out & about
The amazing
Survivorbear
A true story of
adventure, tragedy
and seriously
inhuman endurance
jack ie besteman
by j.b. MacKinnon
At twilight on the first night, she could no
longer see any land. It was late August, and
the midnight sun was a distant memory;
eight hours would pass before light filled the
sky again. Until then she was adrift in the
Beaufort Sea of the Arctic Ocean. She had no
food, no fresh water, no navigational aids,
and no sense of how far she would need to
travel before she reached either landfall or
pack ice. There’d be no chance to sleep.
Nonetheless, she was there by choice.
Whether or not it still felt like the right
choice as that first night fell, no one can
say. What is beyond doubt is that, at some
point over the next eight days, the journey
failed to go as expected and became a raw
struggle to survive. It might, in fact, be the
most incredible survival story ever told,
though this, too, is difficult to say, because
“she” is not a human, but a female polar
bear. Or did you think that only people
have adventures?
Her only name is Polar Bear 20741, or
B741 for short, which seems fair enough—
she’s a wild bear, after all, not a plush toy.
No one noticed anything remarkable about
her when she was darted from a helicopter
on August 23, 2008, along with her cub.
At seven years old, B741 was still a young
bear, and weighed in at a healthy but not
unusual 500 pounds; her cub, a yearling
female, was already 350 pounds. The pair
was tranquilized on Alaska’s northern coast,
not far from where the Colville River softens into the Beaufort Sea.
Over the next hour, B741 became a fully
modern polar bear. Researchers fitted her
with a Telonics brand radio collar with GPS,
designed to record her location hourly and
uplink to a satellite. The collar also featured
an external thermometer, plus a 3-D accelerometer to gauge her activity level. Finally,
a body-temperature sensor was surgically
implanted near the base of her tail through
an incision as long as a thumb.
Over the next three days, the information beamed to the satellite was, if anything,
unusually dull. Bear 741 moved a total of
about one kilometre. Then, on August 26
at about 6 a.m., she disappeared into radio
silence. “The assumption was that she was
in the water,” says George Durner, the zoologist with the U.S. Geological Survey science centre in Anchorage, Alaska, who was
monitoring the movements of collared polar
bears. The scientific name for polar bears
is not Ursus polaris but Ursus maritimus,
the sea bear—they’re known to be good
swimmers. The researchers were about to
learn just how good they can be.
From the place where B741 entered the
water, there’s nowhere, really, to swim. A
few barrier islands scatter down the coast,
but if you head straight out to sea, the
next land you encounter is the Svalbard
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out & about
Archipelago in Norway, on the other side of
the North Pole. Long before that, of course,
you’d hit ice, but in the summer of 2008,
the sea ice recorded by NASA’s Aqua satellite was impossibly far away—more than
600 kilometres to the north.
Still, there was reason to believe that the
ice pack might be B741’s ambition. When
her story was told this year in an academic
paper published in Polar Biology, the authors,
led by Durner, acknowledged that she might
have gone searching for sea ice as “a response
to handling.” In other words, the shock of
being anaesthetized only to wake up with
what amounted to an alien probe in her hiney
scientist emeritus with the Canadian Wildlife Service, who has studied polar bears for
nearly 40 years. Given this cub’s genes, I’m
going to imagine the yearling managed up
to 300 kilometres. If so, she drowned after
four days straight of swimming.
Ethologists, who study animal behaviour, warn against assigning human emotions to other species. Here, though, we’re
talking about intelligent, social animals
that fiercely defend their cubs, play with
them, teach them—animals that appear
capable of forming friendship-like bonds
even with unrelated bears. Bear 741 may not
have wept frozen tears as her cub slipped
under the surface and sank, ghostlike, into
the black depths, but I don’t doubt that she
felt the loss.
By that point, she had already achieved
the extraordinary. After four days at sea,
sider the fact that polar bears swim with an
inefficient dog paddle, their hind legs acting
as little more than rudders. Consider the
fact that, before B741, the legendary Russian bear biologist Nikita Ovsyanikov had
written that polar bears probably couldn’t
swim much more than 120 kilometres. By
her fourth day at sea, B741 had more than
doubled that distance. She’d been in continuous motion for 96 hours, and it was
taking its toll: Her body temperature was
in chronic decline. With no land or ice in
sight, she was swimming as much toward
death as anything else.
That night was the new moon. Bear 741 had
now swum a distance 10 times the breadth
of the English Channel. Below her yawned a
watery abyss so deep the numbers are meaningless. Above her, perhaps, the northern
might have provoked her to abandon the
coast. More likely, it was a perfectly normal
decision. Beaufort bears often make midsummer swims to get back to the ice pack,
home to their favourite prey, the ringed seal.
