First Polar Bear Sighting!
First Polar Bear Sighting!
By prisca.campbell
(August 6, 2010, 20:45) - On route from Dundas Harbour to Coburg Island - Hamish Fothergill Reporting- As the Kapitan Khlebnikov traversed towards Croker Bay, breakfast was interrupted by the sighting of a polar bear. Rapidly climbing staircase after staircase, we arrived to see a male polar bear inquisitively examing the scenery around him, the KK included.
Whilst being avidly photographed, he proved himself to be a worthy subject, catching a ring seal pup, an event never before caught on film. After returning to finish a breakfast of Smacks (Sugar Puffs to the rest of the world), we split into 6 groups and waited to take our respective transportation. For me this was a brief helicopter ride over the glacier of Croker Bay.
As soon as group 4 had returned we ascended above the ocean on a journey to observe the fractured tip of the glacier, where the occasional shard would splinter off to become yet another ice floe in a crowded sea. Upon returning from the helicopter, we hurriedly prepared ourselves for a skirmish onboard the Zodiacs. From the water one is imbued with a far superior prespective of the grandeur and epic proportions of the great glacier. We took the opportunity to purse what had been earlier misidentified as a bearded seal; in fact it was a female walrus. We we able to get within 20 odd meters without disturbing the walrus, which was, at the time, sun bathing upon a slab of ice barely larger than itself.
Post lunch, the expedition hoped to travel over water to Dundas Harbour where there lies an abandoned station belonging to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. There was also the promise of musk-ox and Arctic hare. However these plans were dropped when the Bell Long Range helicopter, on its forward scouting, found poarl bears to be active in the landing area preventing any onshore activity.
As a compromise, my father gave a talk in the ships lecture hall on his most recently finished project, Planet Earth. The sighting of yet another polar bear, supposedly a female this time, prematurely interrupted this. The time, however, the bear was too far away to offer much in the way of photographic opportunities. Once the ship had passed the lecture was resumed, much to the enjoyment of my fellow passengers who had enjoyed the former part of his speech.
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