Polar Bears vs BBC Spy Cams: Snowball Cam on the Ice in Svalbard

Put a camera disguised as a snowball in front of a polar bear and it will not stay a secret for long. In the BBC documentary Polar Bear: Spy on the Ice, the bears of Svalbard sniff, paw and bite their way through the film crew's hidden cameras, and the cameras keep filming almost to the end.

Polar Bear: Spy on the Ice

The two-part special was made by John Downer Productions, the team behind the "Spy in the…" wildlife films, and first aired on the BBC on 29 December 2010, narrated by David Tennant. In the US, Animal Planet showed a version in March 2011.

The film follows two mother bears and their cubs from their winter dens across the frozen islands of Svalbard to the sea ice, where they hunt seals, while large males roam the same route. It also shows stranded bears hunting walrus, diving for kelp, raiding bird colonies and sharing a washed-up whale carcass.

Snowball Cam and the other spy cameras

To get close without disturbing the bears, the crew built a whole family of disguised remote cameras:

• Snow Cam, disguised as a lump of snow, with four-wheel drive and tundra wheels for crossing land and ice.
• Blizzard Cam, its faster successor, driven by propellers at up to about 37 mph (60 km/h).
• Snowball Cam, the small round camera that features in the most famous clip.
• Iceberg Cam, a waterproof unit that floats between ice floes and films bears swimming underneath.
• Drift Cam, which completes the set.

The bears found several of them. One adult male alone destroyed more than $200,000 worth of equipment, and secondary cameras recorded the damage, which is how the "polar bears smash the spy cams" clip came about.

Polar bear facts

• Size: adult males weigh 300–800 kg and measure about 2–2.5 m long.
• Population: 22,000 to 31,000 worldwide. The species has been listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN since 2015, mainly because of shrinking sea ice.
• Hunting: mostly ringed seals, ambushed at breathing holes or at the ice edge. From winter to early spring, waiting at a breathing hole is the main method.
• Nose: a large, highly developed sense of smell detects prey over long distances. That is exactly why a strange new object on the ice gets inspected so thoroughly.
• Fur: the guard hairs are transparent and hollow. The coat looks white because it reflects light, while the skin underneath is black to absorb heat.
• Cubs: usually twins, about 600 g at birth in a winter maternity den. The family leaves the den between late February and early April.

Svalbard: polar bear country

Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, roughly halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, covering about 61,000 km² of land. Around 300 polar bears live there year-round, part of a shared Barents Sea population of about 2,650 with Russia's Franz Josef Land. Norwegian sovereignty dates from the Svalbard Treaty, signed on 9 February 1920.

The main town, Longyearbyen, has about 2,500 residents, and its airport has regular flights to Tromsø and Oslo. Daylight swings to extremes: the midnight sun lasts from 20 April to 23 August and the polar night from 26 October to 15 February. Leave the settlements only with a guide or proper bear protection. Anyone travelling outside town must carry scaring devices, and carrying a firearm is advised as a last resort.

For more close encounters, see Gordon Buchanan’s different filming pod, or explore Churchill, Manitoba with a panoramic way to explore a polar-bear landscape.

Related reading

• Svalbard Global Seed Vault: What the Arctic Backup Actually Does
• Helsinki Zoo’s Brown Bears Return to the Snow
• Japanese Snow Monkeys Bathing in Hot Springs
• A Siberian Husky Disappears into an Autumn Leaf Pile
• The Arctic Light: Lofoten’s Long Spring Twilight
• Antarctic Icebergs in Motion: Drift, Collapse and Meltwater

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