They certainly do not seem to have been fed upon lately to any marked extent, for we found them everywhere in abundance along the edge of the ice, and they appeared to be very fat and prosperous, and very much at home, as if the country had belonged to them always. They are the unrivaled master-existences of this ice-bound solitude, and Wrangell Land may well be called the Land of the White Bear -- John Muir, The Cruise of the Corwin. 1881.
Cubs retreating into the security and comfort of their den.
Barry Lopez's momentous 1986 non-fiction, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, is a relentlessly inquisitive and exhaustive exploration of all things polar. Eternal prairies of saxifrage and lupine blossoms, the billowy tufts of mosses, willows scarcely above the tundra. The precipitous rise and fall of musk ox populations. Commanding and violently-birthed mountains. Vastness and serene seas of ice cracked by leads that look like small streams. A sun most alien to us that rises and sets in the same place. And a landscape that reveals the almost untouched effects of people, centuries before, amidst the frenzied outbreak of zinc mines and petroleum wells today. The anthropogenic changes may have seemed small to an observer in 1986 but represented huge leaps, exponential rates of disturbance across time. The Arctic is our last frontier. We know what happened to the other ones.
The polar bear Ursus maritimus will, often enough, openly defy our more recent attempts to divide the Arctic according to conventional geography. Barry Lopez explains:
The Polar Eskimos of northwest Greenland call the polar bear pisugtooq, the great wanderer... A polar bear tagged in Svalbard, for example, showed up a year later near Nanortalik, Greenland, 2000 miles to the southwest. Another bear, a female, traveled a straight-line distance of 105 miles in two days. Polar bears have also been found far afield in unlikely places, at the crest of Mount Newton in Svalbard, for example, 6600 feet above sea level, or 30 miles inland on the Greenland ice cap. ...A Russian ice-island crew sported a female and her cubs a little more than a hundred miles from the Pole in the summer of 1937.
Locations of a radio-collared polar bear between October 25, 1981 and December 4, 1984. Unpublished U.S. Fish and Wildlife data, taken from Arctic Dreams.
Their range is incredible and not always so polar, living at the southern end of Hudson's Bay, and turning up in Newfoundland. A female shot in 1938 had roamed the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in Quebec. "I used to think the land would stop them," recalls biologist Ray Schweinsburg. "But I think they can cross nearly any terrain. The only thing that stops them is a place where there is no food."
Their behavior is individualistic, from the distance wandered to the level of aggression or closeness with other bears, despite their solitary nature. Their exceptional memory for places and routes is mystifying. Experimental findings for analysis "have a certain attractiveness, because they simplify and provide numbers. To watch polar bears in the wild, however, is to marvel at the intricacy of their physiology and behavior."
Marvelous, indeed. At Bogen Valley in Svalbard, females den in a great line on the slopes of Retzius Mountain. Their dens are sophisticated constructions, complete with ventilation shafts and an entrance. As the cubs (typically a pair) leave, however, they face a 70-degree slope on the southwest face of the mount. To descend, they "imitate their mothers, who slide down rump first, looking over their shoulders and braking with their claws, or on their sides, leading with all four feet, or headfirst on their bellies. Mothers at the bottom catch cubs veering out of control." Imagine this strange sight, with the added curiosity that only one den will emerge and venture at a time as if carefully planned, for the bears want to avoid each other.
Denning and general bear health depends on an interesting dietary tidbit: Ursus maritimus eats fat, which allows the female polar bear to rest (she is not, in fact, hibernating) through the winter and let fertilized eggs develop. In order to obtain fat she will consume the blubber of the ringed seal, leaving a great and bloody feast that brings processions across the supposedly empty dreamscape--"the arctic fox, glaucous and Thayer's gulls, the shier ivory gull, and the ubiquitous raven." Furthermore, "[i]n winter arctic foxes live far out on the sea ice, entirely dependent on scavenging polar bear kills for their survival." This diet that is reliant on fat before protein allows the bear to den while producing little bodily waste, keeping it very clean. But the bear eats many other things, too. Whale and walrus, carrion, the rich forage of tundra berries. This is a calm-hearted predator, becoming more patient with age, scanning at ice-edge.
But ringed seals are a very important prey. Polar bears will ambush their lairs resulting in mighty carnage. Many populations depend on the ringed seals dearly:
A Canadian polar bear biologist, Ian Stirling, has added greatly to a Western understanding of the polar bear by combining his study of bears hunting seals with a study of ringed seals and ice dynamics. In the spring of 1974, Stirling, with the help of ringed-seal biologist Tom Smith, was able to explain a peculiar sudden decline of the polar bear population in Amundsen Gulf. In the winter of 1973-74, he said, little snow fell in the area--too little to permit seals to excavate their snow lairs on the ice except in a few isolated places. Also, the ice itself remained stable and unbroken in areas where there were usually leads in winter. Perhaps the solid ice also affected concentrations of the seals' food. At any rate, a number of seals moved out (one of Smith's tagged seals moved all the way to Cape Dezhnev, Siberia), very few seals made birth lairs, and many bears either starved or moved on. Because, in essence, it didn't snow enough that year.
The Arcitc is a constantly variable dreamscape, and with its variations comes fortune or doom for the individual. These are populations that already reside in conditions that are as unpredictable and unrelenting as possible. We are throwing too much chaos into the equation.
Variations. It is very frustrating to behold months of dry conditions and then have your friends and neighbors complaining at the first, briefest rains that do little more than tide over wild biota as the streams run low, and the heat that is just not right to those with what's called 'native eye' and an affinity for the land. And it is troubling to know that whatever pleasant warmth these people feel, disproportionately larger changes are happening in the North's landscape of desire and imagination.
The Arctic is very sensitive to oil spills and other forms of pollution. Polar bears in areas affected by oil spills have been observed licking oil off their fur, resulting in the agony of renal failure. Of climate, the yearly return of something as simple as the narrow stream-like leads in the ice and a particular amount of snow is vital to the health of the population. There are so many things that climate variations can throw out of whack, and we don't know most of what those are. At the same time, the Arctic nations are witnessing the scramble for the next, great natural resource bubble.
The Arctic is not just a realm of polar bears. It is a deceptively vast but intimately close region of awesome diversity, of ancient peoples surviving on the edge, wary of us in their awareness of how vulnerable they prove to our machinations, of many things yet to be discovered, of feelings larger than most of us get to feel.