PREVIEW

A meteorologist working in the Arctic was greeted by a family of polar bears peering through her window.

Katarzyna Kudłacz woke up ready for work at the Polish Polar Station Hornsund on the icy island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean when three unexpected guests faced her.

“The meeting was quite unusual, as the bears looked into the windows of the polar station with great interest. [I] saw a mother and her two cubs in the window,” Katarzyna later told The Dodo. “[I] immediately alerted the entire station.”

Leader of the 46th Polish Polar Expedition, Daniel Kępski, clarified that the bears visited the base on 27 March, at 7 am local time.

“The photos were taken with a cell phone because there was no time to grab a decent camera,” Daniel told Cover in an exclusive statement. “We see quite a lot of polar bears here, but rarely they come so close to the building. However, a similar situation occurred in the middle of polar night - maybe they were even the same bears.”

Daniel speculated that the March morning sighting marked the return of a polar bear family who visited the base on 9 December last year at 5 am - night time for winter in the region.
At the time, the family were caught on camera but not seen by the researchers.

The expedition leader recounted, “Later we saw their tracks, checked CCTV footage and that's how we ‘noticed’ their short visit. They were around the station for just [a] few minutes during the night, so they were easy to miss.”

A spokesperson for the research station wrote on Facebook that the bears’ morning return gave Hornsund’s residents a start, joking, “We didn’t need coffee to wake up this morning.”

Staff at the station spooked the bears with noisemakers into moving on their way.

“It is important to remember that these are wild animals, and for them and for us it is better to keep a certain distance,” Katarzyna explained. “It was a wonderful experience… but also a bit stressful.”

The morning of 27 March did not mark the last time that polar bears made an appearance near the station, either. Daniel told Cover, “After this meeting at the window in March, we saw a few bears, but from a safe distance and they were definitely different polar bears.”

Also known by their Latin name Ursus maritimus, polar bears are the largest species of bear and land carnivore alive.

Adult males can weigh between 300 and 800 kilograms (660–1,760 pounds).

Native to the Arctic, polar bears prefer to walk on sea ice but move onto land when the ice melts in summer.

A polar bear's diet consists mostly of seals, but they may also eat walruses, beluga whales and some terrestrial animals.

While polar bears may hunt solitarily for most of their lives, young polar bears do stay with their mothers for up to two and a half years.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) have declared polar bears as a vulnerable species, with an estimated 22,000 to 31,000 individuals left in the world.