In the spring of 2014, photographs of Gerda the polar bear curled around her tiny cub at Novosibirsk Zoo in Siberia travelled around the world. Taken by Vera Salnitskaya for The Siberian Times, they show the mother sheltering the youngster between her paws, the cub dwarfed by an adult many times its size.
Gerda and her cub at Novosibirsk Zoo
The cub was born in December 2013 and spent its first months with Gerda in the den, as polar bear cubs do. By March 2014 mother and cub had come outside, and the zoo's visitors and photographers got their first look at the pair playing and resting together in the snow. Salnitskaya said she was deeply moved by the tenderness between them.
Gerda was born at the Moscow Zoo; her mate Kai came from the Leningrad Zoo in St Petersburg. The cub of 2013 was a female named Shilka, the first of several youngsters the pair have raised at Novosibirsk. Rostik followed in 2015 and the twins Nordi and Shaina in 2018, and in February 2023 the zoo announced the birth of two more cubs. According to Rosneft, which sponsors polar bears in Russian zoos, Shilka has since moved to a zoo in Japan.
How polar bear cubs grow up
In the wild, pregnant female polar bears dig a maternity den in snow between August and October and give birth there in midwinter. The newborns are tiny:
- Birth weight: about 600 g, roughly the weight of a large loaf of bread.
- Litter size: usually two cubs.
- Leaving the den: between late February and early April, when the cubs weigh 10 to 15 kg. The family stays near the den for about two weeks before moving on.
- Weaning: cubs stay with their mother until they are about two to two and a half years old.
Adult females weigh 150 to 300 kg, which explains the striking difference in scale in Salnitskaya's pictures: a cub of a few months can curl up entirely in the space between its mother's legs.
Visiting Novosibirsk Zoo
Novosibirsk Zoo, about 2,800 km east of Moscow, was officially founded on 29 August 1948 and moved to its present site in the city's Zayeltsovsky district, a move completed in 2005. It now keeps around 11,000 animals of 738 species. Its polar bears are among the most popular residents, alongside a dolphinarium that opened in 2016.
Polar bears in the wild
The polar bear is listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN, with an estimated 22,000 to 31,000 animals left in the Arctic. Since 2013 the oil company Rosneft has funded the care of all polar bears in Russian zoos, about 35 bears in 17 zoos by 2023, and since 2016 it has also paid for research expeditions studying wild bears' migration routes and numbers.
Watch a Toronto Zoo cub encountering snow, or see polar bears filmed in a different setting.
Related reading
- Andrew Manske’s Polar Bear Mother and Cubs in Manitoba
- Polar Bears and Dogs in a FirstScience Film Excerpt
- Gordon Buchanan’s Close Encounter with a Polar Bear
- Churchill in Google’s Panoramic Imagery: Looking around the Tundra
- The BBC’s Snowball Cam Meets Svalbard Polar Bears
- Mark Dumas and Agee: A Polar-Bear Filming Relationship
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