Wild bears fishing for salmon

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This summer I spent four month in South East Alaska. While working on a cruise ship I had the chance to explore the beautiful Alaskan coast and even was able to explore a few of the towns we docked at. In my free time I went on quite a few hikes, but also was lucky enough to jump on a few excursions to see some of the beautiful landscape and wildlife that Alaska provides.
While I managed to see quite a few whales and eagles, within the time spent up here, I had not been able to spot any bears within the last four month, so I was more than excited when our excursion team offered me to join one of bear viewing tours on the last week of our Alaska season.
Of course it is never guranteed to see the animals, but at least there was a chance to see some bears in their natural habitat.
The tour started of with an hour boat ride up to Traitor's Cove. When we got off the boat I was a little shocked with what we found. The smell that hit us was almost unbearable, everywhere we looked we saw dead fish lying around the shore. Our guide explained that this was pretty normal as he explained to us the salmon run. Apperenly most salmon don't make it up the river, plus a lot of them get eaten by the bears. We took a tour of the nearby salmon hatchery, which was very interesting.
After we left the hatchery we took a walk down the river to see if we can spot some bears. And we did, not just a few but quite a lot in total we saw 12 black bears coming down to the riverbed to catch some salmon and they made it look so easy. I was quite surprised how picky the bears are for that matter. In fact they prefer female salmons and only eat the eggs for their protein and throw the rest of the fish back into the water.
We watched the bears for like an hour before heading back to Ketchikan. It was such a beautiful experience and I also learned quite a bit about the wildlife on this excursion.

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Very Cool.
I'm gad you were able to go on this excursion.