Journey’s end

Starving polar bear’s final moments on film

PAINFULLY thin and desperate, harrowing footage shows the final moments of a polar bear killed by climate change.

Forced from its natural habitat by melting ice and so weak that it struggles even to stand, the young male rummages through a bin and then gnaws on an old snowmobile seat as it searches for food.

Animal welfare experts believe the animal was beyond help and would have died soon after.

Paul Nicklen, 49, shot the tragic scenes on Somerset Island in Nunavut, Canada, for non-profit group Sealegacy. He hopes his film will be a wake-up call on the plight of polar bears – which now face extinction within 100 years.

Describing the experience as “profoundly heartbreaking”, he said he watched for more than five hours as the bear struggled – driven inland after the melting of the polar ice cap cut off his main food source of seals.

Mr Nicklen said: “We only knew that he wasn’t dead when he began to lift his head.

“We didn’t want to stress him out more than he was, so we hid behind an abandoned hut.

“He got up and wandered over to a trash bin, looking for food.

“He was looking for anything he could find, although at this stage no amount of food would have saved him. In this video, he is chewing on the burnt padding from a snowmobile seat.

“This video was one of the hardest things I have ever filmed. It was impactful and disturbing. The first instinct is to help, to save him somehow, but his legs muscles had atrophied beyond repair and nothing we could have done would have saved his life.

“As a global society, we haven’t seen footage like this before and if we don’t do something, we will see more and more of it.”

During the summer, polar bears can go for several months without eating while they wait for the Arctic ice to solidify.

But the ice is now freezing later and melting earlier – and without access to seals their fasting period is prolonged.

Sealegacy is using the grim footage in its Turning the Tide campaign to highlight the suffering of polar bears and the ravages of climate change.

TRAGIC Wasted youngster is far from natural habitat DESPERATE It checks bins for food and gnaws old seat NO HOPE The weak giant slumps to ground in Canada