As marine mammals, polar bears are at home in the water, and routinely swim dozens of miles in search of food and whatever else bears search for. They paddle with their powerful front legs, while their back legs serve as rudders. We encountered this very healthy bear in a field of broken sea ice in the Davis Strait. It passed within less than 50 yards of our Adventure Canada expedition ship, the Ocean Adventurer. This is part of a sequence of images taken from the bow of the ship. What an exhilarating experience!!
As always, I highly recommend metal prints for crisp rendition of the fine details. If you choose a paper print, please include a frame to help reduce the cost of custom framing later.
Davis Strait is a wide, deep, cold body of water between Baffin Island and Greenland, and crossing it is a serious undertaking even in a ship: our own crossing ran 510 nautical miles and took the better part of two days. To meet a bear swimming out in it is a reminder of the scale these animals operate at.
The strait carries a steady traffic of ice southward out of Baffin Bay, which is what makes a crossing like this possible for a bear: the broken floes are stepping stones. It is also the reason the strait has always been a working corridor. European whalers pushed into these waters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries precisely because the ice edge concentrated whales, and the Davis Strait fishery ran for the better part of a century.
Photographically this is a difficult subject and an honest one. There is no dramatic light, no convenient foreground, nothing to hide behind compositionally: just an animal, the sea, and the ice it depends on. I kept it because the plainness is the point.
On printing this one: unlike most of my ice images, this one is deliberately low in contrast and low in drama. It suits a matte or pearl paper better than metal: the glossy treatment fights the quietness. This is one where I would choose paper first.
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