Grizzly Watching

This is a great picture of a sub-adult grizzly in BC’s Glendale River estuary in the spring. The long looking legs because of the absence of a fat belly means that sedge grass and protein from turning over rock is this bear’s main food source.
Sub-adult or juvenile grizzly bears refer to the age they leave their mother and they reach sexual maturity. Depending on food abundance mother grizzlies may keep their yearlings a second (even a third) year, denning together again and breaking up in the third (or fourth) year. The average breeding age for female grizzlies is 4.5 years. Males reach sexual maturity at roughly the same age as their female counterparts. Even though males are capable of breeding at three or four years of age, they rarely have the opportunity to do so because of intense competition from older, bigger males.

The bears move into the water and down river still looking for salmon. This mother and cubs are quite fat for this time of the season so their daily routine of walking the river in search of food must be a successful.  Not that these pictures were taken with a point and shoot Pentax Opti 6mp 3X Optical Zoom I can only imagine the quality of the photos my guests obtained with their long lens camera and then again maybe we were to close.

The mother grizzly and cubs have climbed over the log and are about to enter the river just behind the boat. If you look over the previous photos in this series of postings you will notice the grizzly did not make eye contact by looking toward the boats – staring a bear in the eyes is a sign of aggression. And the guests were cautioned that it was ok to glance and take pictures but to avoid “bug eyed staring”. The mother had her head down while the cubs would occasionally glance toward the boats when a camera was making noise. …. more tomorrow

You my notice that both the guests head and the bear are in reasonable focus so the distance is close. At this point the mother grizzly bear was about fifteen meters or less than fifty feet across the river from the boat. Knowing the bears and their habits we were very safe in our location. These same bears had being coming down the river for about five days and had accepted the boats presence and as you may have noticed there was a larger boat ahead of ours and another behind, enough to make the bears very cautious…. more tomorrow

A beautiful fall morning on the Glendale River located on Knight Inlet, which is part of British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest. We had left Grizzly Bear Lodge at 7:30 for the hour and half boat ride up the inlet to the river. After taking Angus’s guest to shore for the SUV ride up to the viewing stands my guests climbed into the flat bottom river skiff for an estuary tour. If you check the Jan 1st posting “Google Map of Spawning Channel” it shows the yellow dot of the float and we went from there into the river and up past the tree line. At times pulling the boat over the sand bars and up the shallow river but as the tide came in we were about half a mile into the tree’s when we saw this mother and cubs coming down river. We had moved to the riverbank and I was standing in hip deep water holding the boat…… more tomorrow

This photo shows that grizzly bear cubs are often different colours and can be quite different in size even though they are siblings. The size difference is often a result of one being a male and more aggressive than a female. This means first to nurse and the first to solid food once they are on the beach in the spring. It could also be due to the fact that siblings may have different fathers as females will mate with multiple males. A genetically larger male may produce a larger cub.  And the difference in colour is a result of the different mating partners. As the season progress and salmon become more of their diet the oils will cause the fur to darken but these are “spring cubs” and salmon are not in the rivers.