Botanizing With Bears

Day 275: Uncle Walter may go waltzing with bears, but he's got nothing on Joe, Sharon and Crow who go botanizing with them. Yep, today my botany partners and I made our first excursion since the pandemic closed us down in March 2020. We spent a fantastic 11 hours searching slopes, ditches and bogs for the rare and unusual species found in Mount Rainier National Park and came home with hundreds of photos between us and two mystery plants which have so far eluded identification. I'll be focusing on those over the next few days, but my readers can expect a week or more of wildflower posts, and although all of them may not be of rarities, I hope to impart some bit of knowledge to you about each. As for Bear (Ursus americanus, black bear), he/she was stopped traffic on the Sunrise Road for the better part of twenty minutes while enjoying a leisurely lunch at the meadow smorgasbord.

A Six-Bear Day

Day 325: Well, this sets a personal record. Today, I saw six bears (SIX!) during a MeadoWatch hike on the Lakes Trail. SIX!!! There was a mid-sized adult of indeterminate sex, a sow with two cute little cinnamon cubs, a yearling, and this healthy, husky gentleman who was a bit closer than I would have liked, given his size and age. But there were visitors to protect, so I escorted two terrified young women past him, a dicey situation because it involved us disappearing behind a stand of trees for a minute and a half, then reappearing directly in his line of sight. I hoped he wouldn't think we were trying to sneak up on him. He gave us a reproachful glance and took a few steps toward the trail, but then resumed eating wildflowers. No wonder I was checking off the box for "herbivory" at so many of the target plots! My previous daily and/or yearly record for bear sightings might have been as many as three at once (probably a sow and cubs). So far this year, I've encountered nine.

Naches Loop Bear

Day 319: It's not just me. All across the Park, we're seeing more bears this year, although Paradise seems to be recording them in near-record numbers. This marks my third encounter for the summer, and definitely a more healthy specimen than the scrawny wretch I saw two weeks ago on the Lakes Trail. A party of half a dozen hikers had stopped at a respectable distance and alerted me to the bear's presence with loud voices (but not shouting). "There's a bear on your left! About fifty feet down!" At that moment, my view was blocked by trees, so I continued down the trail until I could spot the animal. Yep, there was a bear, contentedly munching what few blueberries it could find, doing bearish things and posing no particular threat to the humans in its territory. "Oh, hi, bear," I said (my customary reaction when I need to let a bear know it's sharing the trail with a human). Bear looked up briefly and then went right back to pulling blueberries off the bushes, but the hikers were somewhat agitated. "We wanted to wait until you got by it!" I hung around until the bear had moved out of sight and was no longer at risk of causing a less-experienced hiker to panic, not so much worried about the hikers it might encounter as I was about the poor bear who was just trying to have a decent meal without disturbance. Remember: you're in their world out there, so mind your manners and let them go about their business without interruption.

And Other Wildlife...

Day 272: Most of my bear sightings have been in the backcountry, and at least two of them were of the "up close and personal" nature, i.e., the bear was within 50' of me (in one case, only about 20'). I'm not complacent about bears, but my customary response to them is that I speak in a normal tone of voice, saying, "Bear...hey, bear! I need to use this trail. Would you mind moving over so I can come by?" Sometimes it takes several repetitions and maybe even a few steps forward before Bear notices me, but only once have I encountered aggressive behaviour, and that was from a motherless cub who was probably more curious about me than anything else. Cubby and I came to an agreement after a tense ten minutes, neither of us wanting to escalate the situation. Backcountry bear experiences aside, bears are attractive to any photographer, and thus it was that Team Biota started a bear jam on the Valley Road. We'd first glimpsed it (her, I believe) from the upper portion of the road, a tiny black dot moving among small trees deep in Paradise Valley. After she crossed the creek, we lost her in the brush, and then we hopped back in the car and drove down the road further to a viewpoint directly opposite. Sure enough, there she was, and this time within zoom range. We were somewhat sidetracked by the presence of marmots on the rocks immediately below us, more marmots than I have ever seen in one location. There must have been at least twenty, adults and young alike, sparring, kissing, loafing on any rock which afforded a flat surface. Below us, the bear moved into open meadow, offering a good photo op. While the four of us trained our cameras on Ms. Ursus, cars were pulling over behind us, filling the small pullout. A tour bus went past without stopping. Pretty soon, the parking area was full, the roadside lined with people, cameras ranging from cell phone to high-end, all taking pictures of the bear. She was a good 600' or more from us horizontally, another 150' vertically...a tiny black dot in most viewfinders. I thought of the visitor who told me he'd seen a polar bear at Lake Louise. He had a picture to prove it, too. He pulled out his iPhone and zoomed in on the white blur in the image. "That's a goat," I said. "No, it was too big. It was a polar bear," he insisted. I suggested that when he got home, he should email the photo to our wildlife biologist and gave him her address, you know, just for documentation's sake. To make a long story short, there were a lot of photos taken during the Tuesday bear jam, but most will simply show a black lump. I was zoomed to 74x for this one.