Best Polar Bear Moments | Part 2 | BBC Earth

As the bears move up the coast, Snow Cam gets ready for action. But the first bear it finds is an inquisitive young male. Like so many bears, he finds the spy cams intriguing. He subjects it to a pressure test using a technique that works well on sealed ends. Snow Cam is supposed to be indestructible, but it's buckling under the pressure. Snow Cam films its last. It's March and light returns to the high arctic, sweeping away four months of darkness. A polar bear stirs. She has been in her den the whole winter. Her emergence marks the beginning of spring. After months of confinement underground, she toboggans down the slope, perhaps to clean her fur, perhaps for sheer joy. Her cubs gaze out at their bright new world for the very first time. The female calls them, but this steep slope is not the easiest place to take your first steps. But they are hungry and eager to reach their mother, who's delayed feeding them on this special day. Now she lures them with the promise of milk, the only food the cubs have known since they were born deaf and blind beneath the snow some two months ago. Their mother has not eaten for five months and has lost half her body weight. Now she converts the last of her fat reserves into milk for her cubs. The spring sun brings warmth, but also a problem for the mother. It starts to melt the sea ice. That is where she hunts for the seal she needs to feed her cubs, and she must get there before the ice breaks up. For now, though, it's still minus 30 degrees, and the cubs must have the shelter of the den. I'm really hoping Lyra and Mickey will have returned. And we're in luck. Our family is back, but Lyra's behaviour is different. It's interesting, she's coming towards us. Okay, Lyra is a bit closer. This is when I start getting nervous, just a bit. Okay, Lyra, I can see that you're smelling the air, and I'm just a little bit worried that it's the smell that's coming from me that's holding your attention. This is not a bear that is at all scared. It's a bear that's figuring out what's going on, whether there is an opportunity to feed here. We're completely downwind, so Mickey's getting quite a good scent of us here. Lyra's always actually moved away from us and kept a personal distance, and right at the moment, it's the first time in the last year of being with her that she's actually turned around and come towards us, and it's her body movement and her stance that worries me a little bit when she's tense. She basically puts her front paws forward and builds up a stance. It's like a spring ready to take off, you know. When they come at you, the initial speed is incredibly fast. This is the first time I've felt threatened by Lyra. If she comes, you drop everything. You drop the monitor, you drop the camera. Jason, is he safe there? I'll just grab one more shot of Lyra. I don't like it. OK, shall we move back then? Sure. If you don't like it, I'd rather move back now. Please, Gordon. OK. Right, Lyra, that's close enough for now. Despite the fact that she hasn't been aggressive towards us at all, there may well come a point where she views me differently, that she sees me and thinks, possibly, this is something that I can eat. Maybe this is my next meal. We may be safe, but I'm so worried about Lyra and Mickey. While the bears wait for the bay to freeze, there's little to do but sleep and play, giving visitors an intimate view of polar bear life. No one appreciates this more than scientist Malcolm Ramsey. In the summertime when we're working, it's at the time that the bears are just coming on shore, and we've caught individual bears probably on the day that they arrived ashore at exactly the same spot that we've caught the same bear in previous years. The sea ice, remember, is not solid, so the bears are moving over a huge area the size of Great Britain. It's on a substrate that's constantly moving. Particularly in summer when they're about to come ashore, the ice is very broken up. Where the last vestiges of ice are found can vary by several hundred kilometers from one year to the next, and yet they can swim right ashore in this, what is to us, a featureless environment and know where they are. Malcolm's been following these animals for 20 years. They still surprise him. Every year I find that the bears do something quite extraordinary. And I'll think, why are they doing that? Where did that come from? What's going on there? I'll predict something will happen, and gosh, they don't do that at all. It's something completely different. Why would they do that? So I find it's no end of excitement to work with an animal in which every year I feel I know less and less about it. Rather, I realize their lives are much richer than I ever expected. There's no doubt about it. Polar bears are full of surprises. Much of Malcolm's efforts to understand what it's like to be a polar bear focus on how these animals survive in such a hostile environment. They can walk out in conditions that to us seem most ferocious, and to them is equivalent to a warm spring day. We've seen bears jumping into the water on what appear to us to be a rather chilly day, and to them they just leap in to chill down or to have fun swimming in the water. Somewhere, somehow, there has to be a way into this wall of blubber. There are pups in there. There's one. There's another one. Another. But how do you get the pup away from the big ones? It seems to be more than one bear by itself can manage. But the bear isn't by itself. Other bears have picked up the scent. Polar bears are more than just solitary animals. They actively dislike each other. But they're all very hungry now, and there's an awful lot of food cornered here. They're circling like vultures. The only trouble is, these bodies aren't dead. Even the mother is here with her cub. The bears have backed the walruses into the water, but can they organize an assault? The walruses are breaking ranks. The bears have singled out the young, the old, and the unhealthy. Especially the young. Now they're closing in. There's the objective. Confusion among the walruses. The wall of blubber is breached. Goes. Another one. But as soon as a kill is made, the carcass is dragged away so that other bears won't steal it. It's a victory and it's a massacre. The beach is covered with walrus meat and bones. Because there were so many bears, they're all feasting at a time when they might be expected to starve. There are even leftovers for late arrivals.