Somerset Island Deadly Pole to Pole

My name is Steve Backshall.

And this is Deadly Pole To Pole.

Oh!

From the top of the world to the bottom. Wow!

Deadly places, deadly adventures and deadly animals.

And you're coming with me every step of the way.

The crew and I started our global journey in Svalbard

and already we've had some incredible wildlife sightings.

She is striding towards me. She thought we could be her next meal.

They are certainly eyeballing me!

Before we leave and start south,

it seems the Deadly luck is not yet done.

I've only just been woken up to one of the most extraordinary sights I've ever seen.

There's the creamy head of a polar bear just swimming alongside

parallel with the cliff.

This is out of this world, absolutely out of this world.

As this bear is making its way around the cliff edge,

he seems to be looking for a way to get out of the water.

These bears are such opportunists.

They've been seen climbing up onto sea cliffs like these

to feed on the eggs and chicks of breeding birds.

And I'm not sure what this bear is doing

but it's obviously here for something and that could well be food.

It could be the birds themselves.

This is an incredible opportunity for us

and really, I think we have to get in the kayak and be alongside him.

This is something that could only happen once-in-a-lifetime.

But as I'm getting ready with the kayak,

something extraordinary happens.

I really can't quite believe what is happening.

The polar bear starts to scramble up the almost vertical cliff.

I don't think there is much point in me getting into a kayak.

It looks as though he will go right up and over the top of these cliffs.

There just seems to be absolutely no limit to what this bear can do.

Here in the Arctic, they just so totally dominate the environment.

They can go absolutely anywhere.

They can feed on absolutely anything, from a bird's egg to a whale.

They are one of the most extraordinary predators on the planet.

Classically, polar bears seek out seals on ice floes.

As the ice melts, they are forced to improvise.

This bear is in search of a meal amongst the nesting birds.

There is a couloir packed with snow there.

It looks as if he is going to try and climb right through it.

No way!

No way!

He is picking his way up through the compacted snow,

just exactly the way that a climber would use their crampons and ice axes.

Those curved claws cutting into the snow.

I honestly would not believe this if I wasn't seeing it with my own eyes.

I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would see this for myself.

This was very worth waking up for.

He's just going to go right up over the top of the cliff.

That's pretty unbeatable.

The ice bear crests the cliff and out of sight.

We need to keep going, too. This pole to pole adventure has barely begun.

Our next stop is Somerset Island.

Part of Canada, it is still inside the Arctic Circle,

about 1200 miles from the North Pole.

Of course, it's home to some true Artic deadlies.

From some heavyweight head-bangers,

to ghostly white whales.

And a cunning canine survivor.

Every animal living here has to survive winter temperatures

of up to minus 40 degrees centigrade.

Colder than the inside of a deep freeze.

This is one of the most challenging places on earth.

To get to the island from the mainland is a five hour flight.

We are arriving to an Arctic summer and had hoped to avoid the worst weather,

but the big freeze is still here.

For the first time in 17 years,

the pack ice that surrounds Somerset Island has not melted.

Filming wildlife in the Arctic is always a challenge

but we're no stranger to that on Deadly.

Unfortunately, this is a challenge we can do nothing about.

Right now, all of that should be an expanse of open sea.

And it's not, it's sealed in with thick pack ice

and the animal we've come here to find is a marine mammal which lives at sea.

It's an extraordinary beast, totally unique.

It is the pure white beluga whale.

Every year, thousands of beluga whales come in to this bay on Somerset Island.

But this year is a different story.

Our chances of seeing them are not looking good.

Right now, I am actually walking on the sea.

If you look down at this crack, you can see how thick the ice is.

There's probably a metre or maybe 1.5 metres.

I reckon you could drive a truck on this right now.

So in order for the belugas to come into this bay,

and they do in their hundreds, perhaps as many as 1000 of them,

all of this ice has to go.

It stretches off as far as the eye can see in every direction.

We need sun, wind, tide, everything on our side

and even then, our chances are still pretty slim.

It may seem impossible that this world could completely change

in the seven days we're here.

However, there's 24 hour sunlight to bring the melt on.

We're not giving up yet.

In the meantime, this is our base camp.

This is Expedition Headquarters.

It is the only warm place in the entire camp.

This is probably my favourite bit, skull corner.

