Liefdefjorden, Woodfjorden and Monacobreen, North Svalbard
From Oslo two days ago, we took the three-hour flight north to Longyearbyen. Even our Norwegian stewardesses were excited: “This place is very exotic to us!” Soon after landing at the tiny airport we toured the old coal-mining community, with its Skidoos, husky kennels, famous polar bear signpost and the letterbox where the children post their letters to Santa Claus. At 6pm we set sail, northbound, up the west coast of Spitsbergen. Quiet engines and a merciful ocean lulled us to sleep.
This morning, gone were the grey clouds of Longyearbyen; instead a bright sun danced on smooth waters. Round the northwest tip of Svalbard came strings of little auks and puffins returning from fishing trips. A bearded seal appeared close by, a minke whale surfaced off our starboard bow. South down Woodfjord, and passing Andøyane Islands we came upon our first bears: a mother and single young cub hunting in an Arctic tern colony, where angry birds buzzed round her head like wasps. It was hard to contain the excitement on the bow as folk clamored to get views of our first wild bears. We were just planning our first landing in Bockfjord when all thoughts of going ashore were scotched by our second bear sighting: a female with two cubs. The captain slowly crept us into the shallows nearby, but this bear led her cubs away along the shoreline. Checking through the telescope revealed why she was leery of people: she carried a neck collar with a transmitter underneath; someone must be tracking her movements by satellite as part of polar bear research. Her cubs were rosy, stained by the red clays of the Devonian sandstone hills behind us.
But the treats never stopped: as we turned away there was our sixth bear: a young male guarding the carcass of a reindeer which must have died last winter. He tore at the loose fur and bones as we watched, a lean meal in this barren landscape. Only a few hundred yards further along the coast between two thermal vents on the hillside and there was bear number 7: a sizeable male which climbed the rocky slope above us and watched warily from a patch of lime green moss. Seven bears on our first day! Our spectacular finale was Monacobreen, the huge glacier at the end of Liefdefjord. We launched our fleet of Zodiacs and within minutes of approaching the blue ice wall, a gigantic slab of glacier face collapsed with a roar, sending out a great wave of water. This panicked the vast cloud of kittiwakes, gathered to feed where the underground river pours out from beneath the glacier. A trawl by David Cothran revealed the swarm of tiny creatures on which the birds were feeding, copepods, arrow worms, and choice morsel, large Arctic krill which the dancing birds were snatching from turbid waters. There can be no finer illustration of the sheer abundance of life in Arctic seas: this swirling menagerie of birds included Arctic terns, black guillemots, ivory gulls, and bird of the day, a small group of Sabine’s Gull.
Ian Bullock, Naturalist
