Brown Bear, Black Bear, Big Bear and Babies
While on our vacation in Alaska, I didn’t expect to see the bears. All the reading that I had done said that the bears usually don’t appear until July and August, when the salmon begin to run. It was early June when we saw the first bear, a Grizzly or brown bear. They are actually one and the same. She appeared on our first day in Alaska, during a flight seeing tour of the Misty Fjord. She was large, weighing in around 300 pounds. She had three cubs, which is somewhat unusual for this species. Although they have been noted to birth as many as six, it is most common that they will have just two cubs at a time. The cubs seemed a good size, so I think they were about a year old.
We learned that they will remain with their mother for 2-4 years. Adult males will often kill a cub for food, to reduce competition, or to make a female sexually submissive. Life itself is always a struggle for these baby bears. Grizzlies are identified both by their size and by a distinctive hump on their backs. The hump is the result of large muscles that develop while digging roots and tubers or hunting ground squirrels. Since the Brown Bear is mostly nocturnal, it was a real treat to be able to see her during our tour.
The next bear that we saw was a much smaller, a female black bear. This one we spotted on our second day in Alaska, while cruising the Tracy Arm Fjord , near Juneau. She was feeding on lichen and mussels near the shoreline. She had two cubs which were brown in color. I did not realize that black bears can be grey, black, brown or bluish grey in color. It is their size, not their color, that determines the category that they fall into. Oh, the things we learn!
We nearly missed seeing our last black bear. Alan and I were hanging out on the caboose of a train, when the announcement that there was a bear on the tracks was made. I don’t know whether it was a male or female, but we saw it on our third and final day in the state, while we were in Skagway. This one was cinnamon in color. She seemed oblivious to the danger of an oncoming train. Luckily the engineer had time to slow for her as she meandered to the side of the track to continue feeding. All 20+ passenger cars enjoyed a good view as we passed by.
I was unaware of the exictement going on inside the train. At the time, that the bear had been discovered, I was busy trying to capture the beauty of a waterfall with my camera. Suddenly, a woman burst through the door to inform us to watch out for the bear. Quickly switching to my telephoto lens I “barely” had time to capture this amazing animal on camera. You’ll just have to trust me when I say the the brown dot in this photo really is a bear! At least I was able to finish this post with a nice shot of the Alaskan mountains.