Polar bear.

Lower jawbone from a seal.

Arctic Fox. Grrr!

And a single vertebrae from a bowhead whale's back.

This is my tent.

Probably the most important place, this is our kit tent

where we've got edit suites set up, so this is home for the next week.

Somerset Island is an impossibly rugged place

and the distances we have to cover in order to see all of our wildlife

are just far too great for us to do yet on foot.

So, this is going to be our key to unlocking

the mysteries of the Arctic.

Miles and miles of rugged wilderness.

Any creature that can make a living here has to be tough

and able to make the most of meagre opportunities.

Like one of the great survivors, the Arctic fox.

And soon we find our first signs that foxes manage to thrive here.

This mound is covered with animal sign and lots of holes.

That there is the den of an Arctic fox.

You can see some of its white fur that it's left behind.

There's also piles and piles of droppings.

These are all from the fox. Look at that!

Oh, that is a jawbone from an Arctic hare,

one of its favourite food items.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about this is

quite how much this mound stands out from the surrounding environment.

Everything else is brown and barren, but here, it is lush and green.

That's because all of the fox's droppings

and what is left over from its prey is full of nitrates.

Essentially, fertiliser.

So it has turned this mound into a lush, green garden. Brilliant!

Arctic foxes are perfectly adapted for polar life.

Their thick coat means they can survive temperatures of minus 50 degrees.

Their small compact bodies prevent heat loss

and the thick tail is the perfect protection from gale force winds.

I've just pulled up because there is a white shape

and it's an arctic fox.

Look at that!

I wasn't sure whether I was going to see one

actually in its full white winter coat.

It's feeding on something.

There are gulls around it as well. Let's go and get a closer look.

Just like the landscape,

the fox is also whiter than it should be right now.

Summer really has come late to Somerset Island.

Right now, I would expect most of this snow to have melted

and for the animals here to have lost their winter coats.

This Arctic fox is no different.

Right now, he should be a dirty brown, grey colour to mix in with the landscape

but instead, he still has that beautiful white coat.

Everything about the Arctic fox is designed to cope with the cold.

They have much smaller, more rounded ears than a red fox.

So they lose less heat that way. The tail is huge, thick and bushy.

And that can be used to spread around the head,

cover the nose, keep all of the most exposed parts of the body

nice and warm.

But its adaptations to cold aren't the only reason

they're a perfect Arctic survivor.

They're also cunning predators, using hearing and sense of smell

to locate food.

They can't afford to be fussy and will scavenge on carcasses,

steal bird eggs from ground-nesting birds,

and even pluck birds from the sky.

They laugh in the face of polar gales

and are a definitive Arctic Deadly.

A thick coat to defy Arctic temperatures.

Exceptional hearing and smell to locate their food.

Sharp teeth to strip down a carcass.

And they'd be toasty warm, even inside your fridge-freezer.

# You're as cold as ice! #

After two days of watching the frozen sea,

some of the ice begins to fracture, offering a route out to sea.

If the beluga whales can't get into the inlet,

maybe I can kayak out to them.

But within a few hours, the ice shifts.

Once again, the island is locked in.

I think we've come as far as we can.

From here on in, it's just an expanse of flat ice.

And most of it I don't think is really strong enough to walk on.

Beyond that is the open sea.

Really, what we need now is for the elements to do their work for us.

To break down this ice, carry it away with the wind,

and then maybe, just maybe, our whales will come to us.

Far from getting better,

the tide has brought the ice back into the bay, trapping me.

See how much things change here.

Just a few minutes ago, this was open sea.

And now the only way to move across it is to drag your kayak over the ice.

# As cold as ice to me! #

So while we keep our fingers crossed for an ice melting miracle,

we decided to head inland

on a mission to find the Arctic's top deadly defender.

This plateau is what most of the Arctic looks like in the summer.

It's called tundra and it is a brutal environment.

For most of the year, this would be covered with snow

and blown with hurricane force winds. Any vegetation is very low.

There's certainly no trees, and not much to feed on.

An animal that could survive here has to be very, very tough.

Only creatures like the musk oxen stand any chance of making a living here.

This is a half tonne heavyweight battering ram.

It's difficult to tell where the enormous head ends

and the body begins.

They're surprisingly swift, even across snow,

and have one of the biggest of all animal fur coats

to protect them from even the most ferocious weather.

