Time’s running out for the polar bear

They’re light-heartedly calling it Meals On Wheels For Bears but there’s nothing funny about the perilous lives of polar bears today.

With the ice below their feet slowly but surely melting to water, they have less space to get around, and it becomes trickier to catch morsels such as fish below the ice.

In fact, one idea to help polar bears is to simply collect them all and move them by plane or ship much farther north, where the ice is melting, too, but more slowly.

In the meantime, biologists and animal experts have taken to regularly flying over the most worrying parts of their world, and dropping food for the animals.

As the planet warms up, sadly, these magnificent creatures are being driven out of their minds with hunger.

A polar bear can, if need be, go months without grub, but that is far from ideal. Emaciated and confused, it often leads to eventual death, so, at a cost of over £20,000 a day, special helicopters are being used to airdrop food from above.

Simply gathering them and taking them to zoos, it’s said, would lead to the bears losing their natural instincts eventually, and the breed may die out anyway.

If they’d got used to living in zoos and having food there whenever they needed it, a possible return to the ice one day would see them too pampered to cope.

Bear chow ground corn, meat, fish and soybean, with various other bits and bobs looks much like typical cat food when packed in a tin, but the bears love it and have taken to looking out for the helicopters, just like kids waiting for the ice-cream van.

Sadly, it’s the ice that’s the problem, as it disappears at a terrifyingly fast pace. In the summer, in polar bears’ habitats, ice is becoming a thing of the past.

As mankind heats up the planet with every petrol-hungry car that’s produced, life gets warmer and harder for the bears. Boffins think all summer ice will be gone within decades, not centuries.

Seals are smart enough to stay well away from land, and it’s only by getting far enough out on this ice that the polar bears have a chance to wait and grab a few for dinner. As the ice melts, the bears go hungry.

We all know the solutions, because we’ve heard them before, it’s just that we’ve watched our governments do too little about them.

Fewer cars, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, use less power, walk instead of drive we all know what would help the planet, but the people in power never seem to do enough to help.

How tragic it would be, if magnificent wild creatures such as polar bears just became tame zoo exhibits, simply because their natural habitat had disappeared.