I Spent 30 Days With Bears In Remote Alaska. It Didn’t Go As Planned
Welcome back, guys. And if you’re new here, welcome. My name’s Jake. I film nature shows for TV. And recently, I started this channel as a way of sharing wildlife stories with you all in a format that’s just a little bit more personal. So, for this film, I traveled to a remote part of Alaska with the goal of filming brown bears fishing for salmon.
The density of bears here is really unlike anywhere else in the world, and watching them sprint through the water after fish is a behavior that never gets old to me. I’ve been here a few times before filming other nature shows, but this time I wanted to come back on my own time and make something for you all. This really may be my favorite place on Earth, and I think you’ll see why.
Alaska’s coast feels wild in a way that I’ve just not experienced anywhere else. There’s just nothing like the sense of scale you get when you’re up in the air like this. I mean, you know that Alaska is big, but until you see it from this perspective, you can’t really can’t begin to comprehend it.
I think it’s partly the giant scale of the place that just makes you feel so small. And it’s surrounded by such rugged and extreme terrain that the sheer inaccessibility of it has kept much of it from being developed. There are no roads here, and when the place I am headed is only accessible by boat or bush plane, I know that I’m off to a good start.
Where the rivers meet the ocean, this incredible sanctuary of coastal meadows and tidal flats has created. This is the ideal habitat for brown bears. I had about a month here and while the goal was to film bears fishing for salmon, the timing of the tr.i.p meant that I stood a chance of catching the arrival of brand new bear cubs, which is what we call spring cubs.
And we started right on track because the afternoon we landed, the very first mother and spring cubs of the season showed up in the meadow. You can see her. She’s right there. Those little cubs are pretty hard to see in the gra.ss. She’s definitely a little jumpy right now. She keeps looking up a lot. She’s just been basically chased around by a lot of a lot of different bears. I think she may just be kind of on edge from that.
So the worst thing we can do right now is scare her and push her away because then we’re not going to be building any trust with her. And so it’s better just to kind of take it slow and let her feel comfortable with us and then, you know, eventually hopefully she will feel comfortable enough to come approach us or let us kind of get in position where we can get more usable sh0ts. So, for now, it’s just a waiting game.
As we sat with her, other bears started to arrive in the meadow. It looks like she’s getting kind of nervous. She’s bringing the cubs right to us. Yeah, I think she must feel safer closer to us as opposed to those other bears. I can’t believe this is just day one. Being this close is pretty special. Oh, look at this guy. That’s a big male.
Yeah, she doesn’t like him. She’s going to take the cubs into the woods. Yep, there she goes. Finding her on day one felt like a huge win and a great start to the tr.i.p. She seemed really relaxed with us, which made me feel pretty optimistic about filming her going forward. And you just come away with so much respect for a mother bear.
When you watch her like that, those cubs are just so vulnerable and she can never let her guard down. I mean, she’s constantly looking left and right, raising her head and sniffing the air. Raising bear cubs is a very difficult task, especially in a place like this. Most of my time here I plan to spend with bears fishing out in the tidal flats, but the salmon aren’t here yet, so many bears are a bit closer to shore, where it transitions into sedge meadows. This is where I had the mom and spring cubs on day one. But even further
inland is the forest. The bears spend at least half their time here. All those lines leading into the trees are bear trails. And there’s one behavior I really want to film in there. I think the focus for today is going to be setting up the camera traps in the forest. I want to focus on these rub trees. And that behavior is really cool.
You know, it’s when they they’ll stand up and kind of scratch their back on it and rub back and forth. Out there in the open it’s really easy for me to be with them and film them in person. In the forest, it’s a totally different story. That’s why these camera traps are just going to be a lot safer way to film some of this forest behavior. So, we have selected our camera trap target. It’s this rub tree here.
It’s just coated in bear fur along the whole thing. And it’s kind of it’s situated here on an intersection of at least two different trails. Okay, here we go. Going to start the camera trap install. We’ve got a group of four people, which is super helpful because if I was in there alone, it would be pretty sketchy because I’m going to be really focused looking on the ground and setting up the cameras and wouldn’t have a ton of spatial awareness. So, this way I’ll have a few people watching my back and a few extra hands.
So, this is going to be the main wide angle sh0t of the tree. So, the idea is you’ll just be looking up at the bear as they stand up and scratch their back. And it should make the bear feel really big, right? It’s just like towering above you. What’s really important here is just to make sure that I tilt the camera up high enough so I don’t cut off their head. A 20 mill should be right for that. Yeah. Wow.
