In one of the world’s most incredible places, bears ruin everything

There’s perhaps just one animal that isn’t afraid of a polar bear: the Arctic tern. Those lunatic birds, with their black helmet markings and furious dispositions, are known to attack the world’s largest land predator. It’s not just a quick nip, either – they have been filmed drawing blood as they dive bomb the mighty mammals’ heads.

Bear ballet… they are the animals most visitors want to see.

For everything else – man and beast alike – the polar bear is an enormous distraction, able to generate excitement and paranoia like no other Arctic animal. Last northern summer I could see just how much mental real estate the bears occupy as I worked as a ship’s photography guide in Greenland and Svalbard, a distant Norwegian territory.

Let me say that I admire polar bears – they are awesome in the truest sense, wonderful models for wildlife photographers, and like all charismatic megafauna, a delight to simply witness as they march unstoppably across their white world. Let me also say: I think they are very capable of ruining the Arctic visitor experience, too.

One of the problems with polar bears comes from their psychic enormousness and the outsized value visitors place on seeing them. The entire Arctic region is full of wonders, but ursus maritimus dominates thoughts in a way that can become pollution. For guides, every excursion must consider the possibility of bears. This means taking rifles, loading them on shore, and engaging in endless radio chatter to make sure the animals aren’t around. The scouting starts much earlier than this, of course, with landscapes scoured with binoculars before we’ve started to think about leaving the ship.

Targeted in the hunt for a photo opportunity.

Passengers are generally kept unaware of this massive inconvenience – the endless faffing and fretting – but if the Arctic offers a polar opposite experience to Antarctica, it is because of the bears. The impact of having a huge land predator affects not only the safety of operations for expedition cruise companies, but the wildlife, too. Knowing they have the chance of being eviscerated and eaten, most animals exhibit caution in the north that is absent in the south.

Too many bears, meaning it’s unsafe to land? Perhaps that signifies there are too many humans.

Consequently, most fauna in the Arctic will flee at the sight of a person as though they were a bear. This gives the feeling that all wildlife is scarce in the north. (If you’re ever struggling to recall whether penguins and polar bears coexist, remember that there would be no relaxed penguins if the predators were around – and there would be no skinny bears if they had access to penguins.)

When bears are encountered, interactions are necessarily distant. Most photographs will convey nothing more than a white spec in a vast landscape. Owing to tightening regulations in places like bear-rich Svalbard, this will have to be regarded as a good sighting. For passengers arriving with a hope of looking into the black eyes of the bear, of seeing its prodigious claws thudding into the tundra, the huge distances will, of course, be disappointing.

It is unlikely to be their only ursine frustration. In the last Arctic season, I worked on a particularly long and spectacular itinerary, 23 days which were split between the magnificent east coast of Greenland, then Svalbard. There were just two sea-days as we transited between the two territories, the only hours during which we had no hope of seeing a bear.

As it turned out, the first 16 days were bearless. They were also full of marvels: fjords as dramatic as anywhere in the world; incredibly intimate whale encounters; sightings of bloated and brilliant walrus. On the 16th day we reached Alkefjellet, a colossal granite cliff network which is home to an estimated 150,000 Brunnich’s Guillemots. The teeming avian city is one of nature’s great sites – in the polar regions or anywhere – but it is no home for mammals. That night, during our daily recap, passengers asked not about the sensations of the day, but when we would see polar bears.

The next day from our Zodiacs we saw five together. The day after that, seven. The day after that, bears were spotted at our landing site, meaning we had to cancel our operation and couldn’t leave the ship. I heard some passengers grumbling about this – “there’s too many bears now” – and had to remind myself that I was being paid to be polite.

Jamie Lafferty is a writer and polar photography guide. His book, An Inconvenience of Penguins, will be released in late 2025.