But our first challenge will be finding them in this vast and barren landscape.

There's a few dark shapes.

Probably a mile and a half off.

In the distance, off that way.

And whenever you see something like that, that really stands out

from the environment here, it's likely to be something living.

And it is.

There's about nine musk oxen and they're right down

close to the river that's winding through this valley.

This is going to be really tricky. They're quite well spread out.

I think our best approach is to come down to the north of them

and work our way up the valley on foot.

The most important thing is to keep downwind of them,

as if they smell us, they'll be gone.

So we've parked up and are making our way towards where we think

the musk oxen will be.

The ridge line in front of us is giving us

a certain amount of natural cover.

Probably hiding not just ourselves, but also our smell.

And the sound that we make.

But once we get over that, we're going to have to stay very low

down to the ground and approach carefully, cautiously,

and above all, quietly.

'If you can't see your target animal,

'the best thing is to follow the signs.'

This is musk oxen droppings.

It's really unusual - it's more like you'd expect to see

coming out of the back end of a goat, almost a rabbit.

They're certainly very different to the cow pats

you see from domestic cows.

The reason for that is that there is so little nutrient

to be gained from all the vegetation around here.

They have to make the absolute most of it -

they can't let any go to waste.

And so these are just basically

little bundles of indigestible goo.

-I mean...

-HE SPITS

..it just tastes like soil.

It's pretty much exactly what it is.

I did it. I did it.

'And...there's the culprit.'

Superb.

Musk oxen, and their kind, have been roaming the Arctic tundra

for perhaps a million years.

They've shared these places with things like woolly mammoth.

There is something almost prehistoric

about coming up on one of these animals here.

They have that vast, huge furry coat,

which at the moment it's beginning to lose.

They're coming into the summer.

If it kept its winter coat, it would simply overheat in minutes.

So this musk oxen has spotted us

and turned round to face us.

He's doing something really classic,

which is rubbing a gland just in front of his eye on the foreleg.

This is thought to be a way of releasing

chemical smells into the air.

It's a threat.

He's saying, "OK, I see you.

"Keep that distance, don't get any closer."

'As the musk oxen moves away,

'I edge in, always keeping that same safe distance between us.'

Every time he drops his head to feed,

I creep in just a little bit further.

'It might seem like I'm being overly cautious,

'but this is potentially one of the most dangerous Arctic animals.'

Steve. MAN WHISTLES

(He's just seen him.)

So this is a male.

The horns are slightly differently shaped.

He's a larger, bigger animal.

At the moment, grazing on his own.

In the winter, they're much more likely to keep tight herds

with all the other animals.

But now it's coming up to breeding season,

and that's when musk oxen really show their deadly side.

These bad-tempered head-bangers are built to batter.

Their thick skulls and muscular necks help to absorb the shocks.

But even so, in as many as one and ten battles,

one of the combatants will be killed.

This animal could be on me in a matter of seconds.

I need to make very, very sure that I don't unsettle it.

I also know that there's quite a few other musk oxen around.

There's one just a stone's throw away over there.

Despite the fact it's so close, it's hidden by the environment.

The last thing I want to do is just to wander head first

into this high-powered, head-butting machine.

They may look like a big, walking carpet.

But don't be fooled.

This is a high-octane head-banger.

It has the potential to be deadly.

With a sledgehammer of a skull...

..tipped with pointed horns...

..from naught to scary in a couple of seconds...

..this high Arctic head-banger is...

Deadly.

'Not far from the Arctic's largest land creature,

'we find one of the smallest.

'But it's no less special.'

It's a woolly bear caterpillar.

This is one of nature's great survivors.

It's also one of the oldest living of all insects,

and certainly by far the oldest living

of any moth or butterfly caterpillar.

It takes woolly bears 14 years

before they transform into a moth,

and that means getting through the Arctic winter again and again.

When the polar winter strikes, they shut down their body

and freeze solid, but when the summer comes,

they rise from the dead and race to eat as much food as they can.

Finally, they weave a cocoon and metamorphose.

As a winged adult, they'll last only a few days.

All spent in the search for a mate.

The reason that I'm putting this on a pedal rather than on my hand

is that all of these hairs can be very, very irritating.

