Thursday, December 30, 2010

Polar Bears vs. Spy Cams

No contest.

4 comments:

JeffS said...

Why didn't they send in some Beeb reporters carrying the cameras? Get the video AND feed the poley bears at the same time!

I guess the BBC just hates poley bears.

Paco said...

Jeff: Your engineering side is showing! That's the kind of efficiency that wouldn't have occurred to those BBC bureaucrats.

Paco said...

BTW, I really got a kick out of the blizzard cam - the one that dropped the decoy.

JeffS said...

Yeah, I know, Paco, I tend to go towards the low-tech solutions. Much to the annoyance of my peers, I might add. They lurves their complicated plans, they does!

And I thought the decoy was a clever idea as well! I wonder if that was the intended purpose of the doohickey?

BTW, if the Beeb collective think polar bears are smart, they need to go tromping in the deep wilderness, where extreme measures are required to keep other bear species away from anything even remotely smelling like food. The ingenuity and problem solving abilities of those bears to get at the food is really quite remarkable.

Me, I suspect that two things drew the attention of the polar bears to the spy cams: the motion, especially in an environment where animal life is thin; and the smells, as bears will eat nearly anything. I've known brown bears to devour soap with gusto (although I wasn't around to witness the aftermath, thank God!), and I have to think that any new smell (and any equipment with servos, motors, and electronics DOES smell, even if it's just the lubricant) attracted them.

Put 'em together, and presto!, instant polar bear toy.