Polar Bear Habits | Wild: Polar Bear Diary | BBC Earth

While the bears wait for the bay to freeze, there's little to do but sleep and play, giving visitors an intimate view of polar bear life. No one appreciates this more than scientist Malcolm Ramsey. In the summertime when we're working, it's at the time that the bears are just coming on shore, and we've caught individual bears, probably on the day that they arrived ashore, in exactly the same spot where we've caught the same bear in previous years. The sea ice, remember, is not solid. So the bears are moving over a huge area the size of Great Britain. It's on a substrate that's constantly moving. Particularly in summer when they're about to come ashore, the ice is very broken up. Where the last vestiges of ice are found can vary by several hundred kilometers from one year to the next. And yet, they can swim right ashore in this, what is to us, a featureless environment, and know where they are. Malcolm's been following these animals for 20 years. They still surprise him. Every year I find that the bears do something quite extraordinary. And I'll think, why are they doing that? Where did that come from? What's going on there? I'll predict something will happen, and gosh, they don't do that at all. It's something completely different. Why would they do that? So it's, it's, I find it's no end of excitement to work with an animal in which every year I feel I know less and less about it. Rather, I realize their lives are much richer than I ever expected. There's no doubt about it. Polar bears are full of surprises. Much of Malcolm's efforts to understand what it's like to be a polar bear focus on how these animals survive in such a hostile environment. They can walk out in conditions that to us seem most ferocious, and to them is equivalent to a warm spring day. We've seen bears jumping into the water on what appear to us to be a rather chilly day, and to them they just leap in to chill down or to have fun swimming in the water.