Of Bears

One of my goals for my time in Sitka was to find and study bear sign. While there are a few things I was hoping to see (without much expectation) that I didn't, I have to consider my goal to have been smashingly met.

This post is intended to be an overview of my bear experiences, though I plan to tell my most interesting bear story from the trip as well as document some of the other things I saw and did in later posts. At some point (hopefully in the near future) I will likely document my bear experiences in even more detail on my tracking website.

I won't list everything that I saw but some of the highlights were finding several rubbing trees, much feeding sign and scat and trailing a bear and cubs for quite a way through an alpine meadow. I sometimes wondered about the wisdom of the last, but I think I was pretty safe since the trail was at least hours old and I wasn't exactly being quiet as I was going along.

The sign that was generally the most interesting to me were the things that I was least certain about. It's hard to mistake bear scat or hotfoot trails for anything else, but a trail of pushed down vegetation through a meadow? So I tried to be sceptical of such things and look for supporting evidence even when I couldn't think of anything else that would have been likely to make the sign (What else would have dug so much dirt from around a tree pretty far back in the woods from an official trail? On the other hand, why would a bear make such diggings?) And when I looked for supporting evidence I found it, which helps make me feel a bit more confident in my tracking deduction skills.

Hear is some bear scat with blueberries, cow parsnip seeds and other vegetation. Most of the scat I saw was almost entirely grassy, the exceptions were this one and one large bunch that was predominantly filled with deer hair.



This was the biggest sign tree we saw. Matthew is pointing at some bite marks on the tree, though I think there are some markings higher up than that as well. For reference, he is a little over six feet tall.



Claw marks on the same tree. Though I don't include a picture here, I found several small bunches of hair caught in various places on the tree as well.



Brown Bear sometimes wear in trails where they step in the same spot over and over again. We have been calling them hotfoot trails, though I'm not sure how commonly used that term is. My brother said someone told him that they saw a bear making such a trail intentionally by rubbing down each step as they went. Perhaps it is a scent marking behavior? This trail has been there for several years at least and went on for over 500 feet with a few different rubbing trees along its side.