Hello from East End Road, Homer!

As I relish in the pleasures of autumn — community potlucks, the Burning Basket, the crimson and fluff of fireweed going to seed, making left hand turns in town — I’m already missing the brown bears of summer. My guiding season is over, though the bears are still splashing through the rivers of Katmai. Only now instead of catching sockeye, they’re slaying every silver, pink and chum they can. They’re not so picky as they were in August, when they were fat and happy and playful and wasteful; the chilly winds of fall have forced them into hyperphagia so they’re hyper-focused on feeding now.

Hyperphagia is a biological response to changing environmental conditions. Prompted by the autumn weather, the bears’ central nervous system overrides the satiety signals sent by the hormones leptin and ghrelin, which normally tell a bear that it is full. During hyperphagia, they cannot feel full, even when they’re stuffed, and so they binge, growing uncomfortably fat and grumpy until it’s time to dig.

Unlike black bears, who find established caves or tree wells in which to hibernate, brown bears dig a new den each autumn. They ascend to an elevation of one or two thousand feet to select their winter homes. They choose a slope — not too rocky, with plenty of forage for their last few days of hyperphagia — and they graze in between the hours of excavation.

A grizzly bear den can be 12 feet deep, 4 feet tall and 6 feet wide, but it doesn’t have to be. It just has to be cozy. Like people, every bear is an individual, and their dens reflect their personal preferences. Some are lined with grassy bedding, some are spacious, some are tight.

All bears of an area, however, follow the same winter schedule: as soon as the first big storm hits, be it in October, November or December, they’ll shuffle inside and bed down as the snow seals up the entrance to the den. They won’t eat or drink or pee or poo until we see them again in spring. Their vital signs will drop while they’re hibernating, but not astronomically, as they dream of whale feasts, of splashy salmon and green miles of sedge, surviving off the fat they’ve amassed this summer.

Hyperphagia is critical to a bear’s survival. It’s why we celebrate the Fat Bears of Brooks Falls this week. (Check out Fat Bear Week to cast your vote for the fattest bear of 2026!) The fatter the bear in the fall, the stronger it’ll be in the spring, and in some cases, that fat is doing more than just sustaining the one bear that amassed it.

So, speaking of fat bears, let me introduce you to “Girlfriend.”

In 2025, I met Girlfriend alongside her romantic interest of the season, “Pretty Boy.” These two bears were the A-listers of Moraine Creek. Far away on the tundra, we’d watch them wrestle and nuzzle, chase each other then roll down a slope, locking claws and love-biting before jogging down to the creek to get back to their fishing business. Not the biggest, oldest or meanest bears, and not the cutest, fluffiest or silliest bears either, these two were simply the best-looking, most prime examples of Brown Bear that I’d ever seen.

After the then-unknown dark brown male gave me a close drive-by on the riverbank last season, my colleague Arabella radioed from across the creek. “Pretty boy!” she crooned. The name stuck. And his constant companion, this merled blonde beauty, became Girlfriend soon after.

Recognizing that 1, “Girlfriend” as a moniker given in reference to a briefly-observed “romantic” relationship is not only male-centering, but misaligned with the hierarchies and customs of bear society, and 2, that giving bears any name at all is a dubious, anthropomorphic practice and a slippery slope that toes the line of habituation — bear with me.

I do not consider these bears to be my friends. I use names only to refer to individuals I’ve observed over time and can recognize. Most bears are just bears to me, but the ones I see day after day, I prefer to refer to by a name. A number is also a name, just a clunkier, more calculated one. No shade to the fat bears of Brooks Falls and their numberers.

And so, Girlfriend by any other name would smell as sweet to Pretty Boy. Like wild woods and salmon streams, animal fur and autumn breeze. And even with any other name, I bet she’ll emerge with two, maybe three cubs next spring. She’s probably got all the ingredients inside her, and I watched her slay red after red as her Superman technique was on point this season. She’s fat enough to become a good mother.

A bear’s gestation is wild. It begins with mating season in June. In the polyamorous society of bears, a female may mate with multiple males, carrying fertilized eggs from several fathers. But don’t be fooled: a male bear’s contribution to parenting ends with copulation. There is no such thing as a “Papa Bear.” Even Pretty Boy will be chased away if Girlfriend emerges with cubs next season.

Throughout the summer, the fertilized eggs form into a cluster of tiny cells called blastocysts that float around the uterus until October, when they implant and begin to grow fetal tissue but only if the mother is fit enough (i.e. fat enough) to support the pregnancy and nurse the infants throughout the winter.

If she is pregnant, then the fetuses will grow for only four months before Girlfriend gives birth in late January or early February. Bear cubs weigh about one pound when they’re born. Imagine a bear you could hold in the palm of one hand. They are hairless, toothless, blind and tiny. A bear’s fat is more efficiently converted to milk than to fetal proteins, so the den acts like a secondary womb for the completely helpless infant cubs. They nurse throughout the winter, and by May or June they’ll weigh about 15 pounds when the snow is finally cleared from the den’s entrance, and Mama is ushering her spring cubs out into the great Alaskan wilderness.

Hopefully next spring Girlfriend will emerge trailing a cluster of little bears. I won’t see her until August, because she spends June and July somewhere other than Hallo Bay, but the next time I do see her, I’ll let you know how her winter went. Until then, goodnight and happy winter to Girlfriend, Pretty Boy, Rabbit Ears, Spirit Bear, Duke and all the other bears of Katmai.

What kind of outdoor stories would you like to read? 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!