Brooks Camp Field Report, September 2019: Porcupine Songs and the Perils of Cub Precosity

A form of behavior referred to in the technical literature as "cuddle puddling."

Friends,

Please don’t give up on me quite yet but, since I’ve always felt like the one unarguable virtue of these field reports is that I make them as unfiltered and honest as possible, I’m going to say it at the start:  From a bear management perspective, this was a pretty quiet September. 

I know, your second grade teacher always admonished you to never start a Katmai field-report that way, but there you have it.

Fortunately there are some advantages in this for you, dear reader.  First, strange and wonderful things did happen.  It was Brooks Camp in September, after all.  Second, my poor, beleaguered brain is not in its usual post-Brooks state of synaptic exhaustion, and perhaps I will thereby be able to convey the aforementioned events with more clarity than usual.  Last, and by no means least,  you won’t have to put up with my usual   “Oh, verily verily, how shall I convey it all?” writerly angst.

The Big Picture

As ever, I set forth to Brooks with my bear-hazing sticks and my ever-well-intended, if ever-knuckle-headed, hopes of playing Ian to the bears’ Spinal Tap,  but such was (mostly) not to be.  The reason why it was a relatively quiet year for bear management and, to a lesser extent, for visitors, was that most of the bears were late in returning to Brooks River.  As most of you know, the majority of bears leave the river once a sufficient number of sockeye salmon have migrated through to Brooks Lake and the small streams that feed into it, and the river has become less useful as a fishing spot.  Normally by the end of the first week of September most of those bears are back, and a few others have shown up as well. They return to feed on the dead and dying salmon brought downriver.  An exception is the small but increasing number of bears that stay through much of August for the smaller run of silver salmon that also comes up the river.

This September, because of a summer heat wave and drought, the normal timeline was thrown off for all but a minority of bears.  How it played out in detail is complex and I don’t think anyone completely understands it.  (No one knows that much about Brooks bear movements away from the river, even in more normal years.)  Nonetheless, I think the broad outline is clear enough.  The record heat delayed the movement of salmon into Brooks River and thereby Brooks Lake and its tributaries.  The concurrent drought stopped water flow completely in some tributaries, or turned them into shallow, narrow salmon traps that provided an easy feast for the bears that could stake out claims on them.  

Fortunately for the park and lodge staff at Brooks, the silver salmon run was sufficient to keep a few bears (mostly adult males) busy at the falls, and there was a handful of playful subadults that hung around.  Because of this we were spared having to confront angry masses of visitors carrying torches and pitchforks and demanding to see bears.  Nonetheless there was unrest, primarily because all but one or two sows with cubs failed to return until the last few days of full camp operation.  

In the world of bear viewing, sows with cubs are the centerpiece, and I have no doubt they always will be. 

As it turned out, many if not most of the missing sows with cubs were hanging out at Margot Creek, where low water levels and a substantial salmon run had turned it into a brown bear's idea of Valhalla.  We were kept informed of the situation by groups of visitors who hired the lodge boat and a guide (and in at least one case an Otter) to take them there.  Near the end of my tour, however, Valhalla had apparently gone bust and its denizens were showing up at Brooks River.  Unfortunately it was  too late to make much difference for me or most September visitors.

Fly by Night

My sharpest jolt of adrenaline was received while I was walking to camp for my last full-day shift of work.  I was on the road that runs from the bridge to Brooks Lake, and it was early twilight on an overcast day.  I did not have a flashlight or headlamp and, while that may well have been stupid, I would argue that it was at least not quite as stupid as it seems.  (Yes, that may well be a low bar.)  First of all, the habit of going without any light sources was drilled into me as a young infantryman, and I’ve never bothered to shake it. (Okay, that one probably is dumb.)  Second, in my experience bears don’t like having lights shined into their eyes at night.  That is, lights only make them grumpier.  Granted, so far no fall visitor to Brooks has been killed because of shining a light in a bear’s eyes, but then no one has been killed by not having a light either.  Lastly, I have enough Celt in me to have a strong preference for twilight over electric light in any form, esp. in the quiet of an early Katmai morning.

Anyway, it was dark.

Roughly half-way between the bunkhouse and camp I saw a large, dark, fuzzy something emerge from the pitch black woods onto the slightly lighter blue-grey road, 80-100 yards ahead of me.  It took a few seconds to realize that it really was a bear. As I recognized what the blob was, another and far more distinct form emerged from the woods 30-40 yards in front of me.  I immediately knew it was a bear; a very large subadult or a youngish adult.

As soon as the second bear emerged it let out a long, guttural, and unusually aggressive “Whoooof!” and started running directly toward me.  With one exception, it was the fastest I’ve ever seen a bear move.

