This was one of the most exciting shots of the summer. Seeing this bear reach into the nest, come up with the egg in it’s mouth, you can see this perfectly preserved egg, not yet crushed, just sitting in the bear’s teeth. And then it goes ahead, chews the egg. And to me it’s really cool because I dont usually get to see polar bears that close. Most of our work we’re looking through spotting scopes at polar bears, or we’re seeing them from helicopters, and to see a polar bear so clearly, right in front of the camera, when you can even make out it’s ear tag, was just a real treat for me.

Once we place these cameras, it’s really just a waiting game to see sort kind of data we’re going to get at the end of the season. So after about two months of waiting to go collect the data we flew out, down along the coast, and even as we approached the area from the helicopter I could see that a couple of the posts were knocked over, the cameras were laying on the ground. We brought the data back to camp and we took a look at it. A curious bear been gone up to the camera and chewed on the case a little bit.

It is just like the Boogie Man. All of a sudden the geese are there, the next frame there’s a bear, right in front of the camera. And then, of course, then we watch, we keep watching, the geese eventually leave. That’s because all the eggs have been eaten by that bear.

These are large green eggs in each of these eider nests, and they look maybe about twice the size of a chicken egg, but they’re packed full of calories. In each of these nests there’s four or five eggs. Over the course of about a week, or a week and a half, they ate almost 250, maybe up to 300 eider nests. And so that’s almost the calorie equivalent of 250,000 calories!

One of the other exciting observations, and surprising observations, at least for me, was seeing the female bear with her cub and how they learned how to hunt throughout the summer. Or at least that’s the impression I got. It seemed that they started off just opportunistically stumbling across nests in the eider colony, but over the course of several days we watched them actually get better at it. They began systematically hunting for nests, and then eventually they started getting good at hunting female ducks. We started to see her almost stalk the nest, and then eventually run up to the nest, pounce on the female, and then eat her and the eggs as well. So for me that was really cool to watch that happening.

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These images were all taken in mid June of 2013, collected with remote wildlife cameras. We’re using them to look at waterfowl predation. The whole phenomenon of polar bears eating eggs is something that we’ve known about for a while, and the question is really how much are they doing it and is it increasing over time because of climate change.

From our camp we can look out to the west and see a glacial esker and that’s where the sun sets every night. You just get these beautiful red, yellow, orange sunsets regularly. So for me that’s just one of the highlights of being out in the field all summer.