What Does “A Celebration of Polar Bears” Mean?
“Celebration” is a genuinely cheerful, almost festive word, and it sits in real contrast to actual polar bear behavior, since polar bears are the most solitary of all bear species, adults spending the overwhelming majority of their lives alone, actively avoiding each other except for brief mating encounters or, occasionally, temporary tolerance around an especially large food source like a whale carcass.
That rare tolerance around abundant food is really the closest thing to a “celebration” polar bears display; multiple bears converging on a single large carcass will cautiously share the resource, adult males in particular normally being dangerous to each other outside these specific circumstances. Given how thoroughly solitary polar bears are otherwise, the cheerful, communal image “celebration” conjures reads as playfully ironic rather than behaviorally accurate, a nice example of a collective noun chosen more for charm than precision.
Example: “What passed for a celebration of polar bears was really just several bears cautiously sharing a beached whale, each keeping a wary distance.”
Related: Collective Nouns for Mammals