brown bear Archives -

Wildlife in the Field

Now, you already saw Cappy the Blasting Bear, but here’s some of the other wildlife from the field.

Of course there were bears. Not too far up the road from the camp was a bridge over a stream, where you are pretty much guaranteed to see bears this time of year. I went out there the first night, and we saw three brown bears, fishing for pink salmon. It was pretty dark for the camera equipment I’ve got, but here’s a picture of one of the bears.

Brown bear fishing for pinks

We also had the awesome experience of watching a group of humpback whales bubble feed. This is a technique (perhaps unique to southeast Alaska?) where the whales blow a string of bubbles underwater, creating the illusion of a wall in the water. The fish think they can’t swim through it, are confused, and thus can be trapped in a net of bubbles. So the whales make a shrinking net of bubbles to get the fish (probably herring in this case) all together, and then — whoosh! — they come reverse diving up through the school of fish, mouth first. It’s like bobbing for apples, except that they’re underneath the surface. After the whales come up, they seem to spend a few minutes catching their breath before diving again. They are down for 4-5 minutes making the bubble net, and then appear without warning at the surface, so I didn’t manage to catch that part, but here’s video of them catching their breath before going down for another round.

Then there were the Sitka pythons. The biologists swore up and down that we needed to watch out for these creatures, which apparently live on the west side of Baranof Island and the east side of Chichagof. Or was it the other way around?

In any case, they told us, Sitka pythons feed once a year on large mammals, and the culverts we were blowing up were just the sort of place that a python might like to den.

So of course we sent my intern into a culvert at the very first blasting site, or ‘shot,’ as they like to call it.

Fearless intern enters culvert!

She survived this test and was renamed Elizabeast.

As the trip continued, we didn’t see any pythons, unless perhaps you count the long snaky lines of explosives we were making up and sticking into the culverts.

Sitka python waits to enter culvert

I’ll explain more about these explosive pythons and the rest of the blasting process next time!

Dead Whale Tales

On our way to Redoubt Lake, we made a little detour to check out this dead whale. It was a gray whale, which died and washed up in March or so. It originally washed up closer to the town of Sitka, but was towed to this location, further from people’s houses.

As you can tell, it has been dead for some time and is an advanced state of decomposition. Large portions of it had melted into piles of goo. As you might imagine, it smelled terrible!

But if you think that’s gross, imagine this image. The fellow we were with said when they cut it open for the necropsy, they unleashed a veritable river of blood. And one of my Forest Service supervisors told me he was once involved in towing a whale corpse from one location to another. When they approached that one in the boat, first, he said you started gagging a quarter of a mile away, and, second, they could see bubbles in the water, from gases escaping out of the blowhole. Yum!

Since it’s a giant smelly pile of meat, maybe you guessed that a whale carcass is a the sort of thing that attracts bears. In fact, the attraction is so well know that earlier in the year there were hunters who came out and shot a brown bear. You can see the bear’s skeleton in the foreground; the hunters only took the head with them. You can also see that Joe’s carrying his rifle in case any other bears come by for a snack.

Perhaps that unlucky bear was the one spotted in June by folks who went on a boat tour with the Sitka Conservation Society.