by I was looking for the marmalade when bear ecologist Chris Morgan shadowed the door. “Line up, everyone. There is a bear and two cubs on the ice.”
The empty dining room. Seven sets of clothes and three minutes later I was out on deck with 11 other guests, two guides and Chris. Our binoculars scanned a stunning monochrome landscape: black mountains, gray scree, white sky reflected in a sea of glass, shining like molten silver.
Far away across translucent “early” ice attached to a deceptively low glacier, a polar bear was leading her 18-month-old cubs under a cliff along a narrow shore in search of food. “She’s going to the eggs!” Morgan shouted across the wind as a pair of geese shot into the air.
“The geese are doing well here,” said Rickard Berg, an impressive Viking who has led more than 80 trips like these around Svalbard, the archipelago of islands known by Vikings as the “cold fringe” north of Norway. mainland. But even Rickard had never seen a bear killed. Our expedition leader, Dutchman Rinie van Meurs, author The Polar Bear in the Future, Impact of Falling Sea Ice on the Arctic Ecosystemwho can spot a polar bear six miles away and has 200 trips under his belt, only seen a handful.
Going for the kill
Climbing diagonally up a rocky slope, then snow climbing back down, nose in the air, our carrier made the hunt relatively easy. But it never is. It is an equation. A bear needs 70,000 calories per week (three to four times what a human might need); a kilogram of seal produces 4,500 calories. However, seals are slippery, can outrun a bear and must be caught from the ice. On average, bears take one out of every ten they hunt, so they must moderate the energy used to increase their chances of dying; eggs are a useful snack on the go.
“She’s in the water!” cried Lisa, who had flown in from San Francisco to join Morgan’s tour. For the past 35 years the Lancashire-born ecologist has been tracking and recording bears – be they grizzly, black, brown, spectacled, lunar, sun or polar – in documentaries or in his podcast, The Wild. He is one of the experts who have teamed up with Polar Tracks to lead trips through the Polar region, together with Arctic guides.
Our unlucky bear didn’t have much luck. There were seven burning seals on floating ice islands but they were loud. One by one they went into the water just as she got to them. Then suddenly everything changed. Back on the ice now she gave an invisible signal. Her twins lay down. She went forward stealthily, eyes focused, before stopping short, leg mid-air, and studying the ground. Then she pounced and vanished into a hole. A few seconds later she reappeared, a seal pup tucked from her mouth under her tail. She had done it.
Elsewhere, perhaps watching a BBC Wildlife documentary from the comfort of a warm living room back home, we might have felt sympathy for the hapless pup, but there was no pity here. The polar bear was a mother with two cubs to feed. From the awed silence erupted a cheer.
Rickard looked bewildered. Finally, he had seen a kill. “That was great. I have seen many bear hunts just to see them seal in front of you, to watch the communication between the mother and the cubs. Well, it’s a moment that has to be experienced to understand the magic.”
The threat from climate change
But should we be there at all, to see that moment? It is a rare phenomenon that we have been seeing. Scientists have calculated that climate change could mean that the ice will be gone by 2044 and the polar bear with it. Without the ice the seals can’t come up to breathe and burrow, and the bears can’t hunt the seal.
Acknowledging their own interest in tourism, Rinie and Rickard cleared that dilemma for me. But of course, the ships (which are now limited to 200 passengers and of which I only saw three on a nine-day Arctic trip) are not the real problem. That is what is happening in the rest of the world: Rinie and Rickard see us as ambassadors able to tell others what we have seen.
And as for all the drama of witnessing a rare bear kill, it was just a curtain call for the series of Arctic memories I gathered during that sea.
Every day the MV Polar Front – an ex-Norwegian weather ship with a reinforced hull and a deep draft of 4.5 meters to plow through the ice – carried us down deep fjords, broken by jigsaw puzzles of cold turquoise icebergs, in search of minke whales , walruses. , reindeer and small awks. The experience was consistently exhilarating, humbling and addictive.
Quickly, we learned the signs. Rinie, Rickard or Chris would see something, followed by a relaxed conversation. Then, after briefing us, they would send out the Zodiacs – a brand of rigid inflatable boats used on polar expeditions to take passengers from the mother ship to interesting locations. As these benches were lowered into the water, we turned to our overalls, life jackets and wellies before climbing down a steep ladder to leave the safety of our mothership on an unexpected sea where we were at the mercy of of the elements.
Cold comfort
I always put on everything – two base layers, a mid-layer, a fleece, a waistcoat, a down coat, a windbreaker as well as a collar and four head coverings (hood, hat, balaclava and windbreaker) – and yet the cold found unprotected crevices in my neck and clutch on my fingers. On some days, deciding whether to take a photo involved a precise calculation that weighed the likely quality of the picture against the time it would take to take off my gloves to press the button and get them back on.
But you can’t stop taking photos. The glaciers, in particular, are sparkling. Deceptively small from our ship, they are actually huge: 40-50 feet tall and nearly a mile wide. They capture every valley.
Every day brought another surprise. At one point, scanning the horizon, I saw an arctic fox, its fur a patchwork of black and white as it grappled with the transition from winter coat to summer coat. Morgan told me: “Foxes eat birds and eggs, but the birds aren’t here in the winter so they mate with a polar bear and live off the remains of its prey.”
Another time we made out stocking reindeer in their fluffy white coats. It was time to land. Safety and security have always been taken seriously; both Rinie and Rickard carried guns. They would order us to stay in the Zodiac while they unpacked and loaded and then proceeded to do a quick recce, shouting loudly. Sneaking up on a polar bear is not a good idea (and no one wants to have to shoot one of the 3,000 bears left in the Arctic because some tourists thought it would be interesting to get too close to them).
Horn of love
But it was the walruses that did it for me. Giant bulbous creatures that roll through icy water like we might be languishing in a steam bath, they seem to scurry without a care in the world (happily, walrus hunting was banned in 1952) . However, they can be dangerous. As we left the ship, Rickard explained how the Zodiac’s hull is divided into five independent sections to protect it from an attack by an angry female walrus or its counterpart, the frisky young bulls (if they attack one section, the others will keep the wedge floating).
I thought the polar bears, the bear kill and the walruses would be the highlight of the crowd, but it was actually the wilderness itself that impressed me. That evening we traveled further north and finally hit the magical 80 north parallel which 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 and miles around us: a white desert without a horizon. Even Rickard took out his camera.
A few hours later, I returned to linger a little up on the front of the ship. It was midnight. The sun was still shining; the northern bow was barely 600 miles ahead. We were further north than NASA’s climate change monitoring station in northwest Greenland and 500 miles north of Alaska.
I’m not a great sportswoman. I will never climb Everest, dive the deepest ocean or fly into space, but right there, standing alone in some of the world’s wildest landscapes, I might have been the northernmost person on the entire planet. And that is an experience I will never forget.
Fundamentals
Annabel Heseltine has traveled as a guest on Polar Tracks Expeditions (polartracksexpeditions.com) which offers customized trips on ships carrying 12-50 passengers to the Arctic regions, including Norway, Greenland and Iceland with excellent guides and specialists wildlife, from £7,000 excluding flights. Chris Morgan can be contacted for private tours to the Arctic and other wilderness regions. For more information visit chrismorganwildlife.org or email info@chrismorganwildlife.org
