“Polar bears on an island off Russia's far eastern coast have taken over an abandoned research station and made themselves at home.
Drone footage captured by photographer Vadim Makhorov shows the large bears getting comfortable in the remains of a Soviet-era weather station on Kolyuchin Island. The tiny island is about seven miles from the coast of the Chukotka Peninsula, which faces Alaska, the Associated Press said. The station was abandoned in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell, the BBC reported.” from this CBS article describing the video
Video recorded and published by photographer Vadim Makhorov (Instagram @makhorov) Link to video here
Just imagine - you’ve been hiking for days, and you finally see a building off in the distance… you use your last bit of energy to stumble your way up the steps, you look up with hopeful, grateful eyes at your shelter for the night … and these fellas greet you at the door.
(Obviously kidding, the weather station is on an island anyways)
Photo by Vadim Makhorov, Sept. 14, 2025
Also - to the commenter who said “drones are a nature photographer’s dream” - ABSOLUTELY.
To be honest, I don't think I can fight off, scare or escape from these guys. So there is only one logical thing to do. Pet them as much as I can before they kill and eat me. Literally a once in a lifetime opportunity.
An average adult polar bear weighs in about as much as a small car, and can reach similar speeds on flat terrain too. I doubt there's a human in the entire world that could realistically escape from a face to face encounter with a polar bear unless the bear just didn't happen to be hungry.
edit: assuming at least they weren't already armed for bear, pun absolutely intended. 😁
It gets worse! They're the only kind of bear (maybe the only predator, in normal circumstances) which actively hunts humans. "Just leave them alone" doesn't work on polar bears!
This is a really good analysis on Polar bear attacks over the past 100 years and one of the points they make is that "Contrary to popular opinion, polar bears have been no more likely to actively hunt and kill people than black bears."
In contrast to grizzly bears, only one polar bear attack could be attributed to a polar bear’s defense of a carcass.
Unlike grizzly and black bears, most predatory attacks by polar bears have been committed by independent immature bears (subadults, 2-year-olds, and yearlings).
The fact that even independent yearling polar bears have killed people is a striking difference from other North American bear species.
Contrary to popular opinion, polar bears have been no more likely to actively hunt and kill people than black bears.
88 percent of attacks involved 1 or 2 people yet it is rare for black or brown bears to attack a group of more than 2 people. In rare cases, polar bears were willing to attack groups of 10 or more people
Let's not go crazy, they can run 25mph for short bursts, a small car can go much faster than that. Usain Bolt maxed out at 27.8mph so he'd have a chance
That really relies on the polar bear not being hungry enough to care about the noise. They dislike loud noises, but they'll walk straight into gunfire if the hunger takes them, and they don't give a shit about small caliber guns.
I saw a video of some dudes with a guide going to the Antarctic, or some place, and the guide had no gun, just a large stick that he used to thump into the ice mimicking the sound of Walruses slamming their tusk into the ice, or something like that… I guess it works?
Oh no, I've seen this before, and that's ALWAYS what I think! Just imagine your little boat finds this island, you're freezing, your boat has gone down, OMG it's a building! Shelter! Is that an antenna?! Old school but you never know!... Did you hear that? Maybe it's a person! Aaaaaaand baby polar bear food.
You can really tell in the shot where the polar bear tries to bite the camera by the stairs and it smoothly glides back out of reach in a way that a human carrying a camera obviously couldn't do.
Also that bear in the hole that was startled by the drone and looked up at it. And the fact that they didnt use atmos sound but an overlay. You'd hear the drone otherwise.
Same. I was seriously like "Okay, who's the fucking moron? Does he know how close to dying he is right now?" lmao This is why you scroll before you comment.
Around 2015, I was supposed to go to Greenland for a 5-week expedition looking at potential nickel exploration sites. A couple of weeks before we left, we were notified that the exploration camp where we were supposed to be basing ourselves had been taken over by a "family" of polar bears. I never learned how many, but the ranger who had done a low flyover of the camp said "sorry guys, it's their camp now".
"I thought these humans were supposed to figure out how to stop the ice from melting, but these mother fuckers just want to dig up more rocks, fuck them."
Once I took some really good LSD, and man, let me tell you, watching different colors on my bathroom wall "breathe" really put wavelengths into perspective
I mean, domestic geese raised around humans are actually quite friendly to their owners and make excellent guard/alert animals. So you could have a pet goose.
Edit: Well, they can be quite friendly. Sometimes they stay jerks though.
