Otras cosas que osos

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. –Chief Seattle of the Suquamish and Duwamish

And when you stand in the Blackfoot during a rising of fish and falling of joy like this, I don’t care how urban you are, you feel it: immersed in the muscles of the wild river’s flow, you feel in your 78-percent liquid body and steadfast heart how even you, even now, are part of the same wildness and flow. –David James Duncan

Suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. –Norman Maclean

Last Saturday was pretty salmon-heavy. It was a damp day that kept temperatures cool and invited a few bears out of the woods that had been hunkered down waiting for weather more typical to Southeast Alaska to return. I was at work, watching wildness do its thing. Coastal brown bears patrolled up and down the creek searching for wild runs of spawning chum salmon. Discarded fish heads and skeletons were immediately snatched up by one or more of the eight bald eagles waiting in hungry anticipation of a free lunch. A solitary mink and a few dozen gulls snuck onto the scene to collect any scraps that slipped from the eagle-grip. As we motored back to camp in our little Boston Whaler after work, we saw a pod of orca surfacing and breaching more than a mile away. They eventually made their way nearer to us, pausing to breach, breathe, and feed at the mouth of our creek, and continued through the saltwaters that separate the creek and our camp. We’d made it back to the island and found ourselves standing on the rock outcropping watching this pod of six to eight orca pass within 75 yards of us. In Alaska, there are two types of orca: resident orca that feed primarily on salmonids, and transient orca that feed primarily on marine mammals. After observing this pod’s behavior for half an hour or more, we determined that they were exploiting the congregating salmon near the creek’s outflow. Yet the local harbor seals couldn’t tell the difference between resident and transient, consequently sending several of them into the shallow waters near our camp to seek safety from the orca. Since the water below us was clear, we could follow a few seals and watch them feed on schools of young salmon. Later that afternoon we pulled in our crab pot, which had been baited with salmon remnants and salmon skin from previous dinners at camp. And for dinner that night, we ate the crab we had caught with salmon remains alongside a few wild sockeye filets.
Salmon were the tasty keystone that made the day so interesting and interconnected. In that one day alone, I physically observed the following animals feeding on fresh, spawning, or decaying salmon:

Brown bears
Bald eagles
One mink
Orca
Harbor seals
Dungeness crab
Ourselves

David James Duncan would be pleased.

Joe Flannery might introduce this tall drink to you simply as: GBH

The ever fashion savvy orca pod, appropriately dressed for the black and white dinner party

A porpoise face I found half buried in the sand on Swan Island (seriously)

Our Boston Whaler, awaiting our return


Uh oh...

Mas Osos...

Mocha and her remaining cub doing some sort of one-footed oral examination. (There are, at minimum, six million other captions that would be appropriate for this photo. Feel free to submit a handful).

A big evening yawn from a big bear, waiting patiently for the salmon to arrive...

An evening landscape unfolding in front of me, with an unknown bear wandering through the tide flats.

A poor subadult that was chased all day by another subadult, an old sow, and a large boar.

Said large boar, stealthily approaching said subadult. He took a brief chase hiatus to browse for salmon in the creek...

Reef Life

Lying in wait just below the mean low tide line are thousands of creepy creatures, waiting to invade your crab pot... Still others wait for extremely low tides to expose them to innocent passersby in kayaks out for a morning stroll to the nearby reefs and rock outcroppings. Slimy stuff.

Although we were hoping for a few Dungeness crab, we were the recipients of several purple sun stars, including this large beast in Nancy's grasp. Or should I say, this large beast grasping Nancy?

Whoa! Mondo close-up, bro!

And here we have a fine specimen. The sneaky Graceful Decorative crab that founds its way into our Dungeness pot. Skinny little exoskeletal legs and all. Eventually, we caught a few legal male Dungeness, only one of which made its way to the dinner table, alongside wild Alaskan salmon, freshly picked nettles, and a handful of wild blueberries to boot. The Omnivore's Dilemma resolved! (For a night).

A sea urchin waiting patiently for the tide to come in.

An anomone that looks similar to a _______.

Tracy Arm

If in the area, you should certainly check out this slender body of water, if I may be so bold as to declare a fjord as having attractive, curvacious features... And the calving action on the Sawyer Glacier ain't bad either, as a soft-spoken white haired Texan told me: "This glacier is off the hook." You can imagine my surprise at hearing those words come out of a man's mouth that was at least forty years better than me.

