The Arctic: Polar Bears, Walruses, and Gyrfalcons

An excerpt from Peter Alden's memoir: My Wild Life

On one shore excursion, when we noticed a huge polar bear watching us from around a large rock we had to quickly load into our zodiacs.

Popular culture has presented attractive images of both the Arctic and Antarctica—with the result that many people sign up for cruises to one or the other not even knowing the difference. Some expect to see polar bears in Antarctica, which they will not; and penguins in the Arctic, also an impossibility, no matter what certain well-regarded children’s cartoons have led them to believe. Nor will they meet the Inuit—the indigenous peoples previously referred to as Eskimos—in Antarctica. If you think Santa’s workshop is indeed situated at the North Pole, you’ll find it in a barren landscape of ice and snow, not in a dense forest of Christmas trees. In fact, one of my most amusing memories of traveling in the Arctic region involves meeting a little girl on Baffin Island. I asked her if any of her elders have ever been to the North Pole to see Santa’s workshop. She said I was crazy. To her Santa lived way south in the boreal forest of Quebec.

A variety of mammals and birds populate the Arctic region, including caribou, ducks, geese, and narwhals, but after centuries of hunters decimating their ranks, they have learned to be afraid of humans and mostly stay hidden. Antarctica, by contrast, was devoid of humanity until just a few centuries ago, meaning that there was no hunting until the 1800s, focusing on seal skins, whale oil, and larger penguins. That’s another major difference between the Arctic and Antarctica—that and the fact that they have opposite seasons.

My first chance to discover the wonders of the Arctic came as I was graduating from college—but I didn’t take it. As a geography major at the University of Arizona, I had watched all of my friends in other disciplines interviewing with corporate recruiters while I just kept waiting for a job listing that mentioned geography. Finally, I spotted one. The weather station in Thule, Greenland, which is where the northernmost U.S. military base in the world is located, was offering a two-year contract with a payout at the end of $50,000. Though that was an eye-popping salary for a new college graduate in the 1960s, I was more drawn to the tropics than the tundra at that time, and opted not to apply. Only later did I gain exposure to the fascinating wildlife and culture of the far north, comprising Russia, Alaska, Canada, Iceland, and Scandinavia.

I worked on several two-week Greenland and Baffin Island cruises, but most memorable was an eight-week stint as a naturalist aboard a Russian icebreaker voyaging through the Northwest Passage. The ship had originally been outfitted for military use, in part because it was powered by inexpensive petroleum. With the gradual abatement of hostility between Russia and the U.S. at the time, fewer military craft were needed, and some of the icebreakers found new work being leased out as luxury cruise ships for adventure tourism. 

Also on the icebreaker were a historian and a geologist. The trip began with a flight to Anchorage, then another flight to Nome, from where we crossed the Bering Strait by chartered aircraft and touched down in an abandoned military outpost called Provideniya, on the northeast tip of Siberia. During the Cold War, spies and aircraft were positioned all along the Bering Strait, but during the years of détente that followed, many of the cities here were abandoned, including Provideniya. The airstrip remained, however, so we landed there and boarded our icebreaker. 

We made landfall at the easternmost tip of the easternmost peninsula of Russian Siberia, a region fairly devoid of wildlife, where we were greeted by a group of native people at a small village. As happens in a number of destinations, the locals put on traditional clothing, showed us around, and danced for us.

The icebreaker’s decks had room for two helicopters, each of which could hold a pilot and four passengers. We used the helicopters to transport the passengers to shore for excursions into the tundra and for sightseeing sojourns. Along with teaching our clients about the region’s flora and fauna, my job included loading and unloading people in and out of the choppers, sucking in the exhaust and immersed in the noise all day as I worked. One of the perils of the job! 

Had we been aboard a different kind of vessel, we could have approached the shore of northern Alaska, but because the icebreaker was outfitted with Russian guns, the U.S. government wouldn’t allow us close enough to use open water near shore. Instead, we traveled 12 miles north of Point Barrow, where we found ourselves icebound for three days in thick multi-year ice. Despite the fact that our ship was an icebreaker, it was not a stronger nuclear one. The captain couldn’t manage to get us high enough on the ice to crash down and break it, so we waited it out, taking our passengers on helicopter excursions to view the icescapes below and warily eyeing the odd polar bear that prowled around our ship on the ice, attracted by the scent of food.

After three days, we were able to get through the ice and reach the northern Yukon region of Canada, where we became the one hundredth ship to ever pass through the Northwest Passage. Before the construction of the Panama Canal, the search for the Northwest Passage had been an unending quest for European explorers trying to find a direct route to eastern Asia. At the time, the only way to complete that journey was to pass by Cape Horn or Cape of Good Hope. The quest to find a Northwest Passage claimed plenty of lives in far northern Canada. Today there are numerous monuments and memorials reflecting the unfortunate history of these unsuccessful voyagers. Yet only after the innovation of icebreakers and submarines did it become realistically possible. 

The sound of Canadian military jets flying overhead reminded us that the Canadians do not consider the Northwest Passage to be an international waterway. This is because Canada does not want to be stuck with the cost of rescues or oil spill remediation in this very dangerous passage. (Asian shippers are now presuming climate change may open up a season in which they can avoid using the Panama Canal to the U.S. East Coast. This would save them many days, miles, and a lot of money in canal tolls.)

