Glacial Errata, No. 15

One: Nanoq: Flat Out and Bluesome

One of the more interesting books in my collection is this work by Bryndis Snaebjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, which is a catalog of their exhibit in which they set out to document every single taxidermied polar bear in the UK, along with their provenance.

Two: Peter

The most interesting of these bears’ stories, to me, is that of Peter. Peter had been donated to the Belfast Zoo in the early 1970s, but did not get along with the other bears in the enclosure, and plans were made to euthanize him. The Ulster Museum in Belfast agreed to take him provided that the zoo did not put him down with a bolt gun (the traditional method, but one which would have damaged his skull); instead, it was agreed that lethal injection would be used. Poor Peter was tranquilized using darts, and then was given an lethal injection from the head of the museum’s Biology Department, Joe Gracey. Ten men loaded him into a van, but they were stopped en route to the museum by police, who demanded the zoo staff get out of the van after they claimed they had a polar bear in the back. The cops opened up the back to inspect the cargo, but quickly closed the doors in a panic—believing that Peter was still alive.

Arriving at the Ulster Museum, Peter’s body was loaded into a freezer, and that, in the words of Stephen Hackett, “was the point where paranoia began to set in. Mr Erwin teased the security men about the bear before he left to go home that evening. A series of miscommunications ensued later that night. The guards phoned the head of the museum to report the bear was still alive. The head of the museum attempted to contact Joe Gracey who was not at home that night. His wife contacted the Police and an APB was put out across the city for Gracey to contact the museum. There happened to be an international press conference at the Europa Hotel and when they heard the story a pack of journalists from papers such as the Washington Post to Der Spiegel rushed to the museum. The next morning Gracey informed all that Peter had been dead and would remain dead for the foreseeable future.”

(It seems likely the cops had seen some post-mortem muscle spasms of some kind and jumped to conclusions, but maybe the moral of the story is don’t euthanize bears? Who can say.)

Three: William T. Hornaday, Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting (1891)

I’m generally not personally a fan of taxidermy! But I love diagrams; in particular, this one from Hornaday’s 1891 manual on taxidermy. I don’t know exactly what those lines mean; don’t ask.

Four: On Pizzles, or Grolars, If You Prefer

From Gloria Dickie’s remarkable book, Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future:

“Because brown bears and polar bears have diverged fairly recently, the two species are able to interbreed, creating hybrids, much like a lion or tiger can produce a ‘liger’ or a horse and donkey can create a mule. But the female offspring of polar bears and grizzlies are fertile; two pizzly bears can mate and produce more little pizzlies, or ‘grolars,’ if you prefer. Martell’s specimen—the first-ever evidence of a wild hybrid—spurred some people to theorize that we could soon see widespread hybridization as grizzly bears move northward, encouraged by warmer temperatures. Since the first pizzly bear was documented in 2006, several other hybrids have been found roaming the Arctic tundra. The ‘polar bear’ that the government scientists spotted tagging along with the brown bear was also suspected to be of pizzly origin. However, when scientists later examined these hybrid bears, they were surprised to find that the wave of hybridization sweeping across the Arctic was due entirely to one female polar bear’s unusual sexual preoccupation with male grizzlies; four of the pizzly bears were her children, and the rest her grandchildren. Clearly, she had a type.”

Five: Longyearbyen

A sign in a shop window in Longyearbyen, the main settlement in Svalbard, from 2013.