I will wind up my polar bear posts with this posting. It was really a lot of fun to watch the bears and despite seeing so many, we never tired of watching them. The thing about watching specific bears for longer periods of time was that we got to see more behaviors and more interesting interactions. Let’s face it, watching the bears nap, which we did a lot of, was not all that exciting.

The guy in the first photo evidently needed to scratch his nose. There are a lot of ways for a bear to scratch his nose, but this was the most fun way that we saw in Kaktovik.

Some bears were really just sacked out and didn’t wake up while we were watching them. I will contrast the second and third bear photos. Our local guide would often call a bear a male or female and I would have no idea how he could tell. I eventually asked him how he could tell and be so sure. His answer was that the males are usually the whitest because they just lay down on top of the ground, like in the second photo. He said that the females tended to dig a hole in the dirt or sand and to lay down in the hole, usually with her cubs. Due to her digging and laying down in the dirt, the females generally had dirtier fur like in the third photo. The bears fur was actually all the same color.

I’m not sure why the bear in the fourth photo was hanging its tongue out but it made for a slightly different look for the bear. That may have been his opinion of us bothering him.

The one-year old twins that we followed a lot fought each other much of the time. It didn’t matter if they were on land or in the water, they never quit fighting for very long. Mom, occasionally, would stop swimming and bark at them to quit fighting and start swimming again. But their fight-breaks never lasted long. We spent an inordinate amount of time watching these two fight each other.

You can see a bear heading into town in the last photo. It happened frequently and we watched this from our house often.