I found myself moving toward the woods at the side of the road, somehow managing to draw my bear spray in spite of the extra gear I carried for my morning commute.  (All honor to the geeky art of Practice.)  The bear blasted past just as I made it into the edge of the woods.

Why the closer bear ran toward me wasn't hard to figure out.  Because I was singing, both bears were awakened by my approach, but when the second emerged from the woods the first was already on the road in the opposite direction from me.  At least in Katmai, bears worry much, much, much more about other bears than humans, so the strange, two-legged shape with the off-key singing voice was by far the lesser of two evils.  Heading straight in my direction was the best way out that the middle bear could think of, given this unexpected situation in the twilight.

Porcupine Songs

After all these years of being around them, I’m embarrassed to say that I had no idea how vocal porcupines are.  Perhaps I should be all the more embarrassed given the small cottage industry around porcupine cuteness on Youtube   (Lest you think me a zoological vulgarian, it had not escaped me how cute porcupines are, I just didn’t know how cute they can sound.)

I got a crash course early one morning around the middle of my September tour. I had just started my patrols in camp, and I heard a strange humming sound. At first I thought was one of the lodge employees on their way to start a morning shift in the kitchen, humming in a deliberately silly way.  As I moved toward the sound, however, certain qualities of tone made it clear that the source was not human.  Nonetheless, the humming really was humming, and it had an almost-melodic quality that might best be described as a exceptionally trippy form of Barbershop Raga.  Whatever the ambiguities of melody, the underlying spirit was clear:  This was one contented porcupine.

I found the porcupine swaying back and forth in a gently rhythmic manner beside the ranger station porch. Whether she(?) was enjoying a morsel or enjoying a session of rodent qigong I couldn’t tell.  She was exceptionally big, with quills and fur ranging from light tan to dark brown.  She sat just a couple of yards in front of me, swaying and humming contentedly until she became aware of my presence.  After a moment of apparent surprise and annoyance, the porcupine turned and shuffled back under the ranger station.

No more than a half hour later, I heard a plaintive call coming from near the auditorium.  It was unambiguously mammalian and just as unambiguously non-human, and very different from the humming earlier in the morning.  With a little searching I found the source of the melancholy calls; two porcupines in a spruce near the auditorium.  They were smaller but colored similarly to the porcupine by the ranger station porch.  The calls continued for much of the morning and, oddly enough, immediately reminded me of a kind of call that rhinoceroses make.  I assume their calls were some kind of mating or bonding behavior, but I’m not sure.  They certainly sounded that way to me.  During my patrols I often brought visitors over to see the pair in the tree, and I was happy to see how many people enjoyed it.

During the time that the two were in the tree another porcupine walked a few feet past me and Michael Saxton.  It was an elegant, solid black except for a kind of tiara of white quills above the eyes.

Oddly, in spite of putting in around 100 miles or so of additional walking around camp, I did not hear or see another porcupine this September.  I don’t think it was a matter of any harm coming to them, but why that was the case I don’t know.

The Perils of Cub Precocity

You may recall my various adventures in July with Bear 171 and her two cubs (later only one cub).  We were all happy to see her return with her remaining cub much bigger and fatter than in July.  Unfortunately the cub also returned with an even bigger attitude.

I’d heard about this even bolder attitude from a member of the team who was the first to deal with the 171 family coming into camp not long after their return to the river.  I got my own introduction to them a day or two later when the family entered camp by the visitor center in order to go around another bear family sleeping on the beach.

I caught up with them at the auditorium, with the cub on the wheelchair-accesible ramp to the entrance door.  Once again the cub was breaking ground in terms of behavior.  Just going up the ramp—let alone all the way to the door--was something I’d never seen or heard of before.  I began hazing the cub to get her(?) to come off the ramp by striking one of my sticks against the slats of the guard rail.  When the cub was not particularly impressed by this, even though she was right on the other side of the rail from me, I knew we were in for a different kind of hazing experience.  (Keep in mind that she is still considerably less than a year old.)

Eventually, after a lot of banging on the rail with my sticks and perhaps a bit of permanent hearing loss (I’d forgotten my hearing protection) the cub got off the ramp with ostentatious casualness.  171 herself was indifferent to the whole affair. So began a long, circuitous hazing session across camp.  From the auditorium we made our way to the lodge cabins by Overlook, down the hill and behind the lodge (to the delight of a crowd of visitors watching from inside) and out to the beach by way of Lodge Trail.

