The Great White Bear Read Online Free PDF Page A

until he had drawn level with the hollow she was creating; he saw the bear, which had her head down as she dug, before she saw him. He immediately dropped to the ground to avoid detection. But it was too late. The crunching of snow underfoot had given him away.
    The bear, he wrote, lifted her head, looked at him with surprise and fear, and "hissed so loudly that I thought she was going to turn herself inside out." She stared at the scientist for several seconds before climbing up a steep slope away from him, still hissing, clearly struggling to move her distended body.
    Ovsyanikov, a conscientious researcher, was deeply distressed that, however unwittingly, he had caused the bear to abandon the site she had selected, forcing her to search for a new suitable location. His presence had altered the animal's behavior, a violation of the field biologist's prime directive; as a result, the pregnant female—which, with resources at a premium, had little margin for error—was forced to expend extra energy she could ill afford to waste.
    Even so, for a bear to desert a den during construction is neither unprecedented nor unusual. Researchers have found that abandonment of dens in favor of more agreeable sites can happen with some frequency during the late autumn months when females are looking for somewhere to bed down for the winter.
    When the dens have been dug and the cubs born, however, it is a different story.
    Ian Stirling, who has spent many decades studying the polar bear population in Hudson Bay, has noted that once pregnant females have become established in their dens, they seem determined to remain there, to the extent that they appear almost passive in the face of disturbance.
    "I think their main interest is in detaching from the bad weather outside," offered Richard Harington, who in the 1960s conducted the pioneering study of polar bear denning behavior. "They want to be as secure as possible. They go into what is called a carnivore lethargy: their temperature drops, but it's nothing like hibernation. You can disturb them fairly easily. They can get up and start walking around. I've taken bits of the roof out over dens, and you can see the female inside. At first you don't hear anything but heavy breathing, and then when you poke through the roof you sometimes hear a bit of a growl. When you open it up you can see the female walking round inside, and sometimes the cubs against the far wall."
    For the females, it is of course important to conserve as much energy as possible once bedded down; they will need every ounce they can find, given that they will be surrendering calories to their cubs without eating for at least four months. Far better to sit and wait out a potential threat than to run or fight.
    Which is not to say that neither of the latter ever happens.
    "I remember one time we were in northern Southampton Island, and we were just building an igloo for the night," Harington told me, with a chuckle at the memory of the tale that was to come.
    "I was with Tam Eeolik [Harington's Inuk guide] and [Eeolik's son] Tony. I took one of the bear dogs; I could see some ruffled snow on the edge of a rise. So I told Tony that I was going to go up and have a look at it. So I took the best bear dog we had—and these are dogs that are specially trained to go after bears, to corner them, to hold them for the Inuk to come up and kill them. So anyway, I took this husky and went up, and it looked like it was an abandoned den; there was lots and lots of snow below the entrance area. I started digging away at the entrance and the bear dog that was up with me went up onto the snow above me, and all of a sudden the roof fell in and this female came out and reached for the dog, and this famous bear dog vanished over the hills in no time. I could just see the end of his tail."
    Harington is not the only one. Geoff York, now a polar bear expert with the World Wildlife Fund but at the time a researcher at USGS, recalls an