The polar bear problem

They’re thriving – and they’re hungry

The terrible story of the boys mauled by a polar bear in Spitsbergen has sparked a debate about the risks of adventure travel. But what does it tell us about polar bears? Some have claimed that this month’s tragedy is evidence that they are getting hungrier and more desperate as Arctic ice retreats. More likely, it shows that they are getting ever more numerous as hunting pressure relents.

For years there was a skin of a bear hanging on the wall of the cafeteria in Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen’s capital village — maybe it is still there. By rights that bear should have eaten me, or my friend Charles Gillow. The first polar bear seen in living memory in summer in Longyearbyen (about 25 miles west of where last week’s tragedy happened), it prowled past our tent while we slept by the beach one June night in 1978, having come ashore with some pack ice that drifted into the fjord in the small hours.

Woken by a car horn, a loud shout of ‘Wake up! There’s an ice bear outside your tent,’ we unzipped the tent flap suspecting a practical joke, only to see a large, off-white, furry bottom in plain view less than 100 yards away, investigating the camp sewage outflow. The bear soon hopped out among the ice floes till it was lost to view, but tracks in the sand showed it had passed close to the tent while we slept.

We had a rifle with us, because the year before an Austrian tourist had been killed by a polar bear in the north of Spitsbergen and the Norwegian authorities now insisted for the first time that expeditions be armed. But this was before the days of tripwires and flares to protect campsites.