When photographer Paul Nicklen and filmmakers from conservation group Sea Legacy arrived in the Baffin Islands in late summer, they came across a heartbreaking sight: a starving polar bear on its deathbed.
Nicklen who is no stranger to bears shared the heartbreaking video on his social media and warned the people what could happen if the Earth continues to warm.
The video shows the animal foaming at the mouth, its white hair limply covering its thin, bony frame. One of the bear’s back legs drags behind it as it walks, likely due to muscle atrophy. Looking for food, the polar bear slowly rummages through a nearby trashcan used seasonally by Inuit fishers. It finds nothing and resignedly collapses back down onto the ground.
“We stood there crying—filming with tears rolling down our cheeks,” he said.
The video he shared on Instagram was captioned, ”My entire team was pushing through their tears and emotions while documenting this dying polar bear. It’s a soul-crushing scene that still haunts me, but I know we need to share both the beautiful and the heartbreaking if we are going to break down the walls of apathy. This is what starvation looks like. The muscles atrophy. No energy. It’s a slow, painful death. When scientists say polar bears will be extinct in the next 100 years, I think of the global population of 25,000 bears dying in this manner. There is no band aid solution. There was no saving this individual bear. People think that we can put platforms in the ocean or we can feed the odd starving bear. The simple truth is this—if the Earth continues to warm, we will lose bears and entire polar ecosystems. This large male bear was not old, and he certainly died within hours or days of this moment. But there are solutions. We must reduce our carbon footprint, eat the right food, stop cutting down our forests, and begin putting the Earth—our home—first.”
In the days since Nicklen posted the footage, he’s been asked why he didn’t intervene.
“Of course, that crossed my mind,” said Nicklen. “But it’s not like I walk around with a tranquillizer gun or 400 pounds of seal meat.”
And even if he did, said Nicklen, he only would have been prolonging the bear’s misery. Plus, feeding wild polar bears is illegal in Canada.
The wildlife photographer says he filmed the bear’s slow, beleaguered death because he didn’t want it to die in vain.
“When scientists say bears are going extinct, I want people to realize what it looks like. Bears are going to starve to death,” said Nicklen. “This is what a starving bear looks like.”
By telling the story of one polar bear, Nicklen hopes to convey a larger message about how a warming climate has deadly consequences.
Polar bears have long been unwitting mascots for the effects of climate change. As animals that live only in Arctic regions, they’re often the first to feel the impacts of warming temperatures and rising seas.
The large, half-ton bears find concentrations of seals on sea ice. During summer months, it’s not uncommon for polar bears to go months without eating while they wait for Arctic ice to solidify.
In 2002, a World Wildlife Fund report predicted that climate change could eventually lead to polar bear endangerment or extinction. Even then, the report found that polar bears were moving from ice to land earlier and staying on land longer, unhealthily extending the bears’ fasting season. By the end of summer, most bears studied by the World Wildlife Fund showed signs of starvation.
Fifteen years later, polar bears’ icy hunting grounds are in even worse shape. The National Snow and Ice Data Center, which tracks sea ice cover annually, has regularly noted record lows in sea ice coverage—a decline that is expected to only get worse.
