Someone’s been honking his horn, fined for waking a polar bear
Once upon a time, in a fjord called Lomfjorden in Svalbard, there lived a polar bear who was doing what polar bears do most of the time, which is nothing at all. He was asleep on land, in a spot that was neither too crowded nor too exposed, but just right.
Then a ship came through Hinlopenstretet, and someone on board reached for the horn.
“SOMEONE’S BEEN HONKING HIS HORN,” the polar bear probably thought to himself before he sauntered off to find somewhere quieter.
That much comes from the Governor of Svalbard, who announced on Thursday that the horn-blower is now out NOK 50,000, or about $5,000, which works out to a fairly steep per-second rate for a noise.
And here the tale takes a turn, because the Governor did not hear it from the captain, nor from any logbook. Some of the passengers told him that someone had been honking his horn. Whoever it was stood on deck, blasted a sleeping apex predator awake for a laugh, and turned around to find a boat full of people who had not found it funny and did have a phone.
The Governor’s office concluded the disturbance was intentional, which is a difficult finding to argue with, given that ships’ horns do not go off by themselves. The fine was issued under Section 30 a of the Svalbard Environmental Act, and the naughty little horn-blower jumped to and paid without complaint.
For the record, the rules say you keep 300 metres from a polar bear between July and February, 500 metres in spring, and you do not disturb, lure or pursue them. Polar bears have been protected in Svalbard since 1972, and the Governor has form here: two guides from a French cruise operator were fined NOK 20,000 each in 2024 for motoring tenders towards a mother and cub eating a whale carcass.
Svalbard has one iconic animal, roughly 300 days a year of it doing very little, and a legal framework built entirely around letting it get on with that. Hopefully this bear never sees anything more of the horn-blower.
