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Thread: Ivory Gull feeding

  1. #1
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    Default Ivory Gull feeding

    With this post, I am not sure which forum is the right one. It is one of a series of a rare Ivory Gull feeding on a polar bear carcass. The image is a good one, not the best I have (that's the Ivory Gull landing on tha carcass with tack sharp head and wings, landing gear extended).

    I am not sure, if such an image works e.g. in a competition like BBC.

    Our trip to Svalbard in late August and early September was very successful. We had great light (please see my post in the Landscape Forum), birds of all kinds (even the Brünnich's Guillemots were with half of the colony at Alkefjellet so late in the year) as well as Polar Bears and Walrusses at around 30 m distance.

    The most interesting but hard encouter was an adult male polar bear feeding on an approx. 3 year old polar bear. Cannibalism is not unknown with polar bears but according to our experts on the ship it was seen so far only that a polar bear found a carcass and started feeding. We have not seen the adult killing the younger one, but the scene was quite clear on this. At the point where we found the adult feeding on the young one was a lot of fresh blood and the adult had a fresh injury at one leg.

    After photographing this scene from about 150m (we very not able to move closer due to the pack ice and our ship the MS Origo was a small one with just 24 passengers) from the ship and the adult polar bear moved away, our expedition leaders decided to park the ship at the border of the pack ice and to walk to the carcass. During the walk we were able to take such photographs as below.





    Canon 5DII, 4.0/400DO IS, 1.4xII, 320ISO, f7.1, 1/640sec

    What do you think on my initial question? Might that work in a competition?

    Regards

    Bernd

  2. #2
    Axel Hildebrandt
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    This certainly is a high-impact image. I don't know if it is too gory for competitions. I'm wondering if the adult bear killed the young one for territorial reasons or if food is scarce.

  3. #3
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    Bernd- Suggest you post your best one to Avian: Image Critiques.

    This is of course absolutely typical behaviour for Ivory Gulls, which essentially make a living scavenging kills by predators such as Polar Bears and Homo sapiens. Nice to see though. Well done capturing the event.

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