The Arctic is changing, though, and what
was predictable in the past is often full of
surprises today.
Days passed, and still B741 failed to transmit her location. Durner never felt much
concern—collars malfunction, batteries fritz out, bears sometimes pry off the
whole shebang and ditch it in the muskeg.
She was, for the moment, simply a missing data point. Meanwhile, the flesh-andblood B741 continued to paddle into the
open ocean.
It was the morning of August 30, if not
earlier, that tragedy struck. No one knows
whether B741’s cub swam out to sea with
her, but that’s seen as the most likely scenario. “A couple hundred kilometres at the
most is getting out toward the limit for their
cubs, even yearling cubs,” says Ian Stirling, a
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B741 had swum a distance greater by far than
any ever managed by a human being—the
Guinness record for uninterrupted swimming is a 225-kilometre Adriatic Sea crossing
by Veljko Rogosic of Croatia. The Beaufort
Sea in August, meanwhile, is more than 10
degrees colder than the coldest allowable
temperature for internationally sanctioned
open-water swimming. Throw a man in a
Speedo into the Beaufort, and he could die
from cold shock within five minutes. If he
survived the initial immersion, he’d likely
lose the dexterity to swim within half an
hour and drown. Even with a life jacket, he’d
be dead from hypothermia in an hour; add
a quality survival suit, and he still wouldn’t
last one day.
If we sometimes picture animals as cartoons just waiting for a voiceover by George
Clooney or Meryl Streep, the other temptation is to dismiss them as otherworldly and
incapable of suffering. Can an animal be
what we think of as a “survivor”—able to
fight against the odds, to hunger for another
hour, another minute, in the world of the
living? “This particular event has got to be
very unusual and toward the upper limit of
what they’re capable of,” says Stirling, who
described B741’s swim as “astonishing.” Con-
lights made witchcraft in the sky. More
likely, clouds obscured the stars in one of
the most lightless corners of the globe—a
perfection of night.
Her life had been reduced to a single
command: Keep swimming. Her only destination was due north, using powers of
navigation that are unknown, but known
to be excellent. But just imagine it. Blackness above, blackness below. Anyone who
has been in dense forest at night, or held a
hand to their face in the bowels of a cave,
knows that true darkness is impenetrable. It’s an observed fact that polar bears
can feel fear—in fact, some are surprisingly quick to be afraid. Ovsyanikov once
watched an adult male bolt in terror at the
spectre of a few leaping, cackling ravens,
and suggests that a propensity to fear the
unknown helps explain why a perpetually hungry predator that can claw its way
through quarter-inch steel plate has fatally
attacked people only a few dozen times in
recorded history worldwide. Meanwhile,
humans have killed an estimated 150,000
polar bears in the past three centuries.
In other words, don’t imagine that this
polar bear, pawing away at the darkness,
feeling its life force slowly slipping away, no
jack ie besteman
The final numbers are mind-boggling. By the time
she clambered onto the ice, B741 had swum non-stop
for 232 hours— more than nine and a half days straight.
She’d travelled a total of 687.1 kilometres
out & about
end in sight, wasn’t capable of feeling—and
overcoming—fear. She could. She did.
Suddenly, there she was. Durner was in
Anchorage, looking over the daily satellite data, when he noticed a point in the
middle of the Beaufort Sea. “It was pretty
exciting,” he says, and Durner does not
sound like someone who is easily excited.
Between the bear’s new location and her
last transmission from the Alaskan coast
was a huge, blank, watery space. Durner
fired off an e-mail to his colleagues: Hey,
guess what?
Bear 741 had found ice where there wasn’t
supposed to be any—a sheet too thin to be
detected by NASA, but thick enough to hold
one tired bear. Her final days had been the
hardest. She’d been lucky with the weather
overall, mainly facing light winds. Rough seas
can be lethal to swimming bears; a Beaufort
gale in 2004 is estimated to have killed 27
polar bears along a 600-kilometre stretch of
coastline. As B741 neared her landing, the
swells climbed to six feet, the sea hoary with
whitecaps and spray beginning to blow—what
mariners call a “fresh breeze” on the wind
force scale. The water was also the coldest
she’d encountered, at 2°C, and she responded,
it seems, by pushing herself—the accelerometer recorded the highest activity levels
since she hit the water.