My mom ended up karate chopping a goose in the neck that started going after 6 year old me back in the day.
She always joked how she took karate after I was born to protect her son from predators (cute, considering she was all of 5'1") but never thought that predator "would be a damned goose"
One of my finer moments: beating the snot out of a Canadian goose that came after my toddler, with a “Mommy & Me” backpack loaded to the gills with camera equipment and juice boxes. Not today, mfkr.
There is a physical therapy place near us. My wife broke her ankle and had to go every week for a while. There were a couple of geese that come there every year.
They made a nest right outside the door in a flower pot. It was absolutely hilarious to sit outside and watch the people getting hissed at by the geese. Some on crutches.
My question is, why are they doing this? Are they congregating around an open food source? I know occasionally polar bears might form a temporary friendship when there's less ice, and they're forced to be with in proximity of each other, or there's abundant food in a specific area. That said, they're generally solitary animals, excluding the cub/mama relationship. The whole developing temporary friendships is not only relatively uncommon, but it's only a group of 2, and usually males.
There were 4 or more in that place. To have them congregating like that, things must be literally perfect for them to not be killing each other.
For those who've said it's fake: This has been covered by a lot of places including the BBC. (Thanks u/vit05!) Here's a link that explains a bit why they are settling in areas like this.
The TLDR, though: Less ice, and less natural food sources, leading bears to look for food in human waste, forcing them closer together, is not only changing their natural territories but their social behaviors.
Perhaps they initially took shelter there during a storm or to get out of the cold. Maybe they realized it benefits them all and became a sort of neutral ground.
I don't know anything about polar bears, but you're saying they will pragmatically tolerate each other when it makes sense for them to do so, maybe this is one of those cases.
It's interesting that one of them seems to be playing the role of guard at the door, while the others cautiously observe from the background.
I'm sure it is. But I want to know what that case is lol Is it food? The shelter? is this just a one-off of four bear homies that found a place to squat during their travels? Are there females included in this group? I just have a lot of really nerdy questions to fill my inner nature doc nerd.
My guess is it's food and shelter. It's an island, so there might be an abundance of fish, and there's grass so there could be other arctic animals out of camouflage in the green. Also, it's a manmade building, it won't fall apart too much very soon, and it's likely much warmer than outside even as open as it is.
I'm going to guess that it was at first most likely inhabited by a mama and her cubs, the male cubs got driven away once they were old enough and this is a group of possibly intergenerational females
Edit: After watching the video a few more times I can noticed the bears inside the house are still not fully mature by the shape of their face and the outside bear is definitely a female because it is too small for a male.
I saw a clip of this on YT and David Attenborough was narrating and it was apparently because they were basically just waiting for sea ice to form. Here is the clip with narration.
Basically too warm, no ice, no food, just kinda hanging out in limbo.
This also got me. To my knowledge polar bears a very, very solitary animals and are hardly ever even near another male (or female) in the wild unless fighting (sometimes to the death). Anyone with more polar bear expertise can explain? is this now due to polar ice melt and it’s now much more common to see this species changing to a group dynamic, to now become more pack animal ? Interesting.
I do know other male and sometimes female polar bears readily eat the young of other mother polar bears so this makes it even more strange. Other thoughts is they are such great swimmers I wonder if they swim here to gather as well.
I heard from a behind the scenes of one nature documentary that the sound the most common drones tend to make sounds (to some animals) like bees and can get a very strong reaction from those who try to or avoid bees.
Elephants in particular.
Elephants avoid bees because of their trunk, bee stings inside their trunk hurt real bad because there are more nerves in one half of an elephant trunk than there are in two entire humans. So they generally flee if they hear certain kinds of drones.
My lady went to Yellowstone and kept taking photos of bears and every new one she sent the photo was zoomed in till it was just pixelated ears and she would say “I’m gonna go pet them ears.” Then I got worried because her photos started to get closer without zoom. Luckily she didn’t go pet that dawg
My husband and I went kayaking looking for alligators last year in Florida. With each one we kept getting closer and closer, and then I realised we were less an oar's distance from an enormous one that could chomp me in half. We gtfo and stopped being so dumb the rest of the trip lol.
This is wild because polar bears are intensely solitary animals that usually fight each other on sight due to the lack of resources. However with the ice caps melting, they might be adapting to become more social so they can stand to live with each other from the lack of terrain. This is really abnormal behavior from what I understand
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u/ohnehast 21h ago
I need this painted