Bear Butts

This Blog Entry builds on the prior four entries.

Grizzle bears, the North American brown bear, is exciting to see and photograph in the wilds of Alaska. They are herbivores. Grizzlies who live in areas where meat or fish can be a large portion of their diet, tend to be larger. Male can be up to 750 lbs. and females 400 lbs. Those who live in areas were meat and fish are a small part of their diet are smaller by as much as one-third. Still, those smaller Grizzles are no less dangerous.

Most of the streams that the Park Road crosses are fed by glaciers, and so, too full of glacial sediment to support fish. Grizzle bears in the area eat mainly root and wild berries (e.g., blue berries, cranberries, clump berries) that grow low across the tundra (see the photo below). Those same berry plants color the tundra red, blue, and purple in the Fall.

A Grizzle needs to consume huge amounts of wild berries to put on sufficient weight in preparation for hibernation. As a result, Grizzly bears seen along the Park Road in Denali National Park most likely will have their heads down in berry bushes, even as they move across the tundra. The bottom line for those seeking to capture a photo of the iconic bears is to be very careful and very patient. Don’t surprise a Grizzle and be prepared to get a large number of photos of bear profiles and bear butts, as per the examples immediately below.