How she hauled herself onto the ice is a
question for the imagination. Perhaps she
erupted out of the water, triumphantly, the
way polar bears sometimes do when they
hunt ringed seals. More likely she came
ashore lethargic, shivering and desperate
for fresh water. Do bears, like so many sailors, feel landsick when they stand on solid
ground after days on the moving sea?
The final numbers are mind-boggling. By
the time she clambered onto the ice, B741
had swum non-stop for 232 hours—more
than nine and a half days straight, combining epic physical effort, sleep deprivation,
dehydration and hunger with the loss of a
cub, for a perfect storm of sentient endurance. She’d travelled 687.1 kilometres. I’m
going to guess that those last 100 metres
were the longest.
It’s the lack of sleep that gives me most
pause. In 1964, a 17-year-old from San
Diego named Randy Gardner broke the
record for human sleeplessness, going without for exactly 11 days, which remains the
only properly monitored achievement of its
kind. By his fourth day, Gardner was sufJ u n e 2 0 1 1 explore 3 1
fering delusions—he was a famous black
football player!—and also mood swings,
short-term memory loss, paranoia and hallucinations. I myself once stayed awake 56
hours, at which point I fell asleep in midconversation. Nine days without rest, constantly in motion, always at risk of death, is
beyond human comprehension.
There was probably nothing to eat where
B741 ended up, and, although polar bears
normally rely on food for hydration in their
frozen world, she would have eaten snow or
searched out the midday puddles of meltwater. There was, at least, sweet rest. For three
days she snoozed or moved slowly toward
thicker ice, averaging about one kilometre
per hour. Then she encountered open water
again. She slipped into the sea, and swam
another 80 kilometres.
There’s a story about climate change in all
of this, of course. “Prior to 15 years ago, sea
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ice generally remained over the continental
shelf near the Alaska coast throughout the
summer. So when a bear had to go swimming, this behaviour was very beneficial
because it allowed them to get to better
habitat relatively quickly in terms of distance—a distance of maybe tens of miles,”
says Durner. “Well, they have this behaviour
ingrained in them, and now the sea ice is
retreating hundreds of miles from the coast.”
It’s possible, then, that B741’s journey was
truly historic—a situation no other polar
bear had ever before encountered.
The Arctic appears to be warming faster
than the rest of the planet, and some observers consider it warmer now than at any time
in the past 2,000 years. The historical range
of polar bears has shrunk (they once were
common in southern Newfoundland and
Labrador, and likely reached as far down as
the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence),
and the equation for the remaining bears,
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who depend on the ice pack to hunt seals,
is simple: less sea ice, fewer polar bears.
Long-distance swimming could be an unanticipated threat. The bears that hunt harp
and hooded seals off northern Labrador in
spring, then walk and swim their way north
as the ice breaks up, face similar dangers to
the Beaufort bears. “We may be seeing more
of this in the future,” says Stirling.
But I’m tempted to put the polar bear’s role
as symbolic climate martyr aside, and simply
stand in awe of the species. Polar bears and
human beings are contemporaries in geologic time, with both Ursus maritimus and
Homo sapiens appearing on the scene about
200,000 years ago. We’re both astonishing
creatures, humans for our ability to render
the harshest environment livable, and polar
bears for their capacity to live in the harshest
environment. A polar bear knows its exact
place on Earth even as it roams moving ice
in the endless night of winter; it is so well
insulated against the cold that it’s invisible
in infrared photos; it can travel in a single
year a distance equal to the Trans-Canada
Highway between Vancouver and Halifax.
And now, with B741, we know it is capable
of survival in the same terms that we celebrate in ourselves: through the will to live.
If anything can be said to be the mysterious spark of life, it is this.
On October 26, 2008, a welcoming party
was waiting for B741. The research team
had been capturing Alaskan coast bears
again, and had noticed in the satellite reports
that a certain long-distance swimmer was
making her way back down the expanding
autumn ice pack. She was in the Yukon, but
trending toward Alaska. In a single day, the
entire field lab was moved to the border
village of Kaktovik, and B741 was darted
almost as soon as she crossed that imaginary frontier.
Her return trip had covered another 1,800
kilometres, and in the two months since
she’d last been weighed she had lost almost a
quarter of her body weight. Still, she looked
healthy. The researchers removed her temperature probe and gave her a new radio collar, and, at her last known transmission, she
was far away again, on a trajectory toward
Russia. She hasn’t been heard of since. It
could be a problem with the collar. It’s possible she’s died. All anyone can say for now
is that a miracle has disappeared. e
J.B. MacKinnon is explore’s senior contributing editor.
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