Often when we imagine polar bears, we visualize them on a vast blanket of whitish snow; after all, their very name implies winter. But even at the poles, summer also arrives and sometimes greens everything in its path; so many wonder what polar bears do during this season. Martin Gregus Jr. has an answer, and it is simply full of tenderness; they sleep on flowered fields.
Gregus set out on a long journey to uncover the secret of polar bears during the summers and found a much more encouraging scenario than he expected. The starkness of global warming that is ravaging the northernmost ice regions has been shown before, and polar bears have been seen looking famished as they head farther south to forage for food of any kind.
However, Gregus came across more hopeful scenes; polar bears in perfect health sleeping on flowery fields in the summer Arctic. That was the photographer’s goal, to show the largest land predator from another angle that had never been shown before.
He witnessed rarely documented behaviors of polar bears, seeing them grazing in the green fields or even spotting them hunting swallow chicks by chasing them over the waves. Perhaps, for now, these actions are helping the population captured by Gregus to survive the retreat of the ice; however, there is no doubt that in other regions of the Arctic, polar bears are dying of starvation.
Global warming has been more severe each year, and summers are increasingly reducing ice cover far beyond historical levels. This has driven bears down into human-populated communities in search of any kind of food. A new species of bear has even been detected as a result of the crossbreeding of polar bears with grizzly bears, which have been named grolar.
However, in the region where Gregus had the opportunity to admire up close the behavior of polar bears during the summer, it seems that the population is completely healthy and they look happy enjoying a green season and fields full of flowers.
[Photos: Martin Gregus Jr.]
Story originally published in Spanish in Ecoosfera
