Getting close to the end of the season...

Less than a month of life on Windfall Island and Seymour Canal, relaxing by day with full-bellied brown bears, relaxing by night with good books and card games. Two months ago, you could wake up at any hour and navigate through camp on Windfall with plenty of light. Already, in mid August, we're having to use our headlamps by 8:30 or 9. Chillier weather and higher seas are replacing the good ol' days of sunbeams and suntans. It's still comfortably warm in Southeast, but you can tell that the summer season is on its last legs. In less than a month, I'll be traversing central BC once again on my way back to the Mammoth-Gardiner metro area. Just in time to catch the elk rut in full swing and the cottonwood and aspen doing their autumnal thing. While I'll be watching my back for stray bulls with a hormonal buzz and a fight to pick in Mammoth, our good friends Mocha and her cub will be scavenging hillsides for berries and scavenging north-facing alpine for a comfortable place to take a six month nap. Pretty nice to know that pockets of wildness will be continuing their cycles in various corners of the continent.

Making eye contact with a heavy hitter. Although it seems like she's looking directly into our eyes, Mocha was actually looking above and behind us. She passed by casually, within 40 feet or so, and proceeded to permit her cub to smack her in the face a few times, resulting in a brief wrestling match in which there was indeed an obvious winner.

This subadult has one of the goofiest personalities I've seen. Some folks at camp have been calling it Fran (short for Frantic) because it is always wrestling with fish, sprinting up and down the stream with a wide-eyed expression, and getting chased off by various larger bears.

Chili and her two yearlings pausing to catch their breath after consuming more than a dozen fish. The afternoon watching these three bears, combined with an unanticipated piece of news from Juneau, was arguably the most intense moment of bittersweetness I can remember experiencing.

A Bonaparte gull doing its best not to impersonate a spawning pink salmon within the hungry reach of this bear.

These two subadults, which we assumed were siblings, arrived on scene one morning thrashing and wrestling and playing. They continued their games for two days, wrestling and chasing and taking strolls next to the creek together. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, they disappeared back into the woods, and we haven't seen them since.

Hominids and Creatures

Approaching Olds Mountain from the Juneau Ridge. I will admit, my legs and brain were seriously fatigued after the end of this day, and all I wanted to do in the evening was consume a pizza and about 50 ounces of cold agua. But the views were noteworthy, to put it lightly. And I'd do it again if anybody's interested... From this ridge and the corresponding peaks, you can see Admiralty Island, Chichagof Island, and Baranof Island to the west, the Chilkat Range to the north, the Juneau Icefield to the immediate northeast, and various ice capped ridgelines of British Columbia to the east. I didn't see another soul the whole day, save for the brigade of helicopters every 45 minutes providing the same view for folks with thick wallets.

Spooked speechless of the choppy seas in Seymour Canal.

Dori and Carl retrieving dinner from the crab pot: fresh Dungeness crabs, boiled in saltwater and served up hot alongside a tossed bowl of greens.


One of the numerous humpbacks we saw surfacing in South Seymour one evening. The sunset was spectacular, a sow and three yearlings were on the shore, and a dozen and a half humpbacks provided a noisy demonstration of blowholes and fluke action. Hard to beat a sunny evening in Southeast...
(Dori was the quick draw photographer for this particular scene).

Fungi that goes by the obvious name of: Chicken of the Woods. And yes, it's edible.

Beasts

Mas osos. Siempre mas osos! But that's what it's all about, isn't it? At least for the next month it will be. I guess it could be analagous to Stockholm Syndrome, in which the kidnapped eventually begins to sympathize with the kidnappers. Actually, that's a lousy reference, and there's really not a whole lot of relevance in regard to living on an island with hundreds of large, slow moving beasts with an omnivore's appetite. Especially when I feel lucky to live in such a place... I will, however, continue my defense of taking so many photos of the same subjects with a more reasonable explanation: they're photogenic. When you have a camera within reach and a heavyset, charismatic opportunitist like a brown bear crawling around nearby, it's difficult not to pick up the camera and start firing away. And besides, who doesn't like a good bear photo?

As I told Tammy on the phone, though, I do purposefully leave my camera at camp every now and then to force myself to observe bears via my eyeballs rather than an eyepiece on my camera. It's hard to describe what it's like to watch three or four wild bears slowly move up and down the creek catching wild salmon in unpolluted waters for several hours. It's kind of strange, actually. You can watch a bear catch five or six fish, yet you're still waiting in heightened anticipation to see if the bear will catch a seventh. And the seventh fish is just as exciting to watch as the first. It doesn't get old.

Occasionally, bears will pass near us in transit from point A to point B. They might browse on cow parsnip along the way, forcing them to pause for a moment or two while within 30 or 40 feet of us. It might sound a bit Timothy Treadwell, but it's not. The body language of a bear is pretty discernable, particularly when you begin to understand subtle gestures and postures. (And for the ever-skeptical: we do have a few methods of defense at hand). Most bears that pass near us will show their backs to us, very clearly indicating that they do not view us as a threat. And they don't approach in an aggressive manner, as they do not associate us with any type of food or flavor (let's hope it stays that way)! Consequently, there have been a few moments in which bears will pass by, munching on sedge or cow parsnip, to the point where we can hear the bear chewing (and sometimes burping) as though it were sitting at the dinner table with us. If you don't get a sense of how close that is, take a moment to calculate the distance between you and your dog the next time you hear it eating its petchow. (Sorry mom, but that probably doesn't sit too easily with you). Just keep in mind that we aren't doing anything foolish or carefree...

Ain't nothin' better than a face full of decaying dog salmon on a hot summer's day. And a nice, cool drink to help wash things down. At this stage of the spawn, some bears will catch a fish, realize it's a male, discard it, and go back to the creek to catch another. Once they've caught a female, the bears will eat the skin and the roe (and sometimes the brain) and discard the rest. Which makes for a battle royale between eagles, ravens, and gulls for all of the discarded flesh laying around. At least nobody's going hungry..

Relieving an itch that likely looks familiar to anybody that lives with dogs... This bear played in the creek by itself for about a half hour, splashing and jumping into the water and pausing every now and again to scratch a few choice locations. And, of course, to retrieve a few salmon from the water.

A very small bear that managed to push a larger bear off the tide flats so it could move in and snack upon a buried seafood buffet.


Por su puesto, una mas foto de Mocha y su hijito en la playa. El oso chicitito se llama "Chino" ahora, pero no me gusta este nombre...


Looking tough. And I believe it.