I not only have a lot of photos of polar bears from our trip, I have photos of a lot of different bears. Each seemed to have their own personality and degree of comfort with the large ship passing by.
Some stayed where they were watching us with a mild curiosity while others came closer and still others left as fast as they could.
The bear, above, is one of my favorites for a very selfish reason. I was all alone on the bow at about 5:30 am when a crew member came down from the bridge to tell me they had spotted a bear on an ice floe we were approaching. The official wake-up call was sounded each morning at 6:45 am and the policy seemed to be that there would be no announcements made before that time. The plan was to get in position and just wait with the bear in sight until people awoke. As we got closer I managed to get the one shot, above, of the bear resting before he became aware of us and entered the water, quick as a flash. That was the last we saw of him. So this is the only photo of that particular bear. I love how his head is down and his butt is in the air.
We had many opportunities to see bears rolling and sliding in the snow. The female, below, was particularly active and I captured lots of images of her in comical poses.
She was also the only bear we saw with a collar on which made for less than ideal photos. Only female bears can be collared for a very simple reason: on males, their neck is larger than their head. Collars would slide right off!
My iMac died this morning. The only good news is that it has been giving me warning signs for the last few weeks so I had everything backed up but I am left without the ability to edit images until I replace it. It was 7 years old so I can't imagine it is worth trying to fix, even if it was possible (which it really isn't in remote Wyoming). I have edited almost all my Arctic images so I can continue to post those photos for a while but things are certainly a little more difficult for the time being!
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