Every two weeks the icebreaker would stop at an airstrip at Victoria Island or Resolute Island to exchange passengers, who could fly to and from Ottawa and then home. After picking up our new batch of clients, each of whom was paying about $15,000 for their trip, we’d circumnavigate Baffin Island. Making our way north through Baffin Bay, we’d stop at Ellesmere Island. Most Americans could not name any geographical point within Arctic Canada. Many Americans don’t know that the region now called Nunavut was once part of the Northwest Territories. When flying into west Greenland, we could see the vast ice sheet in the distance, but where we touched down the scenery reminded me of Arizona. Musk oxen wandered about like grazing cattle; wildflowers grew in abundance.

On this warm, verdant western side of Greenland, we’d travel north to Ilulissat. Next to it is the Illulissat Icefjord, declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. There icebergs break off the Jakobshavn Glacier. Ilulissat was the setting for one of my less happy moments in the Arctic. On an earlier trip to the opposite pole, the Antarctic, a client had given me a ridiculous hat he’d brought along but thought better of wearing. It was designed to look like a bug-eyed white seagull, its orange beak pointing forward and its wings stretched out. The client heard me give a lecture on the sex life of penguins and somehow pegged me as the right person to own that hat. I was proudly wearing it one day on Ilulissat when we spotted a pack of sled dogs resting between training workouts. I reached out to pet one of the dogs. As absurd as my seagull hat may have looked to me, apparently it looked like prey to the dogs, because one jumped at me and ripped the hat to bits, biting my hand as I grabbed for it. Leaving my passengers in the care of another guide, I made my way to a local medical clinic, dripping blood, where my hand was stitched up. There was no mending the hat; however, no charge for the stitches!

The sled dog episode wasn’t my only adventure involving a hat. One bird that every knowledgeable bird watcher who travels to Greenland wants to see is the white phase Gyrfalcon. It’s the largest falcon in the world, and seeing it is a kind of holy grail for bird watchers, the way seeing a polar bear is for other travelers.

On one of my Arctic cruises, I decided to wear a King Penguin hat I’d bought on South Georgia Island. There in Greenland, I wore my hat as I wandered along looking for a Gyrfalcon to show my group. Finally, I spotted one, perched atop a cliff quite far away. Apparently, it saw me as well—raptors have visual acuity that is four to eight times better than humans—and must have been curious about this strange bug-eyed giant penguin. Soon it was circling over my head, joined by a second one, to the delight of my clients. Because of its rarity, its size, and its pure white feathers, a white Gyrfalcon can fetch more than $50,000 from the Arabian falconers. I had $100,000 of bird life circling over my head. So I wore the same hat on a trip to Ellesmere Island and had similar success. For whatever reason, curious falcons loved that hat.

The Arctic is home to an abundance of summertime bird life. These waterfowl and shorebirds favor the insect-rich lowland swamps, and cruise ships avoid stopping at those mosquito-plagued sites. On one cruise, we encountered musk ox, which are very rare animals. When musk ox detect a predator, whether it’s wolves or Inuit hunters, they circle up for protection. We spotted them at a distance. The ship captain hoped we could coax them to run toward us, so he had a helicopter deployed from the ship to try to drive the animals our way, but it didn’t work. They ran in the opposite direction, and we never saw them again.

Passengers on Arctic cruises are always eager to see and photograph polar bears, so I was constantly scanning the ice around us from up in the bridge with the captain. To spot a white polar bear against the endless white of the ice and the sea, you look for something pale yellow. Once we finally spotted one, we had to decide whether it was worth trying to get closer, for the photo ops everyone wanted. Sometimes a polar bear would be curious rather than fearful as we’d approach. If it looked calm and interested in the ship, we’d get closer for pictures. But more than half of the polar bears I’ve spotted are clearly afraid of people, quite possibly because they’ve seen one of their parents shot by a hunter. They would smell the diesel oil of the cruise ships and move away in fear.

Polar bears are becoming more and more rare in the Arctic. Hunting has depleted them for decades, and now climate change is compounding their problems. Polar bears need at least eight consecutive months of solid icepack in order to thrive, and the warmer the climate grows, the harder it is for them to survive. They travel across the ice seeking seals to eat, locating the seals’ breathing holes in the ice by smell. When the seal surfaces to take a breath, the polar bear reaches down and hauls it out with its claws. Without solid ice, they cannot hunt. With rapid warming there are fewer months with ice cover and fewer seals taken. In my eight-week cruise we saw only two mother bears with a single cub, and a few dozen solitary individuals. However, some research suggests polar bears may turn to hunting caribou and snow geese to replace seals as a food source.

Once, while cruising around the Ungava Peninsula north of Quebec searching for polar bears and seeing none, we came across an island heavily populated by walruses. We deployed our zodiacs (little inflatable boats for sightseeing excursions) to get a better look at the walruses. People were having fun going ashore and walking near them until someone noticed that a huge polar bear was watching us from around a large rock. We bolted for the zodiacs just as the bear started lumbering toward us. We made our way safely back to the ship, but there is always the chance of things going badly. On shore excursions, guides would carry guns for protection from the polar bears. Others of us would carry flares, something that could protect us by distracting them without carrying the danger of a gun. South of the Arctic Circle in late summer we had several hours of darkness just north of the province of Quebec’s Ungava Peninsula. We were rewarded with a spectacular show of the Northern Lights throughout the night. We could sit on the deck of the ship in calm waters and behold this amazing spectacle.