A summer look at a winter icon
I’ve seen a few nature documentaries in my day, but have found none quite as gripping as the one airing tonight on CBC’S The Nature of Things, called Polar Bears: A Summer Odyssey. As narrator David Suzuki puts it: “This is their world as you’ve never seen it before.”
He could well have added “and as it’s never been told before” because, not only is it visually stunning — with extended, close-up video of the bears both on land and under water — the 46-minute film is also a moving story of one young bear’s gruelling journey of survival.
The three-year-old male (a teenager in bear years) is one of about 900 polar bears who live in Hudson Bay. They survive by eating about 43 seals each a year, but because they’re only adept at hunting them on ice, once it melts in summer, the bears lose both their habitat and their source of food.
To survive, this most southerly population of bears on the planet must swim hundreds of kilometres, past the islands and archipelagos, and onto the Canadian mainland, where they wait out the hot summer months.
Through amazing cinematography, we follow our hero (often right on his tail) while he makes his first solo migration, swimming for 10 days and nights to reach land.
We’re right with him when, like any teenager, he makes some truly bad decisions — such as when he scales a cliff to get at some tastylooking birds. Since they’re little more than bones and feathers, and he desperately needs fat and protein to survive, it’s a dangerous waste of time and effort.
When he finally reaches shore — hungry, exhausted, overheated by the 30C weather and pestered by swarms of flies — the image of him moaning and rolling around while holding his head in his paws makes it impossible not to experience some heavy-duty anthropomorphism.
There’s stunning footage of an experienced older male hunting a walrus cub, and a hilarious scene of four bears who, over 10 whole days, play the world’s longest game of bear tag. We also witness the death by starvation of a threeyear-old female, despite the fact she resorted to cannibalism the day before.
And there’s the rub, of course: underlining the whole film is the tragedy that, due to global warming, these bears have less time every year to get their seal hunting in before the ice melts. According to the documentary, this particular population has dwindled by 22 per cent in less than 20 years. It’s truly heartbreaking to watch a couple of teen males attempt to wrestle (a life-saving skill they’ll need at breeding time, four years down the road), but they’re too weak to manage it.
This is an extremely effective, moving and beautifully shot film, which will make you laugh out loud (I did, several times), tear up (ditto) and despair at the harm we’re doing to our fellow residents of planet Earth. Essential viewing. (CBC — 7 p.m.)