A BBC reporter has revealed how he came eyeball to eyeball with a polar bear raiding his tent in Canada - and lived to tell the tale.
Explorer Paul Rose is in the middle of leading a major environmental expedition to survey the Arctic East Coast of Canada when he had his close encounter with one of nature’s most fearsome killers.
Mr Rose, who this summer will present BBC2’s The Pennine Way, was sleeping in his one-man tent when the bear jumped on to it on Saturday night.
He somehow escaped only to find himself facing the bear when it ripped a hole in the canvas.
He said: “The first thing I knew was when I woke up unable to move as it had me pinned down.
“Somehow I got out from underneath the bear, only to find I was staring right at it after I carefully opened the zip at the front of the tent to look outside.”
He then scared the bear off and escaped with just a sore shoulder.
His first instinct was to fire a flare but he was worried that would anger the bear and make it even more likely to attack him.
So he endured a tense stand-off before the bear fled.
At the time he tweeted: “Polar bear in my tent last night. Wrecked tent. Sore shoulder. Alive, happy!”
Mr Rose was leading a Pristine Seas expedition which is surveying the Arctic East Coast of Canada as part of a programme to protect the last wild places in the ocean.
But last night Mr Rose said: “Perhaps I should have stayed in the Pennines. There’s certainly less likelihood of encountering a polar bear there.”
Polar bears are ferocious hunters and can weigh up to 1,500lb.
In August 2011 a 17-year-old schoolboy from Eton, Horatio Chapple, was killed by a polar bear while on a camping expedition to Spitzbergen north of Norway.