Throughout this, 171 paid just enough attention to my hazing to continue to lumber ahead with all the dynamism of chilled molasses, stopping to graze on grass at every opportunity.  Why wouldn’t she be casual, given that her 25 lb. cub had set herself up as mom’s protector?  Almost every step of the way the cub confronted me in some form; sometimes making little charges, sometimes tearing at the grass with exaggerated ferocity to show me who was boss, at one point actually standing on her hind legs to show me how big she was.  For the most part, however, she firmly stood her ground with feet wide, and looked at me with determined ferocity.

She made her best show behind the lodge, to the great delight of all the visitors inside.  This was also where I had to apply the most pressure, and at one point I made a lunge at the cub to get her to move. My shoes slipped on the wet grass, and I fell on my rear in front of everyone.  Not only was it a little embarrassing (I could hear the burst of laughter from the crowd inside the lodge) but I wondered if Little Miss Precocity would take advantage of the moment and come at me harder.  Fortunately she wasn’t feeling that precocious.  Not that she could have ripped me from limb to limb, but I wasn’t interested in spraying her, or a potentially angry momma bear, while sprawled on my back on the lawn.  After I got up and got back to hazing the family was close enough to Lodge Trail and the beach that it was a relatively easy go for the rest of the way.

Of course there’s more than a little charm in a cub being that amazingly spunky and bold with people.  That wasn’t lost on me even during the hazing.  (I’ll never forget her standing up on her hind legs behind the lodge to show off her might.) No one on the bear team, not even Leslie or Michael or Tammy, head ever heard of such a thing.  Sadly, however, it does not bode well for the cub's future.

In an episode too complex to recount here, that evening I saw the cub push the limits in relationship to another sow (718?) and her two spring cubs on Closed Trail.  718’s family and 171 and cub were involved in one of the fight / standoff / fight / standoff scenarios that bear families sometimes get into.  Among the three cubs involved, 171’s was the one that kept pushing the limits.  In more than one instance she even managed to get between the other sow and her cubs.  Fortunately, all she got from that was a slap from the other sow, but the episode was intense and unusual enough that it would not have been a surprise if the other sow had killed her.

As harsh a reality as it is, the best thing for 171’s cub would be—and I say this with no sarcasm or animosity whatsoever—to be sprayed multiple times by bear management and slapped several times by other bear moms (assuming 171 continues to not discipline her).  No one in on the bear team has any better idea about how to get her under control so that the little one doesn’t get herself killed.  If she continues to be this aggressive and makes it to being a subadult, let alone a full adult, she will end up being shot.  What is cute at 25 lbs. can be very different thing at 350 and intolerable at 600.  I don’t think we’ll get to that point, however.  In all likelihood either bear management and her fellow bears will condition her out of it her extreme assertiveness or, I'm sad to say, another bear will kill her.

As always I don’t mean to moralize about the cub or 171. Neither can be said in any meaningful way to have chosen this situation.  Nor can human interference be blamed.  

We rarely use bear spray as a means of conditioning bears at Brooks (normally just as self-defense) but let’s hope it works well in this instance.

***

Toward the end of my last shift for 2019 I extended my patrol to Brooks Lake (the lake that feeds Brooks River).  There was a hard wind from the west pushing waves against the shore and turning what would have been a mild rain into an uncomfortably hard spray.  When I arrived at the eastern shore I saw three bears in the the white-capped waves near where the the lake empties into the river.  The bears bobbed up and down in the waves, the surrounding mountains were partially enveloped in mist and clouds, and the wind and spray blew hard against my face.  It was magnificent and magical.  I was caught between reveling in the fact that it is still possible to have a moment like that to oneself and a strong desire to share the scene with someone who would appreciate its depth of power.

By the time my shift was done and I had rounded a couple of friends up and brought them there, the magnificence of the elements remained but bears were gone. The memory of them there, however, will be with me forever.

Some photos below.

Until next year,

Carl

    

The bunkhouse.

Valley Road Housing, the photo having been taken not far from the bunkhouse.  The blue conex (shipping container)  is used as a storage unit for personal gear for staff (bicycles, etc.).  I don’t think the area will ever have the same charm as the old housing on Park Avenue in camp, but I hope that time and the removal of the 

conexes will improve things.

The view of the road to camp from roughly the area where the bear ran

at me in the early morning.

All of my day’s gear, staged for the morning commute to camp.  Except 

for a few bear management specific items (the sticks, rangefinder, etc.)

much of the park staff carry a similar load when heading out for a workday 

across the river.

Brooks Lake and the elements, taken on my return with friends after seeing the bears in the waves.

An air charter pilot pulling his anchor from the beach, taken just before I got in the boat to return home.

A couple of shots of loading the Palayaq and the return trip across Naknek Lake.  As always, mixed feelings

of sadness at leaving and anticipation of being home with Susan.

Photo credit:   NPS / Carl Ramm