winter wildlife

“In July a bear shakes off after a swim in Canada's Wager Bay, a finger of Hudson Bay. Here and elsewhere in the bears' southern range, sea ice melts in summer. Without ice for a platform they cannot hunt seals, their main prey—and so they fast, eating almost nothing until ice forms in autumn.”

—From “Polar Bears: Stalkers of the High Arctic,” January 1998, National Geographic magazine
Photograph by Flip Nicklin