Berg, an imposing Norseman who has led more than eighty expeditions like this one around Svalbard, the archipelago of islands called the “cold edge” by the Vikings, a thousand miles north of the Norwegian coast. mainland. Yet even Rickard had never seen a bear killed. Our expedition leader, the Dutchman Rinie van Meurs, author of The future polar bear, the impact of disappearing sea ice on an Arctic ecosystemwho can spot a polar bear ten kilometers away and has two hundred expeditions to his name, had only seen a handful.
On the way to the murder
By climbing diagonally up a steep rocky slope and then plowing snow back down with your nose in the air, the hunt seemed relatively simple. But it never is. It’s a comparison. Bears need 70,000 calories per week (three to four times as many as a human needs); one kilo of seal provides 4,500 calories. However, seals are slippery, can outsmart a bear and must be caught from the ice. On average, bears capture one in every ten bears they hunt, so they must temper the energy they release with their chances of killing; eggs are a handy snack on the go.
“She’s in the water!” shouted Lisa, who had flown from San Francisco to join Morgan’s expedition. For 35 years, the Lancashire-born ecologist has been tracking and recording bears – whether grizzly, black, brown, spectacled, moon, sun or polar bears – in documentaries or in his podcast. The wild. He is one of the experts who leads expeditions through the Arctic together with Polar Tracks, together with polar guides.
Our unfortunate bear was not very lucky. Seven seals were lazing on floating ice islands, but they were nervous. One by one they jumped into the water just as she reached them. Then suddenly everything changed. Back on the ice she now gave an invisible signal. Her twins lay down. She crept forward stealthily, her eyes focused, before stopping for a moment, clawing the air and examining the ground. Then she jumped up and disappeared into a hole. A few seconds later she reappeared, dangling a struggling seal pup by its tail from her mouth. She had done it.
In another place, possibly watching a BBC Wildlife documentary from the comfort of a warm sitting room at home, we might have felt empathy for the unfortunate pup, but here there was no pity. The polar bear was a mother with two cubs to feed. A cheer erupted from the awe-inspiring silence.
Rickard looked mesmerized. After all, he had witnessed a murder. “That was amazing. I’ve seen a lot of bear hunts, but to actually see them catch a seal before your eyes, to watch the communication between mother and cubs. Well, it’s a moment you have to experience to understand the magic. ”
The threat of climate change
But should we have been there to see that moment in the first place? What we witnessed is a rare and disappearing phenomenon. Scientists have calculated that climate change could cause the ice to disappear by 2044, and with it the polar bear. Without ice, the seals cannot surface to breathe and breed, and the bears cannot hunt the seal.
Rinie and Rickard recognized their self-interest in tourism and discussed that dilemma for me. But of course it’s not the ships (now limited to 200 passengers and of which I saw only three during a nine-day trip in the Arctic) that are the real problem. It’s what’s happening in the rest of the world: Rinie and Rickard see us as ambassadors who can tell others what we’ve seen.
And for all the drama of witnessing a rare bear kill, it was just a taste of the series of Arctic memories I collected on that cruise.
Every day, MV Polar Front – a former Norwegian weather ship with a reinforced hull and a draft of 4.5 meters designed to plow through ice – took us to deep fjords, broken by jigsaw puzzles of chilly turquoise ice sheets, in search of minke whales, walruses, reindeer and little awks. The experience was constantly exhilarating, humiliating and addictive.
We soon learned the signs. Rinie, Rickard or Chris spotted something, after which a hushed conversation followed. Then, after briefing us, they called in the Zodiacs – the brand of rigid inflatable boats used during polar expeditions to take passengers from the mother ship to places of interest. As these dinghies were lowered into the water, we rushed into our overalls, life jackets and mud boots before climbing down a steep ladder to leave the safety of our mother ship for an unpredictable sea where we were at the mercy of the elements.
Cold comfort
I always put on everything – two base layers, a midlayer, a fleece, vest, down jacket, a windbreaker, collars and four headgear (a hood, hat, balaclava and windproof) – and yet the cold finds unattended crevices in my neck and grip to my fingers. Some days the decision whether or not to take a photo was a precise calculation, weighing the likely quality of the photo against the time it would take to take off my gloves, press the button and put them back on to pull.
But here you can’t stop taking pictures. The glaciers in particular are dazzling. They are deceptively small to our ship, but in reality enormous: 40 to 50 feet high and almost a mile wide. They flood every valley.
Every day brought another surprise. At one point, while scanning the horizon, I spotted an arctic fox, whose fur was a patchwork of black and white as it navigated the transition from winter to summer coat. Morgan told me, “Foxes eat birds and eggs, but the birds aren’t here in winter, so they team up with a polar bear and live off the remains of its prey.”
On another occasion we saw stocky reindeer with their fluffy white coats. It was time to come ashore. Safety and security were always taken seriously; both Rinie and Rickard carried weapons. They ordered us to remain in the Zodiacs while they unpacked and loaded them, and then headed out for a quick reconnaissance, shouting loudly. Stalking a polar bear is not a good idea (and no one wants to have to shoot one of the 3,000 bears still living in the Arctic simply because some tourists thought it would be interesting to get too close to them).
The walrus of love
But it was the walruses that did it for me. Huge spherical creatures that roll through icy water as if we were languishing in a steamy bath, they seem to wallow in the world without a care in the world (fortunately, walrus hunting was banned in 1952). However, they can be dangerous. As we departed the ship, Rickard explained how the hull of a Zodiac is divided into five independent sections to protect it from the attack of an angry female walrus or her counterpart, the playful younger bulls (if they attack one section, the others keep the dinghy afloat).
I thought the polar bears, killing the bears and the walruses would be the highlight of the expedition, but in reality it was the wilderness itself that overwhelmed me. That afternoon we traveled further north, eventually reaching the magical 80 parallel north that marks the point where the sun is visible for 24 hours during the summer solstice. At first we couldn’t see anything because of the fog, but then the fog parted to reveal ice glistening in the sun for miles: a white desert with no horizon. Even Rickard grabbed his camera.
A few hours later I returned to hang out at the front of the ship. It was midnight. The sun was still shining; the North Pole was barely 600 miles ahead of us. We were further north than NASA’s monitoring station in northwest Greenland and 500 miles north of Alaska.
I’m not a great sportswoman. I will never climb Everest, dive into the deepest ocean or fly into space, but in that moment, standing alone in one of the wildest landscapes on earth, I may have been the person furthest north on the planet. entire planet was lying down. And that is an experience I will never forget.
Essentials
Annabel Heseltine traveled as a guest of Polar Tracks Expeditions (polartrackexpeditions.com), which offers tailor-made trips on ships carrying 12-50 passengers to the Arctic regions including Norway, Greenland and Iceland, with world-class guides and wildlife specialists, from £7,000 excluding flights. You can contact Chris Morgan for privately arranged expeditions to the Arctic and other wilderness areas. For more information, see chrismorganwildlife.org or email info@chrismorganwildlife.org