Bears

It didn't take too long before we came upon these bear tracks on the beach. It appeared that there were a couple of different ages of tracks and they wandered up and down the beach quite a bit. We figured it (and pretty much everything else around) had probably been partaking of the abundant herring eggs on the beach.



It put its dirty feet up on this snowy log. This is the front right foot - unlike us, a bears largest toe is on the outside and smallest on the inside.

While there are only brown bears in the Sitka area, even if that weren't the case it is possible to tell that these are brown bear rather than black bear tracks. One thing to look for is that the toes are straighter in brown bears then in black. On the front foot, if you draw a straight line from the bottom of an outside toe across the top of the heel pad if the other outside toe falls at least half above the line then it is likely a brown bear, below and likely a black. On this track the toe would be completely above the line.



Another thing to look for is the claws. You can see here that the claws on the front feet are pretty long (good digging claws), whereas black bear claws tend to be much closer to the toes.