A Berry Hungry Bear

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Grizzly bear... When we hear this, most of us imagine a huge, fearsome predator roaming the land of, say, Alaska, killing and eating whatever it finds. Right? Sometimes. But often wrong.

Grizzlies, as well as their close cousins the Brown bears, are large and heavy animals who can weigh up to 1,000 pounds. They have sharp teeth and sharp nails.  And in Alaska, they hibernate during the winter, which means that they have about three to four months in the year to eat and stack up on calories. Yes, bears are predators. But the Alaska bears' meat diet consists primarily of fish. In interior Alaska, where many rivers are filled with glacial dust and have no fish in them, the Grizzlies have evolved over the years from being carnivores (meet eating) to also dine on roots, leaves, flowers, and especially berries.  That's the reason why a Grizzly has a hump - these are huge shoulder muscles adapted for digging out roots..

Like most health conscious consumers, the Grizzly bears of Denali national park in Alaska LOVE organic berries. Berries are nutritious, with lots of vitamins and minerals, and even some calories! So it's common to see a Grizzly working its way through a large field of berries, eating everything  in sight - berries, leaves, flowers, you name it. An adult bear can work through half an acre of land per day, consuming as many calories as possible to use during the winter time. (Yes - it's called fat)

Can you feed a Grizzly? Sure. Here I am, getting ready to feed one with some blueberries, custom-hand picked especially for that precious bear:

Problem is, you may want to not do that, because the bear might eat not only the berries but also your hand. 

And arm. 

And your whole body.

So do the Grizzlies of Denali hunt for prey, as well? Well, it's hard for a Grizzly to chase a caribou or a moose. These animals are too fast and have enough endurance to escape from a bear.  Now don't get me wrong - a Grizzly can accelerate to 35mph (50kph) extremely fast, so you don't  want it to come after you. We all know the pretty chewed-on joke about the two hikers in bear country, where one asks the other "so what do we do if we see a Grizzly?" "We run" says the other guy. "Run?" Asks the first guy. "You can't outrun a Grizzly bear, can you?" "No, but I can outrun you!" says the  smart**s friend.

Ha ha. Funny, right? Especially if you're the faster guy.  


So the Grizzly will often let others do its work. For example, it will watch a pack of wolves kill a caribou, then come out and kick the hell out of them to dine on the dead animal. After all, as healthy as those berries are, nothing beats the thousands of calories in a good piece of caribou!

Except for fish, of-course.

Closer to the ocean, for example on the Kenai Peninsula or on Kodiak Island, where lots of rivers have Salmon in them during the summer, the Brown bears and Grizzlies have a diet comprised primarily of fish. After all, a single Salmon may contain up to 5,000 calories! And you don't even have to run 35mph to catch them.  All you have to do (if you're a bear, that is) is stand at the top of a waterfall and wait for the fish to jump up it on their way to the source of the river, with your mouth wide open...

And do this 12 hours a day, for several weeks, for a total of hundreds of first-grade Salmon..

Read more about the poor Salmon in my post The Brown Bears of Katmai

Visiting Mama Bear

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So, just back from Alaska! Isn't it nice to kayak the that? (so long as you can paddle faster than an angry Mama Bear that is)

From a wildlife point of view, summer is when many things happen. On the Alaskan Peninsula, a lot of it is driven by the return of Salmon to their birthplace, in order to reproduce. We'll talk more abut that in a future post.

This post is the story of a mother bear and her three cubs, born only several months ago. I was lucky to be able to run into them (from a safe distance, of-course!) over the several days.

Summer is also the time when Mama Bear emerges from winter hibernation with her cubs. A Female bear becomes pregnant in the late Fall, and in fact gives birth in her winter shelter while she's hibernating! Who needs Epidural in this case?!? Most typically, she has two cubs. Sometimes she'll have only one, sometimes - three. The cubs are born very small. Relative to human size, it's as if a woman would give birth to a baby the size of her thumb!

But they nurse quickly, doubling their weight every day over several weeks. When the mother's milk resembles high fat Cottage cheese more than milk - no wonder! Then, by early summer it's warm enough, and - more importantly - the Salmon are back!

And by that time, the cubs are cute enough for Mama Bear to stroll the forest and the river bank with them!

  

Cubs spend two summers with Mama. In the first one, she mainly feeds them fish, but also teaches them to swim and look for places to catch Salmon. In the 2nd summer she watches them practice. by the end of it, they're on their own. Their survival will depend on how well they learned! Mama will be busy getting pregnant yet another time, and most likely, she'll never see her cubs again. Sad.

