Map of the Spitzberg archipelago
It was a long time in coming, would say some of the obsevrers here. Here come some photos brought back from a wildlife destination much colder than my usual travels of the past. No big cat in the icy Svalbard archipelago.
It was in June this year (2013) that I traveled to Spitzberg while the last ice just left, in the hope of observing polar bears in their natural habitat. We arrived in Longyearbyen to take a boat cruising to the Western then the North cost of these islands. A few days at sea.
The local fauna is infintely less developed than in Eastern Africa but it is not totally absent (less than in some of our French forests). After the sea birds, we were hoping to meet seals (and other pinnipeds) but we could photograph only this seal who was curious of what we were doing when stopping to go on shore.
Phoque