Sawyer Glacier at the end of Tracy Arm

Mas glaciar

Action


Poco mas..


Harbor seals takin' a breather

Roberts Peak and the Devil's Paw

After avoiding Roberts Peak all spring/summer, I finally gave in and was pleasantly surprised... There is a tram that begins in downtown Juneau, for which you can fork out twenty or thirty bucks to ride 1/3 of the way up the mountainside. Or you can start hiking at the bottom, sneak your way past the crowd at the tram terminal, and continue up this ridge where your only company will be the most sizeable ravens I've ever seen. And one other guy, who had a pretty sly sense of humor, so I was happy to share the peak... Since there wasn't much else for the ravens to do up top, they took to some fun in the sun aeronautical acrobatics. Almost as though they were addicted to flying high and playing aerial tricks on each other. If you've ever read the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, you wouldn't be able to think of anything other than ol' Jonny Seagull while watching these ravens. (And if you haven't read it and are in the mood for a literary pick-me-up, you should pick it up)..

Things became a bit knifey toward the peak... or as the other guy on the summit phrased it, "Things got a little creepy back there, didn't they?"

View from the Gastineau Ridge into the Gastineau Channel and Stephen's Passage

Granite Creek Basin from the saddle between Gastineau Peak and Roberts Peak


Chilkat Range and the Lynn Canal from the Gastineau Ridge


Taku Inlet and the Devil's Paw, on the boundary between Alaska and B.C.

Admiralty Island III

Two weeks ago, my coworker Carl and I watched a sow and two cubs try to cross the creek for two and a half hours (click here for the photos of Mocha and her two cubs). The two cubs wanted nothing to do with the creek, and they let their mother know by crying and crying and crying from the gravel shore. Mocha, the sow, was persistent to the point of picking her cubs up by the scruff of the neck and dropping them into the water, only to see them float downstream a few hundred feet and make it back to the original shore in a panic-driven swim of sorts. Mocha then tried new tactics. She would gallop playfully through the creek toward her cubs, wrestle her cubs to the ground, and play with them for a few minutes. Her cubs would stop crying and start climbing up and down their mother, biting her and biting each other. Mocha would then get up and run around in the grass and into the creek. Her cubs pursued her as though it were a game, right up until she entered the water. Then the game was over, and the cubs would start wailing from the creek's edge once again. Occasionally, Mocha would make her way up to the alders, roughly 75 feet from the creek. She would peer into the trees, and come right back out towards the creek. She'd rub her fur on a few choice logs and limbs, and turn her attention toward her cubs. Carl and I figured there was something in the trees that Mocha wanted no part of, something from which she wanted to distance her cubs. Why else would she so persistently and cleverly try to get her cubs across the creek? Eventually, after two and a half hours, both cubs managed to paddle through the creek and follow their mother across the meadow into another chunk of forest. Five minutes later, a large boar came strolling casually out of the woods, the same woods about which Mocha seemed so skeptical.

A few days later, Carl and Dori saw a large boar with an open, bloody gash on his left flank. Later that day, they saw Mocha with only one cub, behaving in a curious manner. Two days later, we found a pile of bear scat, most of which was made up of dark brown fur. After we investigated a bit further, we found two baby bear claws in the pile...

It's certainly sad to know what happened to one of those cute little swimmers, but it's easy to understand that it happens regularly. Cub recruitment in Southeast Alaska is estimated to only be around 40%. The fascinating thing is that we got to see the whole situation unfold. Mocha appeared with her cubs for a few days, and we observed her doing her motherly thing with her terrified, yet playful little ones. We've seen her and her cubs pursued by boars, and her running across the tide flats with her cub(s) trying to distance herself from those hungry males. And we saw baby bear claws buried in a pile of scat, solidifying our speculations about what might have happened. It's sad, but that's the beauty of it. Admiralty Island is a wild place. Close to one million acres of undeveloped, undisturbed wildness. No human interference. The natural world working the way it should. Self-regulating. Healthy. Unforgiving.

It's beautiful.

Windfall Harbor on Independence Day, where I took the liberty of independently 'swimming' in the frigid saltwaterways of Southeast Alaska

A bear that Dori and I have unofficially called 'Clem.' She likes to dig for clams.

Local orchids on Windfall Island

Flying back to Juneau over the Glass Peninsula and Seymour Canal

The Pack Creek Estuary at high tide