Beautiful images that will make appreciate the majesty of wild animals.

First a big thank you to Mary and Ed G. for passing me an email that contained fabulous photographs of the polar bear playing with a  husky dog.  From that email it was the matter of a few moments to find more on the Internet.

Let’s start with a YouTube video of a short talk by Stuart Brown called Animals at Play.

Then another YouTube video that is from FirstScience TV, which appears to be a defunct website.

Here’s Norbert Rosing’s website and here’s the website for the charity, Polar Bears International.

Enjoy your week-end.

These charming pictures were taken by renowned nature photographer Norbert Rosing, whose work has appeared inNational Geographic and other magazines, as well as several books including The World of the Polar Bear (Firefly Books, 1996), in which Rosing recounts the story of how these particular photographs came to be taken.

The location was a kennel outside Churchill, Manitoba owned by dog breeder Brian Ladoon, who kept some 40 Canadian Eskimo sled dogs there when Rosing visited in 1992. A large polar bear showed up one day and took an unexpected interest in one of Ladoon’s tethered dogs. The other dogs went crazy as the bear approached, Rosing says, but this one, named Hudson, “calmly stood his ground and began wagging his tail.” To Rosing and Ladoon’s surprise, the two “put aside their ancestral animus,” gently touching noses and apparently trying to make friends.

If you want to watch the whole sequence of photographs including background notes to each picture, click here.