In early April, WWF’s Bering and Arctic Sea program officer, Elisabeth Kruger, traveled to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service field office in the Arctic to assist with interpretation for our Moscow colleague, Natalia Illarionova.
In these blog posts, Elisabeth describes her experiences on the Arctic slope and the work that the FWS does to help us understand the Chukchi Sea polar bear population.
The study is conducted over US waters, just miles from Russia.  Exchanges such as this between Russian and American biologists will help to foster a similar research program in Russia.
Read the previous post here.

April 12, 2011
By Elizabeth Kruger
This is the last day Natalia and I will be flying with the team before we head back to Anchorage, so we are happy to see blue skies in the morning.  After breakfast, we prep for the day and pack up the helicopters.
We see track after track all morning, but all of them appear to be old.  We flew northwest today, in search of larger male bears.  They have definitely been spending a lot of time here, but we have yet to sight a bear.

Ice views from the helicopter. Photo: Elizabeth Kruger