Thursday 24 March 2011

intelligent creatures

Because everybody likes cute furry animals. (Most of the time.)


I don't know about you, but I think polar bears are rather adorable. So when I saw these pictures, along with this article, it made me smile. I thought I would share it here.

The story is this: A director who was making a documentary on polar bears disguised his remote-controlled cameras as snowballs, in the hopes that they would blend in with the icy tundra. He captured some cool photos this way, but only before being out-smarted by some polar bears. The playful bears ended up destroying more than $200,000 worth of equipment, but at least they got these pictures first.

 There were a few different kinds of cameras: the snowball cam (the spherical one in the second picture below), the drift cam, the blizzard cam and the iceberg cam, which was for above and below water filming. Here are the bears "playing" with the cameras.


How cute is that? One (okay, two) more:


I thought it was very interesting how the bears responded to these. They are pretty intelligent creatures, are they not?

The documentary was for the BBC and it was called Polar Bear: Spy on Ice. It was broadcast in December but if you want to watch a little, there's also a really cute video {well, I think it's cute} you can watch here.

(The photos are from here and here.)

~KG

3 comments:

  1. something must be done before they become the dominant species. This is urgent.

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  2. I saw a bit of the documentary and found their use of these spy cameras incredibly inventive. It's great that they are spending time (and money) documenting this amazing species.

    ~ OMO

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