Learning much from our very accomplished guides on this A&K expedition “In Search of the Polar Bear”
By Eileen Ogintz
Impressive! The kiddos are swimming—and it’s only about three degrees Fahrenheit. Of course, we’re talking about Harp Seals in the Arctic.
These cute seals are so named, one of our Abercrombie & Kent guides explains, because fully grown Harp Seals have a distinctive black mark on their backs said to resemble a harp. They actually are born white and get mottled as they grow.
[Photos by Andy Yemma, except where noted]
We are sailing on an expedition in the Arctic called “In Search of the Polar Bear” and thus far, we’ve only seen one at a great distance, looking like a white rock as it lay snoozing on a rocky beach. But for that reason, our landing yesterday at Kvitoya, in the far northeast of the Svalbard archipelago, was aborted (too dangerous!).
Now we are sailing further north to reach the edge of the arctic sea ice that we learn is continuously moving with blocks of ice smashing against each other, If we are lucky, we will see polar bear(s) on the ice, says Morten Jorgensen, author of two books on the subject. Alas, none appeared.
Abercrombie & Kent is a company that tries to make a guest’s experience as rewarding and seamless as possible. We’ve all received a copy of Jorgensen’s “Polar Bears Beloved & Betrayed.”
The expedition team is highly accomplished. We had lunch (a fabulous barbeque!) with Nellie Nilsen, a botanist from Norway who teaches at the university level as well as conducting genetic and ecological research.
“When I see a plant, I haven’t seen before that is joy for me,” she said. Also joyful is sharing the experience with those on holiday, she said. “People get so excited…and when they are surrounded by experts, that makes the world bigger. It is one thing to look at a glacier and another to understand what you are looking at.”
During a sea day lecture, Nilsen recounted her days growing up in the Arctic in Tromso, Norway. “In summers we rode our bikes to school, and in the winter on kick sleds,” she said, showing photos of her on a sled and skiing through deep snow when she was just two.
And for us, the 16-member expedition team do all the heavy lifting. They are out there spotting for polar bear, birds, and yes, the Harp Seals before we could see them, making announcements for us to come on deck and then standing by to explain what we are seeing.
We are very lucky, expedition leader Chris Srigley tells us, not only for the sunny weather but to see so many thousands of Harp Seals in one place sliding off the ice floes into the water, and out again. “That was a mind blowing scene,” he said at lunch. “In 20 years I haven’t seen anything close to that.”
The seals must be mindful of polar bear, Jorgensen tells us. The bears will try to snatch them when they come up through holes in the ice to breathe. He says a better name for the Polar Bear is ice bear or white bear as they aren’t found at both poles – only the north. That’s what they have been called in many languages through the ages.
Poor polar bears. Not only is climate change—the ice is melting in the Arctic faster than anywhere—impacting their habitat but they are still allowed to be hunted by indigenous peoples despite a global 1973 agreement to protect them. The hunting continues in three of the five countries where polar bear live—Alaska in the United States, Canada, and Greenland, governed by Denmark.
“It is a political hot potato,” Mortensen said in his talk, explaining in his book that the continued hunting is legalized through a system that is actually “a smokescreen continuously laid out to camouflage the fact that the hunting is commercialized, industrialized, unsustainable, immoral… with 4-5 per cent of these magnificent animals killed every year.”
Mortensen explained that as a result, the bears are being hit by a doubly whammy. “I don’t agree with the current consensus for us to continue hunting, saying the only threat to polar bears is climate change,” he said. “We need the bears to be as strong as possible to manage climate change.”