They're almost like a nettle sting,

so better off just letting him wander around on a rock.

'A normal creature that needs extreme adaptations

'to make it in the frozen north.'

Over the last few days, the sun's been shining

and the wind gusting across the inlet.

And now against all the odds, the ice is melting

'and moving away, offering a way in for the belugas.'

I've never been so excited

to see something as simple as ice melting in my entire life.

Just four days ago,

this was a blanket of solid ice that you could have driven a truck over.

Now it's open.

This is a lead,

a channel that the belugas could easily use to get into our bay.

This is perfect.

After five days of waiting, today is our lucky day.

CHEERING

'So we raced down to the water to take a closer look.'

Yes!

Yes!

There are splashes, waves, eruptions...

of white water no more than about 30 metres off in front of us.

Every once in a while, a white head breaks the surface.

The belugas are finally here.

I don't think I've ever been quite so relieved

to see a wild animal in my entire life.

It's not just adults -

there are grey shapes from young calves as well.

I have no idea how many are here.

There could be a hundred animals right in front of us.

OK, these animals are very, very sensitive to sound

and vibration, moving through the water.

So as I move up to the edge, I'm going to go quite slowly.

Make sure my footfalls are quiet.

And we'll place ourselves just here.

It's kind of difficult to tell what's going on from the surface,

but this in front of us is a beluga whale beauty salon.

Essentially, we've got a very shallow river here,

and the bottom is covered with stones.

The whales are coming in

and they're grinding their bodies on the stones

to get rid of loose skin - they're moulting.

This is the only species of whale that will lose

all of its skin in one go like this.

To begin with, they're a kind of yellowy colour,

but they come out at the end sparkling white.

It certainly looks like they're having an awful lot of fun.

There are very few marine mammals

that could survive an entire lifetime in the Arctic Ocean.

The way they manage this is through a thick layer of fat

underneath their skin called blubber.

It acts like insulation, managing to keep their body warmth inside them.

They're also one of the most social of all whales.

Sound is incredibly important to belugas,

and with so many of them together in one place at the same time,

they're bound to be having a good chat.

So I've got here a hydrophone.

It's a microphone that can listen under water.

Let's put it in and have a listen.

Oh, that's great.

WHALES BLEAT

That's fantastic.

Belugas are known as sea canaries because they chatter so much.

They're probably the most vocal of all whales and dolphins.

Right now, I can here, kind of...

It's like a band tuning up.

There's all kind of creaks and squeaks and chirps and chatters.

That's great.

But these clicks and squeaks aren't just idle chitchat,

they're also used for finding prey.

The bulbous melon shape on their forehead contains a waxy fluid,

which concentrates their echolocation clicks.

They hear the returning sounds through their jawbones.

This enables the beluga to pinpoint fish.

Once they've honed in on their prey,

they'll suck them in with vacuum suction power.

They maybe smiley, but they're still well-tuned predators.

These ones are getting closer. They're coming right towards me.

I reckon they're going to come into this channel, right here.

Seeing these ghostly white shapes cruising alongside you

is a very, very strange sight.

It seems the tide's just right

and the belugas are inching their way...

right alongside us into the bay.

The belugas are choosing to do their beauty treatments

right in front of us.

The belugas have found here an area that is at the perfect depths.

It's probably about as deep as my knee.

On the bottom is full of nice sharp stones.

So they're coming in and they're rubbing themselves on the bottom.

Basically, they're exfoliating.

When they break the surface, all you see is the ridgeline of their back.

They don't have a dorsal fin like you see on dolphins

or on killer whales, because they're living underneath the ice.

Anything extra that would be on top of the body

would be crashing into pack ice and icebergs.

It would just get in their way.

'We found this place a challenge in the middle of summer.

'Belugas make a living below the ice

'even through the endless night of an Arctic winter.'

Respect.

This white whale is truly a master of its white world.

Belugas living underneath the frozen ice,

hunting down in the depths of the darkest ocean in the world.

To my mind - deadly.

Form coordinated attacks.

Hunt using echolocation in dark, murky Arctic waters.

And suck in prey at alarming speed.

These white whales are the masters of the Arctic.

Deadly.

Our last-minute beluga success is the perfect way

to say goodbye to the Arctic and head south.

Yes!

'Join me next time for more Deadly Pole To Pole.'

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd