At the moment I found myself face to face with a polar bear



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NOTNothing prepares you when you find yourself facing a polar bear. During my long career shooting nature documentaries, I have met grizzlies in Alaska and mountain gorillas on their backs in Uganda and Rwanda, including one m & # 's He threw himself to the ground when he thought he had threatened his family. But that did not make things less scary when I was within ten meters of a polar bear, perhaps the most dangerous predator in the world.

I was filming Unknown worlds, a BBC documentary broadcast on Easter Sunday with presenter Steve Backshall. We climbed Scoresby Sund to Greenland, the largest fjord in the world, to examine the damage caused by climate change, which melts the ice in the region and destroys local wildlife habitats.

Most nights, we would camp under the stars in canvas tents, wrapping ourselves in layers to protect us from the freezing cold of the Arctic. We were well aware of the risk of attacking polar bears – one of the few animals on the planet to search for humans and hunt them – and we took bear watch tours every night.

The pack ice around Greenland follows the same trend as the entire Arctic: its size has melted and melted earlier in the year, depriving polar bears of their preferred hunting habitat and making their behavior less predictable. Indeed, by returning as far as possible in this beautiful country, it was clear that the situation was more serious than we thought and that the fjord – which would normally be covered with sea ice at this time of the year – was a pale imitation. of himself.

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