By Libby B Bushell

Special to the Homer Independent Press

Hello from Funnel Creek, Homer!

Katmai National Preserve has been absolutely jammed with salmon and thus brown bears and bear-viewers too. Never have I ever seen Crosswind Lake so busy with airplanes. It brings into question the ethics of bear viewing, and I’ll explore the double-edge sword of bear habituation in my next Dispatch from Katmai. But for now, let’s hike through the spooky willows (don’t forget to sing or talk loudly!) and over the hummocky tundra (watch out for napping bears!) to Funnel Creek.

Before we even make it to the river, we see two subadults wrestling in the hummocks. We sit down about 100 yards away, giving them more than enough space for their frolicking display. They stand on hind legs then smash into each other, tussling and log- rolling in our direction. They play-bite on the ground, then one stands, turns around and the other hops up and jumps on his back. A loopsie-whoopsie, a twisty-doodle, a slippy-slop ensues until suddenly they both leap up into a standing-bear pose, limp-wristed, alert and sniffing in my direction. Something smells funny and it’s not my tourists or me and it’s not the rotting salmon carcasses that line the creek behind us. Both bears turn and bolt across the tundra. Uh oh.

I tell my guests to slowly turn around and sure enough, a BIG bear pops her head up from the bluff behind us. She’s got a flopping salmon in her mouth. “Quiet now, don’t excite her; no sudden moves.” She’s about 40 yards away, assessing us. Seeing how respectful we’re being (sitting calmly and quietly, not staring at her, just glancing in her direction), she lumbers up over the edge to feast. As soon as she’s on our level, three gregarious fluffs pop up behind her. Triplets!

The yearlings give us a suspicious glance, then eagerly join their mom and form a mewling, grappling bear ball as they ravage the salmon, mom hogging the skin and the brains and most of the fillets as each little bear gets a small share of the lesser parts. Care Bears!

Care Bears: Sharing is caring, but those cubs are going to need more calories than that! 7/10

After a wrestling session and more hungry mewling from the cubs, mom lies down with her back to us in a hummock nest and the two little guys climb on top, oh my gosh. She trusts us enough to use us as her rear guard as she nurses them right there on the tundra next to us. The cubs suckle greedily and purr contentedly and, “I’m not crying, you’re crying!” I whisper to my guests. One little cub looks up with a milk mustache. Clickclickclickclickclickclickclick.

Okay, fine. Care Bears: 7/10… 10/10

After mom and cubs wander off across the tundra and my guests and I regain our senses (we literally have to hug it out, we are so overwhelmed with what we just witnessed), we wander down into the river. It’s empty when we arrive, which is the perfect time to set up in one of my favorite viewing spots.

It is quiet down here for a few minutes, but then we see a rustling in the willows downstream and one small bear emerges to chase after a fish in the shallows. It looks young enough to be a cub but it’s all alone, so I tell my guests it’s a subadult. We’re all rooting for the little guy, who is failing miserably at the dash ‘n’ grab, when suddenly three more bears come trotting out the same willow trail. “OK,” I say, “Never mind. That is a cub. He’s probably two-and-a-half and these are his siblings and yep, that’s their mom.”

The first bear gets his paws on a slow-moving salmon and his two siblings come tearing in after it. Mom ignores the food fight and wanders downstream to where the river gets deep. She watches the fish as the cubs continue their bickering. Suddenly she throws her forelegs out wide and leaps off her back legs into a Superman Dive! She plunges into the deep, which scares a whole school of salmon upstream. It’s a flipping-flopping mayhem in the shallows where the cubs forget about their fight and each lands their very own salmon. Mom nabs one too, and I swear, she glances at me and if she could speak English, she’d say “Check us out. We know teamwork.”

“Guys,” I say to my tourists. “Bears are solitary animals, but…did we just witness evolution? The bears have learned to work together. What’s next? Tools? Fire? Democracy?”  

The Superman! Dive: Highly entertaining and surprisingly effective. 8/10

Teamwork: But working together is the most effective of all. 10/10

We walk down the braided bends of Funnel Creek, moving super slow and careful always to watch the willows on either side of us. We stop whenever we see a bear and give her time to recognize us, and backtrack whenever we can’t get around a bear further than 50 yards from where he’s fishing. It is spicy down in Funnel Creek.

