A very large Admiralty Island brown bear, its bloated belly hanging low, waded down Pack Creek pouncing on the last of the year’s salmon. It devoured skin, meat and innards. It dug under a log, racked out a rotten carcass and ravenously chomped it down. It was mid-September and the bear had entered its annual autumn hyperphagia.
I like a lot of stinky things: French cheese, garlic, dirty socks, rolling around in barnyard manure, outhouses, etc. But I draw the line at rotten salmon.
Sure, there’s been times in my youth when I tried to go full Tongass and rolled in a carcass or two. I’m all for being feral, but it’s cold, wet, exhausting, can give you a wide variety of worms and can get your feelings hurt. For many years my nieces called me Uncle Stinky. There’s nothing like being bullied by a two year old to make you abandon your wilderness dreams.
I watched the bear eat another carcass and did my best to stifle a wave of nostalgia.
A month prior, the same bear was cherry picking salmon and only eating the choice parts such as brains, roe and skin. With salmon runs almost over and winter around the corner, bears experience a remarkable increase in their appetite. Every calorie matters in order to successfully den through the winter.
This guy looked like he was well ahead of the game. For Admiralty Island, he was a giant. He slowly lumbered up the stream, swinging his head back and forth before disappearing from view.
An average-sized adult male soon appeared and mimicked the other bear’s fishing technique. He was going to eat whatever salmon, alive or dead, he could find.
A younger and smaller male, with a striking half black and half lighter brown coloration, came around a bend snorkeling and checking under logs for carcasses.
When bears emerge from their dens, from late March to May, they’ve lost anywhere from a fourth to a third of their weight. Many bears I’ve encountered in April are so gaunt you could almost believe they were people wearing bear suits. Putting enough weight back on is a full-time job. A hungry bear is often a stressed bear, especially in the fall.
Brown bears are omnivores in the truest sense. One year, in mid-April, most of the scat I encountered on Admiralty Island was composed of tiny snails. One bear I saw in Gambier Bay that trip was eagerly investigating something dead; my guess is the remains of a deer. Another April, with snow still at sea level and the sedge grass yet to sprout, I found 30 yards of guard-timber completely dug up by a bear hunting mice or voles. That trip I watched a young bear following the high tide line and digging through heaps of kelp.
Once on a sunny day later in September, I encountered a coal black male that by all appearances seemed to be hunting deer in the sub-alpine. I was hunting deer, too. Our meeting was memorable although a little stressful, for me at least. I’m no expert, but it does seem like it’s more common to see ABC Island (Admiralty, Baranof and Chichagof) bears higher up in September. Not to say that it’s uncommon to see them up high during other months.
One of the few things I’ve never seen an ABC bear eat is mussels. I’ve heard rumors of bears eating them in Glacier Bay. It makes me wonder why — do the bears have some sort of instinctual awareness mussels are more likely to carry paralytic shellfish poisoning?
Bears will purge — by eating skunk cabbage and other plants that get stuff going — especially later in the season to get rid of parasites. There’s nothing like stepping around a mass of worms in vomit to remind you that you should cook your fish and not play with bear poop. (At least wear a pair of gloves if you’re going to play with bear poop.)
I left the bears on Pack Creek that mid-September day feeling a bit sentimental. I work as a bear viewing guide and it was my last trip of the year. My two companions and I wished the bears good luck, thanked them for the season and, then, hopped on a floatplane and headed home as a storm from the Gulf swallowed the mountains in gray.
• Bjorn Dihle lives in Juneau. He can be reached at bjorndihle@yahoo.com.
