Brooks Camp Field Report, July 2017: Bear Management at the Deep End

I had been in the habit of writing field report emails for friends for over a decade before I wrote the one below.  While I had filled a few different roles at Brooks Camp for three seasons prior to this (the field reports for which I will post here at some point) this was my first tour as part of the Bear Management team.

Friends,

I came home early yesterday evening, my first flight in a Top Cub —the visibility from inside it was breathtaking!  

It is disconcerting to me to be back in our sedate little home in King Salmon after having just gone through what was an extremely intense bear management season at Brooks Camp.  I’m not saying it was absolutely the most intense ever, but neither I nor the most experienced staff and visitors I spoke with had ever seen anything like it.

The reasons that bear management was so intense this year are relatively straightforward: there is an extraordinary number of sows with cubs present on the river.  There is also an extraordinary number of subadults (bears in their first few years on their own).  The water levels on the river were exceptionally low, making for better fishing downriver for all bears, thereby meaning that the presence of big males further downriver than normal pushed the sows with cubs and subadults even further toward camp (camp is near the mouth of the river).  Last, it was a huge sockeye run, which made for bears with more leisure and energy.  All of those reasons were more or less equally significant in my opinion.

The above, combined with the fact that there’s only so much that one can be systematically trained for bear management, meant that my first season on the job was somewhat like learning to swim in the deep end of the pool.  Fortunately, my experience up close with bears on the Falls Trail and elsewhere in previous years was good preparation, as of course was knowing general camp operations and lingo.  The reason that there’s not much formal training that can be done is that the job is just too situational and intuitive.  Situational in that there are too many variables (e.g. the individual natures of the bears you are dealing with, how those bears are reacting in the moment, the location of other bears around camp (kept track of via radio), the locations of visitors milling around camp, the layout of camp itself, etc.) to have set formats for dealing with problems.  It’s intuitive in that when things happen they often happen quickly, with no time for explicit thought.  

Dealing with the situation in front of me while also keeping track of the broader context via radio was, at least in my case, the hardest part of the job, and something I am still a long way from mastering.

A few more thoughts…  One is that I’m very happy that I kept a journal of the experience, minimal as my journaling had to be.  Otherwise my memory of this tour would be a blur of bears running, bears sleeping, and bears looking at me with an expression best translated (at least without the use of expletives) as  “What is your problem, human?!?”  The aforementioned ursine blur contrasts with a few sharp moments that will remain forever vivid in my memory.  

The other thought is that while I learned countless things about coastal brown bears that would be extremely difficult to learn outside this job, perhaps the most fun fact is that sows playing with their cubs are exceptionally hard to move out of camp!  As we all know, by far the most common way that sows play with cubs is by mock fighting, and I have come to suspect that one of the reasons they are so hard to move when they are playing is that they can’t always tell whether we are trying to push them or are trying to join them in their play and just going about it with our typical human cluelessness.  

By the way, I don’t think there is anything that makes yearling cubs happier than chasing around a subadult, as long as mom is following close behind!  I’m not sure what the subadults think of it, but it certainly helped keep us busy.

If my body could have handled it, I’d have worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and would have extended my tour for at least another week.  As it was, keeping up with the fit and motivated twenty- and thirty-somethings that make up the rest of the team—not to mention following, debating with, and searching for bears—made fifty hours a week was as much as I could handle, and for no longer than my specified tour.  I left not a day too early for avoiding illness or serious overuse injuries.  (The rest of the crew seemed none the worse for wear.)  All that said, I cannot wait to be back in September!  

Until then, Susie and I have trip of our own into brown bear country coming up shortly...

Hope all’s well.  

See you downriver,

Carl