A photographer's iconic shot of polar bears in abandoned buildings on a Russian island shines a spotlight on wider changes in their behaviour.

In September 2021, Russian wildlife photographer Dmitry Kokh and his team were sailing around the wild and remote Chukotka Peninsula in Russia's extreme northeast. They were hoping to visit Wrangel Island, a well-known gathering place for polar bears, when the weather turned.

"We faced a heavy storm, with super-strong wind and waves, and we tried to find a place to shelter from the storm because the boat was small," Kokh recalls. They sheltered near the rocky shore of a small, uninhabited island called Kolyuchin, home to an abandoned Soviet-era weather station – and made an unexpected discovery.

"We saw some movement on the island, took out our binoculars, and saw polar bears roaming around there, many of them, maybe 15 or 20," Kokh says. "We were super surprised because we never expected to meet polar bears so far to the south. At this time of the year, they should be on the sea ice already, and on Wrangel Island, normally."

The weather station on Kolyuchin had been abandoned in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Stepping on the island to take pictures of the bears was too dangerous. Instead, Kokh used a drone, taking his time to get the bears used to it, then slowly flying it closer. As he was watching them, he noticed something else: there were bears inside some of the houses.

"I realised that it was a perfect setting for photography, because these houses are super photogenic, they are old and ruined, and animals looking out of these houses, is a perfect picture," he says. "And the weather was terrible, [there was] wind and rain and fog, which is also very good for photography! So everything came together."

One of the photos captures a bear in the entrance to the weather station, and another one looking out of the window. Titled "House of Bears", it won Kokh the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, given out annually by the Natural History Museum in London. "It's the best picture I've ever taken, and I think I won't be able to repeat it, ever," he says.

Tom Smith, a professor of wildlife sciences at Brigham Young University in Utah, has spent decades conducting field work among bears, including polar bears, and says it's not unusual to see polar bears in abandoned buildings. "They're curious animals so we see them in structures often, or they will be climbing on top of cars or pipelines," he explains. There has, however, been a more worrying trend across the Arctic, he says: as the sea ice melts, polar bears are increasingly approaching or wandering into inhabited towns or villages, to feed on open rubbish dumps. "They are fatefully drawn towards human settlements," says Smith, and this can result in conflict with humans.

The problem is two-fold, according to Smith. One is that isolated, northern communities often use open rubbish pits near the village. Securing garbage so it can't be accessed, for example in bear-proof bins and enclosed landfills, is expensive, he points out – and in the past, was not necessary. "The overwhelming Western influence in the north has resulted in [throwaway] economies that never existed there," he says. "Those cultures never had a throwaway society, so the notion of having to secure garbage – that's a new thing."

Secondly, Smith notes that polar bears are spending more time on land due to the climate-change-driven loss of sea ice. They are also shifting their dens from the ice onto the land, to avoid the risk of denning on the increasingly unstable sea ice, research in northern Alaska shows. Without the sea ice, the bears can't hunt for their preferred, ideal diet of blubber-rich seals, and may

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