Sunday, June 8, 2008

Admiralty Island Bear Photos

I've been asked to add a few photos from my recent trip to Pack Creek. The bear on the left is a young female maybe 5 years old. They normally don't breed successfully on Admiralty until they're 7-8 years old but that doesn't mean the males aren't interested. The post behind her is about 40 feet from the viewing spit we were standing on. So she's obviously much closer.She wasn't any threat to us in fact she was probably just trying to avoid the big guy in the next photo.



When the above bear appeared this large male stopped eating and started huffing and puffing trying to get a good wiff to see if she was shall we say "in the mood". He's looking over at her in th e picture. Fortunately, he didn't seem to mind her using us as interference.






She was most concerned with him but also wanted to test us. After we shouted at her when she was within nearly 10 feet of us she changed course very slightly and continued on by while keeping a close eye on us. I'm still getting used to my new Nikon D40. I deliberately over exposed some of the shots because another local Alaskan told me over exposing dark animals like brown bears makes the details in the fur and eyes stand out. It worked okay but it's a bit much.
After she made a wide arc around him he must have been thirsty from all the huffing so he decided to get a drink.

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