Great Bear Rainforest (Part 6)

The next morning we were met by representatives of the Gitga'at First Nation, landed our zodiacs, and walked a short distance inland on Gribbell Island accompanied by guides Derek, Marvin, and Richard.

We were headed for an observation stand alongside a creek that is a favorite haunt of the spirit bears, as well as our first visitor, the regular black bear.

He wasn't too concerned about us.

Soon a spirit bear came long, snagged a salmon, and enjoyed his snack.

After scouting the creek for more, he headed upstream on the far bank.

Time melted away except for the softly increasing light. If you are there for two or three hours, what's the point in watching the clock? If your feet got tired, you could sit down for a moment, but you might miss something. Hermit thrushes, for instance. Fruit bars were passed around to pacify the stomach. We were able to ease up and put our attention at wide-angle, yet always ready to snap back. Sometimes the spirit bear is far away,

and sometimes he is close. Always take your binoculars.

Eventually the time came to rejoin the Island Roamer. That afternoon there were two humpback whales logging, sleeping on the surface with an occasional puff of breath. Ian killed the engine and we drifted with them.

Then they awoke and dove, leaving us thinking that, if they didn't swim too far away underwater, perhaps we would get to see a tail fluke. The pair breached (jumped completely out of the water) just a couple of boat lengths away. We were in awe. I was stunned and did not get a photo of them in the air, but look at the size and closeness of the dive splash ...

We tied up at Hartley Bay for the night, and to take on fresh water. Hartley Bay town is the major Gitga'at settlement, and has no roads, only boardwalks. Here's a picture of the church.

Joan and I took the boardwalk up the stream that flows into the bay; first stop, the fish hatchery.

Half an hour or so up the boardwalk is a small, shallow lake. Just before you reach the lake there is a shoe tree. Is it a home for lost soles, or a way of keeping your roots firmly planted at home?

When we returned to the Island Roamer, it was dinner time. Kate always put on delicious, imaginative spreads, despite the hobbit-sized galley.

What a day!

Great Bear Rainforest (Part 4)

After the morning's grizzly watching we sailed out of Mussel Estuary, and soon passed some Steller sea lions and elephant seals basking on a rock.

We cruised by Swanson's Bay, an abandoned and now mostly overgrown lumbering town. The BC coast has a number of defunct lumbering and canning towns that thrived before resource depletion set in, and before the timber industry learned to hide the worst of its clear-cutting.

There followed a spectacular afternoon of cruising, visiting waterfalls and pictographs, and we reached our anchorage in Khutze Inlet, near the mouth of the Khutze Estuary. The zodiac cruise departed as the sun grew low in the sky, and fog began to gently settle above the water.

 

Scrambling up the bank with the help of the crew, we set out on a nature walk to see the plants and terrain of the estuary. (We weren't wishing for a bear this time.) After beating through bushes and walking through calf-high water, we emerged on a meadow where the naturalists gave us learned discourse on the trees, grasses, and berries in that environment. By the time we got back into the zodiacs it was dark. Jupiter was rising above the mountains to the southeast, and the Milky Way was visible, which always results in slack-jawed wonder among us suburban types. Captain Ian seemed to know where he was going, even though the fog had thickened. At last, we saw the masts of the Island Roamer poking up out of the fog and we descended upon Kate and another scrumptious dinner.

The next morning we departed before the fog had completed lifted. Looking back, we were treated to a fog-bow.

A bear was spotted, headed downstream along the bar. He/she crossed over a small tributary and began foraging, bending branches to get at the berries, digging for tasty roots, and generally ignoring us. The photographers went wild. After a while, we went slightly further up the bar and landed. We found the bear's pawprints in the sand.

And we continued to watch the bear. Those of us with telephoto lenses continued to snap the bear.

 We explored the bar, upstream, away from the bear's dinner table. Here yours truly provides scale for some of the large items washed down.

I loved the appearance of some of the algae-colored rocks exposed by the low tide. 

As we returned to the zodiacs, bald eagles circled overhead, gaining altitude to cross over the mountains to the next inlet, and Ian hurried to take a cast of the bear's paw prints before the rising tide took them away.

The casts were guarded by Sherry as we zodiacked back to the boat. They made an impressive display in the salon. I wish I had put a ruler next to them for scale -- darn!

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: