Brooks Camp Field Report, September 2018: Bear Vortices and the End of an Era

The back stairs to the auditorium following a minute or two of unauthorized bear recreation.

 Friends,

I am more grateful than ever for the field notes I take while at camp, since even though I record maybe a quarter of my bear experiences in the journal, I was once again reminded of how much I forget of even those I do manage to write down.

As with July, September this year saw less bear action in camp than last season.  And as with this July, this was because high water and other factors kept the bears nearer to the falls and further from camp than did the lower water levels of last year.  I don’t mean to imply that this season was boring.  It just  wasn’t the bear management Valhalla of last year.  I am happy to say that although I was lunged at a couple of times, I was never charged outright, and did not have to use my bear spray.  Still, this is Brooks Camp, and with all the bears and all the people running around willy-nilly, things will happen.  

Bear Vortices

What, you might ask, is a bear vortex?  (I believe Michael Saxton coined the term.) It’s more or less what you might imagine. Well, I have no idea what you might imagine so I guess I should just say that it’s more or less what I imagine I’d imagine if I didn’t already know what to imagine.   It’s a bunch of bears running around in a swirl, at least some of whom are not related.  

In my July field report I mentioned the five bears that 856 (a dominant male) unintentionally drove into camp and the chaos they created as they swirled about, until they scattered after his departure.  That was an example of a bear vortex.  In a situation like that, with the vortex passing through the center of camp and with it mostly made of adult bears, there’s often little for a bear tech to do except get people indoors or behind electric fences and monitor things until the vortex dissipates.

The vortices of September were somewhat different from the above.  Like storms following the path of the prevailing winds, they all started on the beach near the campground (north of camp) and more or less followed the line of the beach to Brooks River (south of camp).  If they made it as far as the river they broke apart there.  The prime mover of the vortex was always either a lone sow or a sow and cubs heading toward the river to fish after resting somewhere north of the campground, an area where adult males seldom travel.  The body of the vortex was made up of subadults that had been either resting or playing on the beach along the sow’s (and cubs’) path.

Bears being bears, and especially subadults being subadults, they seldom get out of the way of the oncoming sow or family in a straightforward manner.  A fox or a lynx might do something that simple and linear, but not a  bear.  Instead they laze or play until the last minute and then freak out and scatter ahead of the sow until they get just far enough to forget about her.  Then they drop everything and go back to playing or lazing until the cycle is repeated, while the mass as a whole continues to lurch toward the river.  This is an idealized version of what usually happens, in that often some subadults are playing or considering lying down again while others are simultaneously freaking out, but you get the idea.

With these vortices, bear management has a more active role.  Basically we hammer on the sides of the  swirl  as it spins past camp in order to keep it out as much as possible, and to keep the center of mass more or less following the beach.  This means hazing the subadults out of camp if centrifugal motion tosses them that way, and getting people out of the path of the vortex.  (If a subadult is in serious danger from the approaching sow or family we let it into camp, get behind it, and push it out the other side of camp, but this is rarely necessary.)

I will confess that I think dealing with bear vortices is cool and am always happy to see one brewing to the north.  

As the saying goes, “It takes a special kind of stupid to be a bear tech.”

Two Vignettes

As I mentioned at the beginning of the report, in spite of it being a relatively slow September, there were still plenty of exciting events.  I mean, this is bear management at Brooks Camp in Katmai National Park on the Alaska Peninsula.  That said, there were only two that can be more or less fit into the “just right” category.  Some of the others were too complex to even begin to describe without drawing maps on a napkin or doing lots of hand waving.  The rest of the others, the majority, involved simply chasing bears, in their various bear-moods, out of camp.  It is  odd that the chasing brown bears out of camp can be too commonplace to warrant mention in a field report, but here we are.  I’ll save the most complex ones for in person sometime, but here are two that kinda sorta make the just right category:

In the first situation I played only a supporting role.  Michael Saxton, the bear management crew lead, played the leading part. 

Because of lots of very active bears on both sides of the river and in the waters nearby, the bridge had been closed for over three hours with a large group of visitors stuck on the lower river platform, unable to make it back to camp.  One of the parties stuck on the platform included an elderly, terminally ill woman whose dying wish was to see the bears of Brooks River, her husband, and their daughter.  The elderly woman was in a wheelchair.  Night was quickly approaching and the bears beneath the platform and around the bridge showed no signs of moving off, nor had they for hours.

Under normal conditions the bridge is not declared open for use unless there are no bears within 50 yards of the bridge or the paths immediately leading to and from the bridge.  Once dark set in it would be impossible to determine whether or not the bridge could be declared open, and the prospect of everyone (esp. the aforementioned family) just making an improvised go of trying to get back to camp in the dark with bears all around was not exactly a cheering prospect.

