Wildlife Viewing.

In Southeast Greenland aboard the National Geographic Resolution, a polar bear swam up the fjord toward the ship mid-barbecue, hauled onto an iceberg and sat back to watch us — a found encounter in the truest sense, since nobody drew it in. Four sperm whales surfaced feeding nearby, a pod of about thirty pilot whales moved past later, and two more bears turned up resting on sheet ice.

In Antarctica aboard the Greg Mortimer, Aurora Expeditions' briefing set the five-metre IAATO minimum and added something sharper than most operators bother to say out loud: keep the distances honest in what you post afterward, and caption a photograph taken at 600mm and cropped as exactly that, rather than letting it read as a close approach.

In Churchill, watching two bears chase a third off a stretch of shoreline from a Zodiac on the Churchill River was wildlife behaving exactly as it would without us there — nobody had baited or arranged any of it, only found it and kept back.

In the Galápagos aboard the Santa Cruz II, sea lions, marine and land iguanas, and nesting boobies showed no fear of people at all — not because anything drew them in, but because the animals in these islands have simply never learned to.

At Longyearbyen touring six Svalbard ships, an afternoon on the water turned up several belugas, a walrus and an enormous number of puffins — no bear that trip, which is the honest average outcome most of the time.