A Polar Bear scavenging at the ice edge. Our fifth trip to these amazing Arctic Islands. This was a very special trip: a private charter aboard the M/S Malmo for twenty nights. This gave us the maximum time possible in the pack ice as we searched for Polar Bears. We had the most amazing encounters. We first came upon a female Narwhal carcass and five bears feasting on it. Narwhal are rare around Svalbard so we were most surprised to find another Narwhal carcass some distance from the first. This time it was a male and there were upwards of 10 bears enjoying the carcass. We spent several days just watching the spectacle unfold.
This lone bear was scavenging for scraps of the whale. It was picking tiny fragments from the sea. It hardly seemed worth the effort.