A wildlife photographer has returned from the Arctic with encouraging news - thirty polar bears spotted in just ten days. Paul Goldstein says last year's "fertile ice harvest" has meant an abundance of cubs, along with healthy adults, and allowed for an amazing sixty sightings during his June expedition. The Wimbledon-based Exodus Travels guide says: "We even had more cubs than adults! This was remarkable and I have never known it so good." Highlights of his stunning photographs sees cubs following their mothers across frozen wastes and a stunning picture of three bears staring into the ice-free waters. Paul says he has spent a total of six months of his life aboard a Russian ice ship in the Arctic waters of Spitsbergen, guiding for Exodus Travels (www.exodus.co.uk). He explains: "Climate change is having an indelible effect on the ice all over the world, I have seen glaciers retreat more than a kilometre in just twelve years but for once it is refreshing to be able to write something encouraging about bears and ice however fickle it may be in the long run. "Each year I guide in this beautiful land of ice and tundra with its 24 hour daylight. It first seduced me at the beginning of the century and has kept an icy grip on me since then, haunting me like only a few other wilderness areas in the world. When guiding the principal attraction is bears, on ice. We have always found them but sea ice is a capricious mistress at best, so the tally can be very varied. Normally I find talking about amounts boorish and frankly childish, as it is the quality that matters: one bear on ice is worth fifty truffling lonely furrows down shingle beaches, however this year was incredible.??? "Polar bears need firm fast ice to hunt seals on. Last year???s ice harvest was a fertile one and the mother???s clearly went to their winter dens well fed and impregnated. This year the photographic charter I led was done deliberately early, not wishing to gamble on the diminishing ice late