The Bear Necessities

Today is an another gorgeous day here in King Salmon but a travel day for us. No more bear viewing 😢. Just hanging out waiting to head to the airport to fly back to Anchorage.  We will take our salmon filets to have them shipped to our neighbor who has agreed to keep them for us until our return. He does not guarantee that there will not be a tariff (in the form of some salmon) levied on the shipment. 😉

I thought I would just post some bear facts.

These brown bears and grizzly bears and the Kodiak bears are actually all the same bears. In bear school they stress that their rules for their bears, however, do NOT apply to any other bears anywhere. The bears here are very well fed and are not inherently aggressive towards people.  I don’t know what one is supposed to do if one encounters, say, a grizzly bear; but I gather it is not calmly walking away while chanting, “Hey, Bear. Hey, Bear”.

In fact, these bears are so well fed that they can waste most of the salmon. They are crazy adept at skinning the poor creatures alive and crunching their skulls open to eat their brains. If they are fortunate or savvy enough to get/select a female, they will feast on the roe. Those three bits are the fattiest highest calorie parts. Then they toss the harder to digest, less energy efficient remnant and move on to the next victim. 

The reason that we aren’t seeing multiple bears at the actual falls snagging the jumping salmon is because it’s been very dry here coupled with the record number of salmon in this area. (An aside, when we were on the Naknek River we passed the Counting Corner where two guys apparently stand on little platforms with little clicker counters and count the salmon as they go by. No joke.  That’s a thing!). Anyway, the river is low which is why we are seeing so few salmon make it over and why there is such a massive ‘logjam’ of salmon backed up all along the river. As we have seen, the bears don’t have to congregate at the falls with other bears. They can just step in wherever they please and eat their fill. 

Take a little nap.

 Wake  up and do it again.