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