Normally the area close to river is considered to belong to the bears and we do not  haze them there, but Michael rightly decided that the lesser evil was to haze his way through as necessary to get to the platform, extract the people from it, and get them back to camp before darkness fell.  Fortunately, Tammy Carmack, a former member of the bear management team in camp and now the biological monitor of the Brooks river bears, was present on the platform and able to assist Michael with the extraction.

I was in camp keeping the path clear of bears so that, once across, the visitors could make it back the whole way safely and without further delay.  I wish I could recount to you exactly how Michael and Tammy were able to get people through the bears swirling around the platform, onto the bridge, and back across.  I was only able to follow bits and pieces over the radio at the time, and even when Michael tried to describe it to me later it was too complex to retain.  

There was a beautiful eeriness in listening to the tense radio traffic as twilight approached night and hearing that they had made it onto the bridge, and then having to stop them just short of camp while I hazed off a bear that had appeared on the trail in the near-darkness.  There was no mistaking the relief on the twilit faces passing by in the darkness at the edge of camp.  

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The second event was quite a bit less significant in terms of scale, but it had a archetypically Brooksian combination of edginess and semi-absurdity that make it worth recounting.  Earlier the same evening as above I received over the radio a call from Katelyn, one of the two seasonal law-enforcement officers at Brooks, that one of Holly’s cubs had pulled a life vest from under a canoe.  After muttering a few choice expletives (hopefully not over the radio) about the mindset of anyone who thought a bear wouldn’t find a life vest in a canoe, I told Katelyn that I was heading that way.  

I found her on the beach at a respectful distance from the cub (the dark cub, as many of you have no doubt already guessed).  The cub was dragging the vest along the beach toward mom, no doubt looking forward to shredding it in close proximity to Holly’s protection.   In the opposite direction, Holly’s light cub was on her own pushing a subadult down the beach (which tells you something about Holly’s cubs…) and doing so in the direction of the dark cub and Holly.  While I couldn’t have cared less about the life vest per se, letting the cub have a good time shredding it was not a good idea for bears or humans (we don't want them thinking of human gear as toys), so I decided to insert myself between the dark cub approaching Holly and the light cub chasing the subadult, in hopes that I could get the vest away from the cub before we all came together in a very unfortunate conclave on the beach.

To my great fortune--though not to my surprise--Katelyn volunteered to come and cover me while I tried to get the vest from the cub.  (The law enforcement team at Brooks this season was superb!)  We quickly closed the distance to Holly’s dark club as she herself closed the distance to her watchful mom.  A snarl was visible from her yearling cub mouth as her jaws gripped the vest as she drug it along the beach toward Holly.  As you all know, Holly’s cubs are not easily intimidated, esp. the dark one, and she was unimpressed by my yelling and striking of sticks. I could sense Holly’s gaze intensifying the closer I got to both cub and, thereby, to mom as well.  All the while her light cub and the pursued subadult were continuing to close in on us from the other direction.

Without much else in the way of options, I decided to start tossing driftwood at the dark cub in order to get her to let go of the vest.  I wasn’t hurling it at her, just tossing it under-handed.  I wasn’t sure that Holly would appreciate the distinction between over- and under-hand tossing but decided to take the risk.  As with certain events in July,  had the mom had been Grazer or 284 things might have gone differently, but at least for the moment Holly just continued to watch, though on full alert.  I kept tossing driftwood at the cub.  We were no more than ten yards from Holly when the cub let go of the vest and I dashed in to grab it.  Fortunately the cub did not argue, though she let me know she was not happy about me now having her treasure.

With the other cub and subadult now almost on us, Katelyn and I moved into the woods beside the beach as quickly as we could without running, and from there back to camp.

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In my first draft of this field report I wrote several paragraphs about this being the last year of the old bridge and the strange, bear-centered and radio-carried dance between Corner and Platform, and why the passing of the old system was a big deal.  Eventually I realized that for those who had experienced that dynamic, no explanation was needed, and for those who had not no explanation was possible, at least not in the format of a mere field report.

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That’s it for this bear season.  Of all my years with the bears here this was the best, hands down, in spite of fond farewells.  I can’t help but want to return for another go at it next year if conditions allow.  Whatever happens, though, it was nice to have a season where even though I felt (and objectively was) far from mastering the job, I at least felt like I’d hit a decent stride.  Hard to not want to experience that at least once more, even with all the pressures bearing down on Brooks and Katmai and cracks beginning to show.

See you downriver,

Carl