Brave residents tried to remove the can from the bear's mouth after it began approaching buildings. Photo / Screenshot
Brave residents tried to remove the can from the bear's mouth after it began approaching buildings. Photo / Screenshot
A hungry polar bear found itself caught in a compromising position after raiding the bins of a town in northern Russia.
Alarm was raised in the city of Dikson after the two-year-old female bear was seen wandering the streets with a tin can on its snout. The animal had got its tongue caught on the sharp metal of a condensed milk, unable to remove it.
One brave resident filmed himself trying to remove the can after it approached buildings on the outskirts of town. However they were unable to help.
A team of specialists from Moscow were flown to the region for a bear hunt. The large white animal was not hard to find in the tundra of the Siberian summer.
The polar bear had been seen wandering near the edge of Dikson with a can stuck on its tongue. Photo / Supplied, Nornickel
They were able to sedate the bear and operate to remove the rusty can from the animal's tongue.
"The next important stage is for her to recover from the anaesthetic. Our specialists will be on standby, to monitor the process," said Svetlana Akulova, director general of Moscow Zoo.
The emaciated polar bear - turned out to be a female - was rescued, vets successfully freed her tongue & treated multiple cuts. The bear is over a year old and weighs only 90kg; the team will leave several bags of fish by her side, and will monitor her well-being for several days pic.twitter.com/KnO91WHBDS
— The Siberian Times (@siberian_times) July 21, 2022
"We left some fish near the bear because she had been unable to eat or drink for quite a long time"
Moscow Zoo has a specialist polar bear programme SOZAR which rehabilitates and treats the animals across northern Russia. It is home to two bears, Tompa and Khatanga, which were rescued from Bolshevik Island, not far from Dikson in Krasnoyarsk Krai.
Specialists from Moscow Zoo were able to track down and operate on the two-year old bear to remove a can. Photo / Supplied, Nornickel
However their specialist rescue service has been increasingly busy over warming arctic summers.
Last week a report by Canadian and US scientists warned that hungry polar bears are increasingly turning up in urban areas to scavenge from rubbish, as their habitat undergoes climate change.
The report published in the journal Oryx said that problems that cities were already experiencing hungry bears were now been seen with larger, polar bears venturing south.
Moscow vets remove a tin can from a tongue of a sedated polar bear. Photo / Supplied, Nornickel
"Bears and garbage are a bad association," co-author Andrew Derocher of the University of Alberta, talking to Reuters. "We know that very well from a brown bear and black bear perspective, and now it's an issue developing with polar bears."
They see this largely driven by climate change around the Arctic circle with the bears becoming increasingly bold in Russia, Canada and Alaska.
Dikson dubbed the 'Capital of the Arctic' has seen an increasing number of hungry polar bears coming to call.
