In one of the world's most incredible places, bears ruin everything

The Age

30-05-2025

There's perhaps just one animal that isn't afraid of a polar bear: the Arctic tern. Those lunatic birds, with their black helmet markings and furious dispositions, are known to attack the world's largest land predator. It's not just a quick nip, either – they have been filmed drawing blood as they dive bomb the mighty mammals' heads.
For everything else – man and beast alike – the polar bear is an enormous distraction, able to generate excitement and paranoia like no other Arctic animal. Last northern summer I could see just how much mental real estate the bears occupy as I worked as a ship's photography guide in Greenland and Svalbard, a distant Norwegian territory.
Let me say that I admire polar bears – they are awesome in the truest sense, wonderful models for wildlife photographers, and like all charismatic megafauna, a delight to simply witness as they march unstoppably across their white world. Let me also say: I think they are very capable of ruining the Arctic visitor experience, too.
One of the problems with polar bears comes from their psychic enormousness and the outsized value visitors place on seeing them. The entire Arctic region is full of wonders, but ursus maritimus dominates thoughts in a way that can become pollution. For guides, every excursion must consider the possibility of bears. This means taking rifles, loading them on shore, and engaging in endless radio chatter to make sure the animals aren't around. The scouting starts much earlier than this, of course, with landscapes scoured with binoculars before we've started to think about leaving the ship.
Passengers are generally kept unaware of this massive inconvenience – the endless faffing and fretting – but if the Arctic offers a polar opposite experience to Antarctica, it is because of the bears. The impact of having a huge land predator affects not only the safety of operations for expedition cruise companies, but the wildlife, too. Knowing they have the chance of being eviscerated and eaten, most animals exhibit caution in the north that is absent in the south.
Consequently, most fauna in the Arctic will flee at the sight of a person as though they were a bear. This gives the feeling that all wildlife is scarce in the north. (If you're ever struggling to recall whether penguins and polar bears coexist, remember that there would be no relaxed penguins if the predators were around – and there would be no skinny bears if they had access to penguins.)
When bears are encountered, interactions are necessarily distant. Most photographs will convey nothing more than a white spec in a vast landscape. Owing to tightening regulations in places like bear-rich Svalbard, this will have to be regarded as a good sighting. For passengers arriving with a hope of looking into the black eyes of the bear, of seeing its prodigious claws thudding into the tundra, the huge distances will, of course, be disappointing.