Bear Safari

Each summer, we do excursions in the Canmore area to photograph the wildlife. The focus is bears but we do see many other animals and enjoy photographing them as well. We had an outing yesterday, Rolande and myself accompanied by our friend Tammy Howell, an enthusiastic wildlife photographer. We were very fortunate to see two grizzly bears and a black bear sow and cubs. Of course, we also saw many deer, some elk, some moose and a coyote.

In this blog, I’ll  limit the pictures to those of the bears we saw.

Our first sighting was along Highway 40 in the Highwood Pass area. Here, Tammy spotted a beautiful golden coloured grizzly, sometimes referred to as “blonde”.  Here’s one of many great shots taken by Tammy, my guest contributor for today.

Next is a similar shot that I took, a little earlier.

This bear was very accommodating, allowing us to watch and photograph him for over 20 minutes. He was actually very busy foraging along the side of the road. A grizzly’s diet is 70-80% plants and they eat almost constantly. A male can be up to 8-1/2 feet tall, stand 4 feet at the shoulder and weigh over 1000 pounds. Following are two more shots of this beautiful animal.

This particular bear was quite large, easily three feet at the shoulder. He didn’t stand erect for us, so it’s difficult to gauge his height and of course we didn’t make any attempt to weigh him.

While we were observing this same bear, a cyclist came by and actually spooked him a little. Here, he broke into a run and scooted into the brush. He soon re-emerged and continued to graze on the lush grass along the highway. The grass along the highway rights-of-way is much more exposed to rain and sunlight and consequently greener and more nutritious. It’s not surprising we find bears close to the roads.

We left golden bear and moved on to the Spray Lakes Road for our return to Canmore. Soon, the ever vigilant Rolande spotted another grizzly, a beautiful chocolate brown bear. He was somewhat distant from the road, grazing on the far side of a meadow. He was definitely bigger than the first grizzly and seemingly a little more shy. He didn’t stay around long to give us a lot of pictures and he didn’t really pose for us either.

A little later, eagle-eye Rolande spotted more bears, this time a black bear sow accompanied by two very young cubs. They were quite distant (not a bad thing) and they didn’t really pose for us either. They were often obscured by bushes and it was difficult to get really good shots of them. We watched the cubs play while Mom dined, very entertaining.

Here’s Mom offering us a brief glimpse before moving behind the sapling and dropping her head to eat.

Here she is with one of the cubs. This female black bear was considerably smaller than the two male grizzlies we saw earlier. A large male would be 6 feet tall, stand 3-1/2 ft. at the shoulder and weigh 600 pounds. A female is smaller.

It was fun to watch this cub mimic his Mom’s eating techniques. Here, both mother and cub are digging away for their next bite. Just part of the parenting process , lasting only one year. Cubs are generally born in April and spend their first summer and winter with the mother before separating in the following spring.

Stay with us throughout the summer if you enjoy these wildlife shots. We hope to do several more excursions, hopefully with comparable success.