We get to a bend where, just ahead, a giant male is lurking in deep water. He’s got a tooth sticking out the side of his mouth and he’s noodling around in the water with his paws. I know this bear; I call him Fang. He’s cautious but has an intimidating stare. And that tooth that sticks out to the side, well … it could still rip my face off if he tried.

There’s quick action underwater and then Fang pulls up a salmon, half-dead and barely flopping. He looks at it, disgusted as he impales it with his claws. He lets it go. The Catch ‘n Release. The sockeye drifts downstream and gets caught up in an alder sweeper. Almost immediately, another smaller bear emerges from the willows, snags the discarded salmon, then disappears.

We call these bears Scrappers. They are usually the young bears who haven’t learned good fishing techniques or who get pushed around by the bigger bears and so cannot compete for the best fishing spots. They move along the riverbank, chewing on old carcasses and picking up the scraps from the catch ‘n’ release. There’s more than enough meat to go around so even the smallest, silliest, worst of the fisherbears get a full belly in August on Funnel Creek.

The Catch ‘n’ Release: Only good for providing for the Scrappers. 2/10

The Scrappers: No fish is wasted, thanks to this clean-up crew. 6/10

Downstream we see a bear doing a Sit ‘n’ Wait up on a sod clump above the water. The river pinches to less than 50 yards wide here, so we’re stuck until this bear moves along. Luckily there’s a grassy spot to sit without too much fish guts covering it. So we do the Sit ‘n’ Wait too.

And while we do, I contemplate a number of things: how lucky I am to get to do this job, to see nursing cubs and adolescent scrappers and to recognize surly old dudes like Fang; how special these Katmai bears are — that I can confidently walk in a river amidst them, feeling safe because of my extensive training.

I think about how fragile the balance of ecotourism and wilderness is, how tenuous is the line of habituation. Nowhere else on the planet would I get into a river full of bears and blind corners, but because this place is like nowhere else on earth, everyone on earth wants to come see it. And not everyone is so extensively trained as me. How long until there’s another “incident?” The last one in Katmai was in 2003.

And then I’m thinking about this present moment, as I’m always hyper-aware of my surroundings, and realizing that it’s been at least 15 minutes with no action and my guests’ knees are probably aching from kneeling on this riverbank and nobody’s shutters are firing. This bear looks the same as he did 10 minutes ago — maybe they’re bored and maybe I should backtrack, but that always feels like failure, I should wait, I should just wait just a few minutes more. “Let’s give this bear just a few more minutes and then if he doesn’t move o—”

The bear stands up. And before I can focus my lens he is leaping! Both forelegs are stretched out in front of him in full Superman position, but because he started above the surface of the water, it’s not a Superman, it’s a Bellyflop! He submerges for a second in a huge dramatic splash and then rises up without a fish. He climbs back onto the bank and disappears into the willows.

The Bellyflop: Really stupendous athleticism but showing poor results. 5/10

With this bear gone, we move along. Now we’re back to the confluence of Funnel Creek and Moraine Creek, and I take my guests to the spot where I watched the Pyramid Scheme of Trickle Down Fishonomics in early August. (Read my last Dispatch to get the scoop.) The river here is red with sockeye and there are two bears sharing the Boss’s spot.

Before we have a chance to settle in, one bear is running towards the water. With a sudden thrilling leap! he bellyflops into the reds. Salmon spray up all around him. Dynamite Bear! Five fish land on the gravel bar and he quickly gets four paws on four fish while the other bear tries unsuccessfully for the fifth. But now our Dynamite Bear has a problem: he can’t go anywhere with each of his paws pinning a salmon and suddenly there are three more bears emerging from the willows, jogging towards the lucky catch. Dynamite Bear forgets about the fish under his hind legs as he bites the one in his left paw. Then he grabs the fin of the fish in his right and slips it into his mouth as well. He turns tail and runs with two fish in his jaws! Bravo!

Dynamite Bear: Two fish in one catch! 11/10

We end our day watching a mother bear catch salmon for her cubs before we head back up onto the tundra, where we see a pair of adults playing chase. The bears out here are happy for now. It’s a good fishing season, but short. Soon they’ll be off in other directions, becoming hyperphagic and the surliest versions of themselves. For now though, there’s at least a few more weeks left of fishing season.

Got questions about bears? You can contact the author through her website: libbybbushell.com.

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!