While the iconic images of polar bears in a warming world are arguably of starving bears shivering on ice floes, or of bears swimming great distances as those floes disappear, a different scene may be a more accurate portrayal of the animal's near future: hungry polar bears decimating colonies of nesting seabirds.
"Picture instead," writes Daniel Grossman in a post for Yale Climate Connections, "a cream-colored bear loping on land, across tundra, and along the pebbled shores." Forced to venture ashore in search of sustenance, this hypothetical bear is fighting off hunger by snacking on bird eggs.
The image is fully grounded in fact. As Grossman notes, polar bears have increasingly been observed marauding through colonies of seabirds as they seek alternate sources of sustenance in the absence of sea ice.
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