This post focuses on the first summer of Mama Bear with her cubs. I shot these photos at Katmai Nat'l Park, where many bears come to Brooks Falls to easily catch the poor Salmon swimming upstream. Here, Mama Bear takes her cubs to the river:

She tells them "Now, I'm going to catch a fish for you. You just wait here and watch me. Today, I'll climb the falls and show you how to catch a jumping fish."

"Watch me!"

Good catch, Mama Bear!

But a female bear is no Jewish Mama. There's no such thing as "Oh, poor kids of mine - you eat first, you must grow up! I'll eat the leftovers!" The mother bear knows that without her, her cubs won't make it till the end of the week. (Grandma is no longer nearby) So first, she feeds on the Salmon she caught. Only when she's satisfied, she'll bring one to her cubs and let them share.

Over time, the cubs will gradually start catching fish themselves, initially in shallow water and then in more challenging environments.

Catching Salmon is an important, and crucial, lesson. But the most important one is how to identify clear and present danger, typically in the form of a large, hungry male bear. He could kill the cubs in a heartbeat, usually just to neutralize potential future competition! Watch this short video clip (shot only because I have very good instincts!) to see how alert Mama Bear is when it comes to keeping her babies safe:

Read my post Sumo Wrestling in The Arctic to get another perspective on bears.

Sheer Bear Power

Nice, ha? You're on a road in a well regarded national park, and apparently the right of way does not belong to you! I mean, it might belong to you, but would you exercise it?

Bears are mighty, powerful, and massive animals, even when they look small and sort of cute or innocent. While most don't eat meat and if they do - you're in danger only if you're a fish, you don't want to get under their paws or between their jaws.

How's that for a rule of thumb?

Today, I present a collection of some powerful photos of bears, photos I took from generally short distances but without really risking my life too much. I will say little, so you just sit back and contemplate the strength of the animals in these pictures. Click on any picture to enlarge it!

So, bears like fish and they like berries. (during season, a lone bear can consume over an acre's worth of berries per day) But you don't always need a closeup photo to get a feel for their sheer power. Here's one of my favorite pictures, taken in Denali Park, Alaska; from a fair distance, I could almost feel the muscle mass of this lone, survival machine:

But of-course, sometimes bears will be glad to demonstrate their strength to their pals, in a game that makes you wonder how they survive it.

You don't want to get under the claws of these guys! Once, preparing for a hike at Yellowstone, I saw a car whose passenger side door was completely ripped and thrown beside it on the ground. The reason? A couple of hikers left some food in the trunk. A Grizzly bear smelled it, and first tried to open the trunk. I guess he didn't have the keys! So he ripped out the passenger side door, got in, tore apart the back seat of the car, got into the trunk, took the food and went back home. Call that a day's work when you get back to your family!

BUT - They are cute sometimes, especially when young and innocent:

And they do climb trees as babies.

Read more about bears in my post The Brown Bears of Katmai

The Brown Bears of Katmai

Fish anyone?
Yes, I know - Katmai National Park is not in the Arctic, not even in the sub-Arctic. But it is such a unique place, and since it is in Alaska it's technically within the scope of our blog. Now that we got this out of the way,  what's so unique about Katmai? in one word: THIS -

Katmai has the largest concentration of Brown Bears in North America, perhaps in the world.  There are two important reasons for that:

1) It's a national park. National parks were created primarily to conserve and protect special wildlife or natural phenomena. So the focus on the well-being of the bears allows them to prosper.

2) It sits on the Katmai River, which has a very healthy Salmon run year after year. Pacific/Alaskan Salmon has a tremendous amount of nutrients and calories and serves as a critical food source for the Brown Bears after a long winter.

During the early summer, when hundreds of thousands (and in a good year - millions) of Salmon swim up-river to where they were born and will die (learn more about the Salmon run, a natural wonder)  Brown Bears from all over the park congregate along the falls, which the fish have to jump in order to get upstream. For the Brown Bear, this is an easy meal: just stand on the fall and wait for a Salmon to jump into your mouth! In the following photo, two bears are doing just that:

When I shot these photos, the bear on the left was very unsuccessful; it seemed as if all the salmon are jumping into her friend's mouth! Look: would you say she looks somewhat frustrated?

Life is tough even if you're a giant bear!

But there's more to it than that. Brown Bears, like most other North American bears, are solitary animals. They like their own territory, often 10x10 miles.  They don't like other bears around them. Here, in Katmai, the fish are too yummy, so lots of bears gather in one place to catch them. That makes them really uncomfortable. They try not to look at each other, to keep their own little space. So what, to the human outsider, looks like one big feast, to them is a party where nobody feels comfortable with the other guests:

I guess it's not a party for the poor fish trying to jump the rapids!

Did you know? A bear yawns when irritated, not when it's tired. If you're interested in becoming a bear viewing expert, try this book: 

More about bears in future posts. In the meanwhile, Go to My Home Page to Read Additional Posts