By Libby B. Bushell

Special to the Homer Independent Press

Hello from Hallo Bay, Homer!

It’s June in Katmai National Park, and this year the sedge is stubborn and the ground was brown well past late May. That cold winter we all suffered pushed spring into the summer months, and the bears are reflecting the progress of the season; they’re slow to return to the meadows.

To live by the weather is a privilege for us sapiens these days. So many of us 21st Century two-legged mammals are locked into schedules and summer plans, that manic squeeze between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the 9-5 grind.

But bears don’t bother with calendars or clocks. They don’t care that the tourists are here already and have paid good money to be terrified or mystified or elated by the awesome presence of so many bears amidst the idyllic landscape of Hallo Bay. No, the bears follow the schedule of their noses in the moment, the tidal switch, the turn of weather. And the weather just hasn’t been hot enough for that sleuth of bears to fill the meadows and give us guides and pilots an easy job of showing them off. We’ve had to search them out this season so far.

There’s one, way off in the back meadow. I see it as a light brown dot with my naked eye, bear-shaped through my binoculars. So, we’re picking our way through the wildflower shoots — angelica and fireweed, chocolate lilies and wild iris — tiny green bear food poking through the blonde husks of last summer’s rye. A log here, a bit of plastic flotsam there, some sun-crisped kelp, a buoy, a water bottle lies partially buried under the flattened grass. The meadows of Hallo Bay flood on moon tides, and the berms where the wildflowers grow flood during winter storms. I pick up the water bottle but leave the rest behind.

We cross the creek that runs parallel to the beach. It is ankle-deep this year, just over our knees on a high tide. Last summer it was uncrossable in hip boots at the flood, but this year with the lack of snow, it’s looking like it’ll be easy crossing on any phase of the moon. This is neither good nor bad for the bears, only notable to those of us with flight plans to stick to, dinner reservations to meet, bedtimes and travel dates and a desire to see the bears on the other side without getting our pants wet.

Across Parallel Creek we are in the sedge. Still mostly brown. Soon it’ll be electric green. Soon the bears will return in droves, will be posturing and playing, courting and mating and most of all grazing, but right now there is just this one brown dot, bear-shaped by the naked eye, still grazing along the edge of the willows. We move like a bear would. Slow. From far away we walk straight on, single file like how a mama (me) with her cubs (my tourists) would approach. From far away in single file we look small and unintimidating, but as we get within a couple hundred yards, we change the route to a zigzag, like a curious bear would come near another.

The zigzag is unintimidating. It displays a curiosity that is not aggressive. This bear may know me but it certainly doesn’t know this banker behind me and his wife from Tucson and the lawyer and her wife from San Diego. The bear can smell me — the guide who was here yesterday and most days the past two summers, from miles away. But it’s these other smells — the shampoo and deodorants of the tourists — that I allow plenty of time for the bear to register as human, as not-a-food, not-a-threat. Out here in Katmai National Park, we are scrupulous to never feed the bears, not even crumbs from our lunches. They are habituated to humans but not food-conditioned. And that makes all the difference between Katmai bears and the bears who are hungry for trash and livestock and people on the edges of towns. It’s why we go bear-viewing out here, but everywhere else, you keep your distance from bears.

This bear is grazing on the sedge. We are 50 yards from it now so we sit down close together, which is more bear language for “We are curious; we are not a threat.” The bear doesn’t mind us except to cast a few quick side-eyes in our direction. He continues munching.

“It’s just another great moment of a good day for me; the bear ran towards us but not at us. There’s a big difference, one that I am trained to decipher in the blink of an eye or a draw of the flare. This was an eye-blinking affair and I am smiling because it’s a good day now, despite only seeing two bears.”

The sedge he is eating is greener back here, where the coastal breezes are stilled by the berms of rye and the heat from the forest behind us has warmed the brackish soil. The perennial sedge is critical as an early-season food source for the coastal Alaska brown bear. It is packed with protein and easy to digest and bears can graze over 50 pounds of the plant per day in the early summer. If you see their enormous piles of fibrous scat, you’ll know what I mean.

But the young male looks up towards the willows, gives a quick sniff, then suddenly takes off in our direction. He runs right towards us for a few seconds before he realizes that we are blocking his path, then he veers away, maybe 20 yards from us at a trot, crossing the vast sedge fields, high stepping across Parallel Creek, then disappearing over the berm and onto the beach.

The source of his flight — a nearly-half-ton dark brown male bear lumbers onto the meadow. He is here to graze the sedge, to sniff out any females who may be lingering, to follow them until they are in heat. None are here so he just eats. My tourists are jazzed and buzzing with adrenaline and asking a lot of nervous questions after that brief close encounter. It’s just another great moment of a good day for me; the bear ran towards us but not at us. There’s a big difference, one that I am trained to decipher in the blink of an eye or a draw of the flare. This was an eye-blinking affair and I am smiling because it’s a good day now, despite only seeing two bears.

After an hour or more of sitting with this duke of Hallo, I check the tide app on my phone and pretend like I’m some wizard who knows where the bears will be just by my own bear-sense and not by the predictable rise and fall of the tides, by technology. 

“Let’s go back to the beach. I have a hunch there’ll be a bear out there,” I say.

When we see our young male out digging for clams, we approach again with the zigzag. By now he knows all our smells, knows what we had for breakfast and how long it’s been since we’ve changed our socks. He knows that we don’t try to scare him off when he accidentally runs towards us, unless of course if he were to get too close. He knows that we are predictable, reliable, and so when we kneel down 50 yards away in the sand, he is comfortable enough to work his way closer and closer and close enough to us that we can hear the sandy grasping of his claws as they extract a Pacific razor clam from its subterranean home. The bear exhales and at this proximity we can practically smell his breath, although our noses are a thousand times less sensitive than his. What does he smell of us?

This bear learned to clam from his mother. She taught him to sniff around for the spot, to dig and then extract the little snack with his claws, to pull it out of the watery hole with his lips, to carefully break the fragile shell with his teeth, to place it on a paw to lick out the live meat. He eats almost no sand and none of the shell before moving on to dig another.

But I’ve seen bears extract a clam and then pop the whole sandy thing in their mouths, crunch it down, swallow it and eventually poop out a painful looking pile of broken shells. Different mothers, different methods. The clams of Hallo Bay have been that little extra protein in addition to the sustaining sedge that keeps these bears well fed until salmon season, that have made this valley such a mecca over the past innumerable millennia.

But today there is only this one bear out here until —

What is this?

A small blonde bear comes trotting over the wildflower berm. She is clearly female to me by her form — cute and round, and her body language — constantly looking back. Sure enough, our dark duke is following her. He’ll follow her until she’s ready to mate, which might be later today but alas — I look at my watch — we humans have a flight to catch.

Stay tuned for the story of these two bears (or another similar pair) in the next edition of “Dispatch from Katmai: It’s Mating Season.”

Got questions about bears? I’ll try to answer them. My contact information is on my website: libbybbushell.com. And if you missed the first edition of Dispatch from Katmai: Bear Safety 101, you can read it here.

Libby B Bushell is a local author and wildlife guide. She spends summers in Katmai with the bears, and winters (the austral summer) in Antarctica with the emperor penguins. She is the founder of HoWL and is passionate about helping people get outside. It’s better out there!