This site is dedicated to wildlife and landscape photography.
This site is dedicated to wildlife and landscape photography.
Brown Bear, Lake Clark National Park
This is a photo from a few years ago in Lake Clark National Park. This female brown bear was feeding on sedge grass, a very important food source until the salmon spawning runs begin. Her cub was just out of the photo.
When this two year old brown bear cub lifted its head and stared at me, it reminded me of a pika. If you’ve ever seen a pika with its mouth full of grasses to be stored for the winter, you know what I mean.-
In the last post I showed a mother brown bear who I said looked concerned. I had reason to think she looked concerned because of what I saw outside the frame of the image. She and her cub were being followed by a boar. Here’s a photo of her cub. It doesn’t look the least concerned. In fact, it looks happy or at least content.
Mom is getting increasingly concerned though. The male bear has gained some ground on them thanks to the cub’s dawdling. She’s starting to foam at the mouth which bears do when they get agitated.
The cub sees that mom is looking a bit agitated so it looks around to see what’s going on. It doesn’t like what it sees.
At this point mom decided a stroll along the beach wasn’t a good idea and she and her cub picked up the pace and headed inland. Fortunately, the boar didn’t follow them.
This guy wasn’t the biggest boar I saw at Silver Salmon Creek, but he’s still pretty muscular. I wouldn’t want him following me. In human terms I’d guess him to be about a 16 to 18 year teenager. He still has that kind of “dog-like” head. It will get much wider. Also, note how short his coat is compared to mom and her cub. These photos were taken the last week in July. By then the males have lost most or all of their winter coats.
Here’s another photo from my trip to the Silver Salmon Creek area of Lake Clark National Park. This is a female with a one-year old cub walking behind her out of the frame.
One of the things I like about photographing wildlife is that you get to observe and record how they act in, and react to, the world around them. You never know when something unusual will happen, but you need to be ready when, and if, it happens.
There is also a boar walking behind them. Boars kill cubs. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but she looks concerned to me. She looked even more concerned shortly after this photo was taken.
