Great Bear Rainforest (Part 3)

The evening of the 2nd day and morning of the 3rd were taken up with grizzly watching from our zodiacs at Mussel Estuary. Accordingly, this blog entry will be mostly photos. Two other boats were in the estuary, but we stayed out of each others way. The morning trip was pre-breakfast, and we got several hours of viewing before anybody else showed up.

Here is an action shot. In the evening, we were watching a mother and cub on one bank, and a solo female, Blondie, on the other.

The next morning, we watched the mother and cub forage for salmon up and down the bank, in slow-moving water, and in fast-moving water. 

Here our ursine friends give us a quick, unconcerned glance before ambling off.

I took this shot on the way back to the Island Roamer. Look closely at the silhouetted stump ... on the right side is a bald eagle. We saw lots of bald eagles on this trip. (The tip for spotting bald eagles is to look for "golf balls" in the trees. They are the heads of the eagles.)

Here are two happy grizzly watchers, Mareda and Joan.

Great Bear Rainforest (Part 2)

The next morning it was raining, a steady barrage of drops you could feel through your rain jacket. Of course, it does rain in a temperate rainforest, and all of us were game (nobody stayed behind in the boat), but my camera never came out. The major feature of that morning was the culturally modified trees (CMT); this refers to trees that were altered by the first inhabitants of the area (First Nations in Canada-speak) in ways that did not kill them. For example, inner bark would be harvested from a patch of the tree, not enough to injure it, and then be treated and used for clothing.

The walls of the channels between islands were, for the most part, quite steep. The channels themselves are glacial valleys that flooded when sea levels rose after the Ice Ages -- fjords. Our skipper was able to bring the boat right to the edge, and here are some pictographs we inspected.

If, like me, you need a memory trick, PICTographs are PICTures (painted on the rock), whereas petroglyphs are artwork carved into the rock.

The rain let up in the afternoon, but it had left the waterfalls abundant and full.

The theme of our trip was looking for the spirit bears, blond morphs of the black bear (not albinos), which number perhaps 400 in the entire world, solely in the area around Princess Royal Island. Imagine our surprise when this afternoon, our second day out, we saw a spirit bear swimming across the fjord in front of us. My apology for the quality of the photos, but I cannot pass up documenting this event.

Late in the afternoon we anchored in Mussel Estuary, a well-known location for watching grizzlies.

I'll combine the evening and next morning's grizzly watching in the next post.

Great Bear Rainforest (Part 1)

One of the reasons I haven't posted in a while is because Joan and I took a trip with Natural Habitat Adventures, sailing along the coast of British Columbia to investigate the wildlife of the Great Bear rainforest. The trip was organized by Candice (Candy) Andrews; we met her on a trip to Patagonia in 2007 run by Natural Habitat, and she now includes us in her Travel Group, whose original nucleus was focused around the University of Wisconsin.

We flew to Vancouver, where we met with the rest of the group (we all stayed at the airport hotel). It was reassuring to already know 6 of the group from last summer's trip to Churchill, Manitoba to see, primarily, the beluga whales. I say "reassuring" because 12 guests and 5 staff were going to spend a week in close quarters aboard the 68-foot ketch Island Roamer. The next day we flew to Bella Bella, where we stayed the night across the inlet at the Shearwater Lodge and did a little exploring while the Island Roamer got ready for us.

Here's a view back to the lodge, the brown building in center, and the Island Roamer at the far right.

Here's a closer look at the boat as we first saw her.

On one walk Joan and I checked out some retired fishing boats. Sandhill cranes flew overhead giving out a prehistoric-sounding call.

Around noon the next day we embarked on our journey. More than one abandoned fish cannery is suffering from entropy along the BC coast, and we passed one soon after we pushed off.

Even that first afternoon and evening were chock full of wonders for us to ooh and aah over. Humpback whales were in the bay, but close encounters were saved for later in the trip. Our first shore expedition, late that afternoon into dusk, took us to see salmon. Species you may be more familiar with, such as king and sockeye, return to the freshwater streams to breed earlier in the year. In September, it's chum and pink salmon, returning just as the bears are single-mindedly fattening up for the winter. Here's a photo of one deceased chum salmon, the large one, and one pink salmon. 

The chum salmon is the species hunted by the bears, for obvious reasons. The richness of the salmon catch allows coastal bears to weigh hundreds of pounds more than inland bears. But there are recent concerns about crashing chum populations, and the potential impact on the bears.

Here our captain (Ian Giles) and one of the naturalists (Sherry Kirkvold) dissect a chum. 

The lens of the salmon eye is a sphere, of all things:

A Quick Response

Hello again. It's been a busy month since I posted last, and I have a lot to write about. Today, a brief story of excellent government service.

Joan and I sent in our passports to have additional pages added to them. They were valid for several more years, but it was clear there weren't enough blank pages remaining. The annual (or, the last two years, twice a year) trips to Canada added a lot of stamps. Joan mailed off the passports on Friday, October 2nd, and we got them back Tuesday October 13th. Less than two weeks for passports sent in unexpedited, and across a holiday weekend!

The new pages are attractive (much more so than the blue shields on the original pages).

Incidentally, in September at Vancouver neither entry into Canada or return to the US were stamped into our passports. (US immigration and customs is gone through at the major Canadian airports, so the flight lands in the US as a domestic flight). In July at Calgary both were stamped. A new policy? We'll see next year.