Looking out the window
I keep looking at the beautiful photographs Dmitry Kokh took of polar bears peeking through the windows and standing on the porch of an abandoned weather station on Kolyuchin Island in the Chukchi Sea—just northwest of Alaska. (You can also watch drone footage Kokh took.)
It is unsettling to me to see polar bears in grassy landscapes. But this isn’t a story focussed on climate change. The photographs were taken in August when the snow had gone. This is a reclamation story. People left the buildings and the polar bears moved in.
We had a blizzard in Halifax on the weekend, so I’ve been thinking quite a bit about snow. (It took forever to shovel out from the storm. My arms, for the record, are still a little sore.) It’s one of the things our friends from other sea turtle groups find interesting about the CSTN. We live in a place that has winter. Almost all of them work in the warmth of nesting beach countries. Many have never experienced snow.
It was one of the reasons scientists initially said leatherbacks wouldn’t come up to Canadian waters on a regular basis. Why on earth would this animal native to tropical beaches go somewhere temperate? It didn’t make sense.
But the leatherbacks did go way up north to Atlantic Canada. Even though the scientists didn’t think they should. Even though it didn’t fit the parameters the scientists had set.
I love that animals do things without us. That they live their lives—inhabit unexpected places, for example—and what humans imagine to be true—what we proclaim—is irrelevant. (“Polar bears don’t look out windows!” people might have said with a reasonable sense of authority.)
I love that the animals themselves are the truth. Embodied. There for us to learn to see.