July 2011– 4 uncles, 2 cousins, one boat and 180 miles. Juneau to Wrangell, Alaska–in search of once in a lifetime photos of bear!
Anan Creek, near Wrangell, Alaska, is part of the Tongass National Forest and requires that each person visiting purchases a permit to visit.
The creek supports one of the largest pink salmon runs in Southeast Alaska. This attracts, black bear, brown bear, eagles and harbor seals.
In Alaska Brown and Black Bears are rarely seen feeding out of the same stream—at the same time. While we were visiting, we were lucky enough to see both types of bear.
The black bear in this video is (according to the forest rangers) a 20+ year old female who has been feeding at that particular spot for many years.
The brown bear, however, is a juvenile—maybe 3 years old—who has no seniority, and gets put in his place a few times and it doesn’t take much from the black bear to make this young brown bear skedaddle. This behavior is shown in the first two clips in the video.
Brown and black bears also have a very different way of feeding. In this case the black bears would patiently wait, along the bank, for a fish to swim by and catch the fish as it did.
This brown bear decided it would much rather RUN into the stream and belly FLOP at any sign of movement under the water (clip three in the video).
After watching both types of bear fishing all day—it was obvious that the older, wiser black bear was less hungry than the poor brown bear.
There were also mothers with cubs feeding from the stream—in one case a mother sent her cubs up a tree when the brown bear approached. The cubs were not too happy about this development—one was so upset it started persistently calling for its mother (clip 4) before escaping down the tree (clip 5). Not seen in the video is the mother sending it right back up the tree haha!
Although we don’t see bears on the Jayleen’s Alaska whale watching tours around Juneau—this was footage that was too awesome not to share! Thank you to Jack Beedle (one of my uncles) for letting us have this footage to share!!
Hope you enjoy! Only 24 more days until the first cruise ship arrives in Juneau!
Jayleen