How cool! Sweet photos show polar bear cubs snuggling up to their mum

Polar bear cubs have been pictured cuddling up with their mum while she takes a nap in the snow.

The adorable moment was captured by Phillip Chang, 70, in Churchill, northern Canada.

The area is known as the polar bear capital of the world because of the massive number that gather there in autumn as they wait for the Hudson Bay to freeze so they can hunt seals on the sea ice.

This makes it the most accessible place in the world to see polar bears in their natural habitat.

Mr Chang knows this and photographed the three-month-old cubs while spending 11 days searching for polar bears in the province of Manitoba.

The semi-retired Californian business owner described the photos.

He said: 'This mother polar bear was traveling with her three cubs, which were about three months old.

'They were taking a short break during their journey to the sea, where the starving mother could hopefully catch a seal and feed herself.

'The cubs were full of energy and very playful, while the mother appeared exhausted.

'After 11 days of searching and waiting in the extreme cold, I was thrilled to finally witness this moment and was deeply moved by the power and resilience of motherhood in such a harsh environment.'

There are between 22,000 and 31,000 polar bears left in the wild, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

However, populations in the Western Hudson Bay are very likely to have decreased from 2011 to 2021, says Polar Bears International.

The bear population in the region has dropped by 27 per cent from 842 bears to 618 in just five years, according to a 2021 aerial survey, the charity said.

This continues the declining trend of the last 30 years, but at an increased pace from the previous five years, where there was only an 11 per cent decrease observed. The population has halved since the 1980s, when there were 1,200 bears.

This is because the time the bears must stay onshore from the ice has increased due to the changing times of thawing and freezing of the Hudson Bay.

There has also been migration to the Southern Hudson Bay region, where there is a likely stable population from 2012 to 2021, according to the charity.

Sixty per cent of all polar bears live within Canada, but they are also found in the USA in Alaska, Russia, Greenland and Norway in Svalbard.

Estimates of polar bear populations vary widely as there are lots of gaps in the data, particularly in Arctic Russia, which lacks basic infrastructure like roads and airfields to facilitate what is already expensive research.