Amazing film of polar bear driven
ASTONISHING footage of a polar bear beating starvation by hunting beluga whales was captured for the BBC’s SevenWorlds One Planet.
In the BBC documentary Sir David Attenborough explains that climate change has extended summer in Canada, which is “warming faster than any other country on Earth”.
Polar bears in Hudson Bay rely on sea ice to hunt and the longer, hotter summers – always a period of starvation for the huge mammals – are now putting their lives at risk.
So they have come up with what Sir David calls “a remarkable strategy for survival”.
Sunday’s North America show tells how the bears have very little hope of beating the white-skinned whales in the water – despite them being slow swimmers – as one young bear discovers.
But the more experienced adults have worked out how to hunt from the rocks above – using split-second timing. A successful kill takes extreme patience. One huge male bear is seen balancing precariously on a small rock, biding his time as the tide comes in, before finally launching himself on to his unsuspecting prey below.
“A bite at the back of the head and the kill is swift,” Sir David explains, over drone footage which shows the bear towing the whale back to the shore.
Once there he is happy to share his kill with the rest of the group, despite them not being family members.
Attenborough explains: “This extraordinary behaviour has only been recorded here, in this remote