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After nearly a dozen visits to the Philadelphia Zoo, photographer Michael S. Confer had almost given up on getting a photo of swimming polar bears, but then he pulled off a stunner: an amazing shot of a polar bear named Coldilocks giving him a wave, reports the Telegraph.
A longtime member of the Philadelphia Zoo, Confer, 39, decided last year that he would try to take a photo of the polar bears swimming in their exhibit. With the magnificent bears' recent addition to the endangered species list, Confer thought the photograph would be timely. "The zoo is about 10 minutes from our house and every month, my wife and I would take our daughter for a visit," Confer explains to Paw Nation.
Once at the zoo, he'd always make a beeline for the polar bear exhibit, but Confer never saw the polar bears swim. "They're supposed to spend the majority of their life in the pool, and I can't even see 'em take a quick dip," Confer remembers. "They were always laying around sleeping."
Last November, on his 10th visit to the zoo in quest of his polar bear photograph, Confer got lucky. "I was walking away from the polar bear exhibit when I heard my wife yell my name," Confer tells Paw Nation. The photographer ran back to the polar bear exhibit, where -- finally!-- one of the polar bears had jumped into the pool.
"She [Coldilocks the polar bear] was swimming in big counter-clockwise circles around the pool," Confer says. Quickly, he placed the lens of his camera right up against the glass and began firing off shots on his camera -- about 3 to 4 frames per second. "I couldn't tilt my camera up or down, or else there would be glare from the glass," Confer explains.
The bear glided around the pool, batting at a ball and swimming in languid circles. "She'd go out of my sight and come back," says Confer. "She seemed curious and would swim back towards me."
Then Coldilocks shocked Confer with a delightful and unusual maneuver. "She swam right up, floating about four feet above in the tank, then she just let herself go and slowly dropped to the bottom of the aquarium," Confer says. "As she dropped, her left paw just slowly came up." The bear's right paw, says Confer, remained down.
Was Coldilocks really waving at the photographer? "I'm not sure if she was waving at me," says Confer. "But it sure felt like it."
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