Articles > Bear-Spotting in the Arctic

“Good morning. It’s 3.30 and we have a bear ahead of us on the pack ice. It’s 32 F outside with a slight breeze, so wrap up warm and when you come out on deck, please remember to keep quiet.”

So begins another summer’s day polar bear spotting in the Arctic on the National Geographic Endeavour. Expedition Leader Bud Lehnhausen’s friendly but clipped tone wakes me with a start. There’s no turning off the tannoy in my cabin. This is not an indulgent pleasure cruise (although the en-suite cabins are comfortable and the food surprisingly good). The one hundred (mostly American) voyagers on this specialist ‘expedition’ have a mission: to see the great ice bear, up close and personal. There is no set itinerary: we are sailing wherever the weather, the wind-blown pack ice and Bud’s decisions take us.

For me, the sight of the frozen sea and the snow-covered peaks of the pointy mountains of the island of Spitsbergen are the draw. That and twenty-four hours of daylight that means my week around Norwegian administered Svalbard (a distant, mostly uninhabited Arctic archipelago, and one of Europe’s largest wildernesses) will merge into one long day. I hope to see polar bears too, but witnessing the ocean solidified into blocks that creak and growl as the ship’s ice-strengthened hull ploughs a furrow is enough of a treat.

When I join the others on deck in the timeless cloudy twilight, I see the animal hugging a small berg far away across the crazy paving of broken ‘tabular’ ice. Even through binoculars, all I can make out are its black eyes and nose, its creamy fur and relaxed boneless repose. I got out of bed for this? But then it sniffs the air, yawns, and faces the ship. It ambles towards us, lolloping across the floes with floppy paws; leaping across the cracks. Before long, I can make out its quizzical face, its fur, blonde and ruffled. I can see its claws. I no longer need binoculars. It is there, right below the bow. We are silent in our awe. She keeps sniffing at the ship and licking her lips. Then she slides down the ridge of a small iceberg, straddled across it as if she has an itch. As a final flourish to her floorshow she rolls on her back.

Her curiosity satisfied, she ambles off to lie down again. It is hard to believe that this young female is a ruthless killer against whom we would not stand a chance. Those cute floppy paws are like that because they’re spring-loaded killing machines, ideal for thwacking seals to death.

Polar bears grow to over 700kg in weight and sprint at up to 60km/hr. They are the largest terrestrial carnivores. Unfortunately, being top of the food chain, many have high concentrations of persistent organic pollutants in their bodies. The environment may look pristine, but the winds and ocean currents carry our poisons.

From the ship’s wildlife guides and library books I learn other bear facts. Polar bear fur is not white, but hollow and colourless; in 1979, in San Diego zoo, the polar bears turned green: algae had set up home in the fur’s hollow filaments. In 1296, Marco Polo wrote about a “region of darkness” and “bears of white colour and a prodigious size.”

Polar bears can survive for eight months without food. They can swim for hundreds of miles and walk for thousands. They survive temperatures down to minus 46 Centigrade. All this hardiness and they still look like an oversized pyjama case. When, twice, we saw a female bear being followed by her two eight month old cubs, the coos of admiration for their bold leaps across the floes reverberated through the still, cold air as if we were a noisy dovecote. Most sows give birth to two cubs.

In an evening talk, accompanied by cocktails and canapés, polar bear expert Dr Tom Smith teaches us more. Ursus maritimus dines primarily on ringed seals and hunts by patiently waiting at its prey’s breathing holes in the ice. Humans make a tasty treat if they cross a hungry bear’s path.

He shows slides of bloody bears he has shot dead in self-defence. As we nibble stuffed mushrooms, he offers gastronomic advice: “You have to cook polar bear meat well, to avoid Trichonella”. He talks of trophy hunting in Canada and the $22,000 per bear revenue that this brings Inuit communities. This information doesn’t go down well with some passengers. (Polar bear hunting in Svalbard was banned in 1973.)

Last year [2005], polar bears became a symbol for the fragility of our planet and the seemingly inexorable rise in global warming. Last September [2005], the area of Arctic sea ice measured the lowest on record. Since the 1970s there’s been more than a 20% reduction in ice cover, meaning reduced habitat and hunting grounds for the bears. It is estimated that by 2080 there will be no Arctic sea ice in summer. For humans and bears, the future is grim.

Dr Mark Serreze at the institution which did much of that research – the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University – says that although cruise ships always carry the risk of a disastrous oil spill, other local impacts are “minor” and “are far outweighed by the potential benefits of education.” Of course, the carbon emissions from flights to Oslo and then on to Spitsbergen don’t help, but for those who want some justification, Serreze says “it is important to get people out there to see the unique Arctic environment for themselves, and in the process learn a little bit about our fragile blue planet.”

Endeavour may be billed an‘ Expedition’ ship but the ambience is a world away from the hardships early adventurers endured. Each evening there is a talk during cocktails. On a large cruise ship, this may be the time for a spin at roulette or to watch some clowning capers, but, thankfully, there is no such vulgarity on this 89m former fishing factory. The nearest we get to a comedy act is when Ian Bullock, a knowledgeable naturalist guide from Wales, sings a music-hall-style song about a walrus’s penis bone. The two foot long ‘baculum’ will “never soften or shrink.” Essential in freezing water no doubt? In the same walrus-themed lecture, Smith tells us that walrus (which comes from the Norse for ‘horse whale’) can reach 1200kg in weight and dive as deep as 80m to search for clams with their whiskers. They extract the meat with a powerful suck. As we bite filo parcels, he tells us how he once ate the contents of a walrus’ stomach. “Freshly shucked clams. Delicious.”

For dinner on the second evening, Captain Lampe positioned the ship near the walls of the Monaco glacier. After admiring the view through windows, we moved onto deck. We were in a bay of the blue and brown marbled glacier: its one hundred foot high edge was now our walls; the clouds on the top of the world, our ceiling. Our bow pushed slowly through the clinking ice, making the sound of a thousand gin and tonics all being swirled at once. It was as if Endeavour were a cocktail toy in a giant god’s martini glass.

We cruised off into the constant day and more activities. We walked ashore among delicate Svalbard poppies and purple-flowering saxifrage. We kayaked among icebergs, admiring their sculpted forms. We peered at cliffs of breeding guillemots whose chicks defy death to plunge from their rock-ledge nest into the waves. Only here do they learn to fly.

We nudged 80 degrees north. The ship moved through the pack ice, elbowing floes out of the way as if they were unwanted thoughts. They spun and heaved apart, splitting with a stormy sound of cracking and wrenching. Their imprinted history - of polar bear tracks and smeared blood from seal kills, flecks of our carbon pollution - was washed in the icy sea to be forgotten, as if they were penitents being baptised. Seagulls jabbed at the fish that lost their shelter.

Leaning over the bow, the wind against my face, watching the ice floes break, I was on top of the world. Literally.

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