Volcanic rock columns are home to black guillemots, eiders, fulmars, puffins and the magical Fingal’s Cave

One summer day in 2024, a polar bear walked across the flat, wild shore of Spy Island, Alaska. Common Eiders nested there, with birds and eggs in the hundreds. By the end of the day, almost all of them were gone. “When we arrived, it was very quiet,” says Kayla Shively, conservation ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which has been tracking the colony for years. “No adult females remained on the island. We started noticing scat, crushed eggshells, and bear tracks zigzagging from nest to nest.” Shively’s team had stumbled upon a rising threat to Arctic seabirds: hungry polar bears. As the Arctic warms, polar bears are losing the summer sea ice where they hunt seals, their primary prey. That’s driving them onto land, where they increasingly forage for seabird eggs, nestlings, and sometimes adults. While the behavior is not new, researchers are observing it more often in the Canadian Arctic, Svalbard, and Greenland in recent decades. A new scientific paper, published in Polar Research this month, provides the first report of large-scale bear-bird predation in Alaska, confirming that it’s happening across the Arctic. On these small islands, one or two polar bears can devastate an entire colony. On...