I’ve been yearning just a little bit to go to Svalbard lately and I knew I wanted a post about the place in the Polar Bear Winter Festival, because what’s more wintery than a frozen archipelago in the High Arctic? But I wasn’t sure what to write about. So I had a look at what I’ve already posted and I now have two ideas. This one, appropriately for the Polar Bear Winter Festival, is about polar bears.
Despite the name of this blog, I’ve never seen a polar bear. Well, I have, but it was in Perm Zoo and it didn’t look happy. No one looked happy in Perm Zoo. Lots of zoos in Europe these days are big and open and they’re about conservation and education and careful breeding programmes rather than “entertain the rich folk by showing them exotic animals in small cages” but it’s very clear that Perm doesn’t have the funds to make their zoo anything other than what it was probably back in the Cold War days. I think they’re doing their best, I don’t think they’re deliberately cruel but it might be time to call it a day and send the animals somewhere with better facilities. A quick Google reveals three places within thirty seconds that would be more suitable for the polar bears.
If Quark Expeditions want to sponsor me an Arctic icebreaker cruise, with minimal worry about seasickness, where I might see a polar bear over the side, I’ll jump at it.
If you leave Longyearbyen, you have to take a rifle in case of a polar bear encounter and obviously, you need the training and certification to use it, which is why most visitors go out with a tour guide. The idea isn’t to shoot the bear if there’s any way of avoiding it. There will be a police investigation if you kill a bear. You’re supposed to try to frighten it off with flares or even with your pots and pans – that one worked quite well for a group who were camping once. They did eventually have to flee to the safety of the boat while the polar bear helped itself to their food. The Svalbardbutikken has some very distinctive carrier bags – I have a canvas version of it that I grabbed at the airport at the last minute – and there’s a photo of the bear appearing out of the mess tent carrying one of them very neatly in its mouth, almost as if it’s advertising for them. You can read the story and see the photo here.
I was there in November 2015 and there had been a bear hanging around town a year or so earlier. I heard the same story from three different people and I’ve also found it in the Spitsbergen | Svalbard news, albeit not with the level of detail I got from some of the locals. (part 1: part 2: part 3)
At the northern end of Longyearbyen town, there’s a dog yard. Dogsledding is popular in Svalbard, both for tourist purposes and as a competitive leisure activity. Dogsledding is less popular with polar bears. I know they can get up far more speed than a human but fundamentally, they live a nice slow life. Sled dogs, all yapping and howling and rushing around like lunatics, befuddle bears’ brains and upset them. I wouldn’t try it personally because I’m not 100% confident but I suspect that setting your sled dogs on a marauding bear is a far better deterrent than your flares or rifle. However, the yard contains huts and the huts contain some of the necessities for keeping and running dogs. There’s the warm clothes for sledding in, there’s the harnesses and chains and collars, the spares – oh, and the dog food. You wouldn’t feed a polar bear dog food but a hungry bear that’s come ambling this close to humans is going to take whatever it can get and food is food and sometimes a bear is prepared to put up with dizzying noise and movement to grab some free food.
Clearly this bear could smell the food. The first sign a bear had been around was that there were sticky nose prints on the windows of the huts, where the bear had clearly stood up on its back legs to have a look inside. It didn’t break in, not yet. Someone, presumably someone who hadn’t heard about hungry polar bears in the region, had left several blocks of dog food outside, great big blocks of meat that weighed about 20kg apiece. Aha, tasty food, very low effort. The bear helped itself to as much as it could carry and then went off down the road to eat it in peace. In fact, having stuffed its furry face, it settled down for a nice long nap on the snow-covered beach, just out of sight of town.
That would probably be enough to satisfy it for the time being but bears are not stupid. When there’s a supply of food just lying there for the taking, you take advantage. It returned the next day for a second course and was met by one of the dog owners. Overstuffed and lazy from eating too much, like humans on the afternoon of Christmas Day, it did not care that there was a human staring back at it. Could not be bothered.
Now the dog owners had a problem. They had a bear who knew exactly where there was free food for the taking and they also had a bear that was too fat and sleepy to be frightened off. There are only two ways of dealing with a problem like that. Killing it wasn’t really an option. Killing is a last resort and continued theft of dog food wasn’t enough of a threat to justify it. If anything, this is probably the safest bear around because it’s no longer hungry enough to even consider attacking a human. But you can’t have a semi-tame bear wandering in as if this is a supermarket. It had to be dealt with somehow.
So they darted it. They put it to sleep and then they loaded it into a helicopter and flew it to the other end of the archipelago. If it came back, at least it would give them some bear-free time as it hiked its way across the frozen wilderness. Hopefully it would be too lost and confused to make it back to town and would go back to its natural diet of seals and fish and whatever else is out there.
I wouldn’t have liked to be the pilot of that helicopter. I assume the bear was inside rather than hanging from a harness underneath. You’d never know whether the tranquiliser was going to hold out. A bear on the ground is one thing. A bear in an enclosed space in mid-air is quite another. Oh yeah, that enclosed space.
It turns out dog food doesn’t agree with bears’ stomachs. By all accounts, the bear remained blissfully unconscious as it… evacuated that dog food all over the floor of the helicopter and the resulting stink was such that the pilots reportedly said that the return flight was the longest they’d ever had the misfortune to fly.
But it didn’t come back!
There, wasn’t that a nice Polar Bear Winter Festival story about the beauty of nature in the Arctic? Dog food and bear diarrhoea! Monday’s post is a nice one about ten years of Iceland, featuring all the events and stories from the island over the last decade, with some eruptions and political unrest and discoveries from the world of renewable energy. No poo.