The Return (Midnight, 21st century)
Once again, I return to the human world. After almost three months of absence.
Marfa and the twins
The season was incredibly difficult in terms of logistics, but it still happened. If anyone has read my post from three months ago, they will remember that I was going to visit the walruses at Cape Heart-Stone. But the attempt to break through with all the expedition equipment to the ship “Sotnikov” through the crowd, eager for the same thing, was unsuccessful. I frantically began to look for any other opportunities to escape to the coast of the Chukchi Sea, and for the first time in my life I found myself in a situation where the risk of being left without a field season approached its maximum.
Nevertheless, I managed to find a complex, three-stage option to fly to Cape Schmidt, where I did a good job in 2017-2023. I used this option. Alas, the long-awaited meeting with the walruses was disrupted… Well, it doesn’t matter! The other Arctic animals are like family to me, and we spent wonderful months together.
In the photo, Marfa and her twins are relaxing in the freshly fallen snow. These are just some of the people whose lives I’ve been following this fall. I’ll show you the others later.
Racial prejudice in bears
Usually, the ranges of brown and polar bears do not overlap: brown ones stick to forests, while white ones prefer sea ice, Arctic islands, and a narrow strip of coast. Nevertheless, American grizzlies have managed to explore the tundra and the coast of the Arctic seas. Brown bears live in similar conditions in Chukotka, the only tundra population in Eurasia. Here, in recent decades, whites and browns have been increasingly facing each other.
The climate is changing, and the rapid and large-scale disintegration of sea ice forces whites to come ashore at the end of summer, while browns are actively exploring the seashore as it warms. Both are happy to use dead walruses and whales for food, so the chances of meeting them have increased many times compared to the last century.
A feast of polar bears on the remains of a whale this fall.
Seeing with my own eyes and capturing in a photo/video the relationship between two different species of bears has been my dream for thirty years. But no luck. I have heard several times about such encounters from local hunters, and I have seen traces of both brown and white in the vicinity of walrus rookeries and beached whale carcasses, but nothing more.
Three weeks before my arrival at Cape Schmidt, my friend and wonderful wildlife photographer Maxim Deminov sent me several pictures and videos via WhatsApp. When I saw them, I felt a sense of ecstatic envy (I can’t think of any other definition for the flurry of emotions that gripped me).
In the video, two brown bears, growling at each other every now and then, tore up a whale carcass dangling in the water near the shore, and 5 or 6 polar bears were sitting on the shore in picturesque poses, watching this attraction in disbelief.
In another video, a mature brown bear greedily gnawed at the remains of this whale, which had already washed up on a coastal beach, while a young white circled around it, sometimes making threatening lunges at another young, but already brown, fellow. Both teenagers, both brown and white, were afraid of the hefty and fat brown male, and he calmly devoured the whale meat, kilogram after kilogram.…
When I finally managed to get to Cape Schmidt, all that was left of the whale was its spine and ribs, but the bears kept nibbling at them. By this time, the browns and whites had sorted themselves out and followed the following daily routine. During daylight hours, polar bears were engaged in whale hunting.
As soon as the sun began to set below the horizon, the whites left and settled down for the night about 200 meters from the whale restaurant. And in the gathering dusk, brown ones emerged from the tundra, which took over the night disposal of whale remains. In the morning there was a changing of the guard.
So, I’m out of luck again. The whites and browns definitely treated each other without any sympathy, they had no desire to eat side by side in a friendly, cheerful company. But we must give them their due! Despite the obvious racial prejudice, they did not bite each other and managed to conclude an unspoken peace agreement. I had to shoot both of them separately, alas.…
Anatoly Kochnev Source
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