Photos show polar bears making themselves at home at abandoned Russian research station

Polar bears on an island off the eastern coast of Russia have taken over an abandoned research station and made it their home.

Drone footage taken by photographer Vadim Makhorov shows the large bears settling into the remains of a Soviet-era weather station on Kolyuchin Island. The small island is about seven miles off the coast of the Chukotka Peninsula, off Alaska, the News said. The station was abandoned in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, the BBC reported.

Makhorov was using a drone to film the island’s landscape when he saw the bears, he said in a Facebook post. Photos show the bears inside homes, looking through windows and resting on porches.

“Bears are no strangers to the feeling of comfort and warmth,” Makhorov said in the post. “They perceive houses as a refuge.”

Makharov said there were about 20 bears in the area and there was a walrus bed near the research station. A bird’s-eye view photograph shows several structures in various states of disrepair, with some debris scattered around the area. Other images show the bears resting outside. A bear tried to grab Makhorov’s drone as it approached, the video shows.

“Polar bears are extremely dangerous predators, but why do they look so cute and friendly in photos?” he added in another post.

It is not the first time that polar bears have been intrigued by human settlements. In 2016, a group of seven bears attacked five researchers at a weather station in a Russian island in the Arctic. A passing ship released flares and deployed a helicopter to scare away the animals, which killed one of the station’s two dogs and broke windows at the research site. the bears were finally expelled.

Hungry polar bears They have also approached residential areas and even airports while looking for food. The animals are considered a protected species and rarely pose a threat to humans, but can be deadly. A worker at a remote government radar site in the Canadian Arctic was killed by a pair of polar bears in 2024.

Rising temperatures in the Arctic are changing the behavior of polar bears, experts told News themezone. Scientists at Polar Bear International told News themezone that melting sea ice and other environmental changes are keeping bears closer to humans and farther from the seal dens they normally feed on. The species is also experiencing a loss of genetic diversity as the species inbreeding in a fight for survival. A 2020 study found that polar bears could be extinct for the year 2100.

In:

• Russia
• Polar bear