Lindsay Moore: Hi, my name is Lindsey Moore and I'm the author and illustrator of Sea Bear. I was inspired to write Sea Bear when I learned about how polar bears can swim long distances to get from one floating pack of ice to another. And I found out that they could swim a couple miles in the water easily, but that polar bears were having to make longer and longer swims where they were swimming a hundred miles or swimming for more than one day at a time. And the more research I did on it, I learned that some bears have been recorded swimming up to eight days to get to land from the ice. And I found that really interesting.

I used to be a swimmer. I swam in high school and in middle school, and I swam the long distance events. And I liked the rhythm of swimming. I like swimming longer distances, and it gave me an incredible respect for what polar bears were capable of.

So that was kind of the beginning of why I wrote the story, was to talk about their ability to survive even in a charging Arctic and the wonders of the Arctic that is just a beautiful, amazing place, and some of the problems that the Arctic is facing. The Arctic is changing because of climate change.

I did a lot of research upfront to understand polar bear behavior, the Arctic, just as an ecosystem. When you think about the Arctic, it's not just polar bears and seals. There's a lot at play, like so many creatures and weather patterns, and all of this is interacting. So kind of getting a good understanding of how the Arctic works as an environment to live in. Since I was going to write it in the voice of a polar bear, I had to really understand what drives a polar bear.

They will go days without food. So they eat a seal and then they'll punch for four or five days before they have another meal. So they spent a lot of time thinking about catching food as they wander the Arctic. They're waving their head from side to side, scanning the air for the smell of seal. So like learning about polar bears and even that they're different. They have different personalities, it all helped make this polar bear a more authentic polar bear.

This is an excerpt from Sea Bear, from the very beginning:

Polar bears are patient beasts. As patient as glaciers. We know how to hope and how to wait. I learned to be patient long ago from my polar bear mother, to be patent when hunting, to be patent with weather, to be patient in darkness. A polar bear can outwait almost anything, seals, storms, and long, sunless winters. But a bear at sea needs something to stand on. I watch the ice.