Svalbard: Polar Bears in Lilliehookfjord
First day of the expedition and we got our first polar bear sighting – a mother and a cub polar bears swimming across the fjord and getting out on shore, climbing the coastal cliffs and continuing at a swift pace along the shoreline. The female actually had a radio collar, indicating that it is a known and tracked bear. Polar bears have it rough on Svalbard, the archipelago now gets ice-free for quite a long time in the summer and polar bears need ice to survive (96% of the polar bear diet is seal, hunted in the open sea ice). In the summer the bears have to roam the shoreline hoping for scrap leftovers of carrion, birds, eggs, or anything else edible.
