Wildlife

Hungry Polar Bears Decimating Seabird Colonies

While the iconic images of polar bears in a warming world are arguably of starving bears shivering on ice floes, or of bears swimming great distances as those floes disappear, a different scene may be a more accurate portrayal of the animal's near future: hungry polar bears decimating colonies of nesting seabirds.

Polar bears have increasingly been observed marauding through colonies of seabirds as they seek alternate sources of sustenance in the absence of sea ice. There have been cases of polar bears eating snow goose eggs, and the chicks and eggs of thick-billed murres, in Arctic Canada – with the bears in some instances even clambering up cliff faces to reach the nests.

Last year, a team of European researchers reported that, in Greenland and the Svalbard Archipelago, bear raids on colonies of common eiders, glaucous gulls and barnacle geese, rarely if ever seen before 2000, are now commonplace.