That’s a cool That’s a cool sh0t. Getting the top of my hand. Yeah. I’ve got an 85 mil here. And it’d be nice to get a closeup of something. I’m thinking maybe I’m going to go actually for their feet as they’re kind of they’re going to be kind of swaying back and forth as they’re rubbing their back. Yeah. What I’m having trouble gaging is how far forward their feet will be from the trunk, you know. Yeah.
Considering the size of their back and rump, they’re going to be a little bit far. See, that’s very helpful. Okay. Yeah. And I’m I’m going to use your feet to focus. All right. That’s good. Thanks, Stephen. This camera is ready to go. All right, so this one on the ground is kind of like this drop cam sh0t looking up at the bears as they walk down the trail. Going like this. Be bigger than me, though.
Now, the real tricky install is going to be this tree camera. We’re going to try to get a camera up here facing straight down looking at their head as they’re kind of scratching their head. Yeah, that’ll be plenty tall. We’re just trying to gage how high to put this camera now. Like here directly in line with the most fur, right? Yep. So like that’s right here. Okay.
When the bear comes and scratches its back, hopefully it leans its head up and looks up at the camera like that. This wide sh0t here, it’s kind of just backed off. It’s It’s like a little window in the trees here. And this will just give me like a wide sh0t where we can see them approaching the tree either from the left or the right.
And you get just a sense of place with that one. And this thing is like a motion sensor. When a bear comes in and moves, it’ll turn the cameras on or keep them recording. Okay, we’ll turn this sensor on here. Okay. And as soon as we come out of the woods there, leaving the traps, there’s a bear right there. You know, I set up for this kind of behavior in the Yellowstone ecosystem, and it’s just the density is totally different.
So, you might get one bear every two weeks that comes by and rubs on a tree. So, the opportunity to try to get that behavior here where you have, I don’t know, 30 bears in all in the same meadow at a time, you just have infinitely more opportunities to get that stuff. So, it’s pretty cool. The high concentration of bears is really what makes this place special.
One evening in 2020, biologists counted 289 bears from the air between here and a neighboring bay. Since their food is so localized and abundant on the coast, bears have learned to coexist here in densities unlike anywhere else. For the most part, they do so peacefully, and they respect each other’s space. But it’s not always without conflict.
As a filmmaker, I’m always drawn to capturing those interactions between them. Whether that’s affection or aggression, those tend to be the moments that are most interesting to me. And obviously, the best chances of interactions is with a mother and her cubs. But the mother that we started off with on day one had been incredibly elusive.
And so other than that, it’s actually quite rare to see interactions between adult bears, especially in their interior ranges like Yellowstone where I live. They mostly avoid each other. But what’s interesting about bears living in such a high density here, is that the chances of seeing one of those moments are a lot higher.
One afternoon, I was sitting with this male and he directly approached a smaller male. And I really had no idea what was going to happen. Wow. Oh, they must know each other. You can see the size difference really well from this this perspective. It’s like that bigger one wants something, but he just doesn’t want to force it. I mean, I think they’re both males, but it just it looks like courting behavior to me.
It’s almost like he’s building trust with the other bear. Okay, I guess he just wants to play. It’s so playful. Yeah, he’s being submissive intentionally. I mean, this really turned out to be something special we didn’t expect. I’m always so curious about the relationships between different bears here.
I mean, living in this density, many of them have probably known each other their entire lives. My guess is that these two were brothers, but we’ll probably never know. It definitely seems like there was some kind of history there between them. So, for me, experiencing that was a real highlight, and it helped kind of make up for the disappointment I was feeling of just not seeing our mother and cubs again. And I still had really high hopes for the salmon run.
After a couple weeks, there was a clear shift in the bear’s routine. They were now spending much of their time by the channels out in the flats and less in the sedge. By this time last year, they were feasting on salmon. And it’s like they expect the fish to arrive now any day. And so for hours they would just sit and wait.
So, I figured I would set up on the bank and do the same. Currently, what’s happening is the salmon that are running are kind of staging right here in the flat. So, just behind me on the system here. And when the tide goes out, some of these little sand bars and channels are more exposed. So, we’ll set up somewhere in here and just kind of wait and see who comes over.
Like at the moment there’s three or four bears back here just kind of in the sedge and stuff grazing. So it seems to be a good spot. There seems to be a lot of bear activity here right now. Oh, there’s one running. Caught a salmon. Cool. That’s the first we’ve seen. That sound of splashing caught the attention of every bear in the area, and bears were showing up from every direction.
You could just feel the excitement in the air. This is what we had all been waiting for. Then another time, I saw a bear with a fish, and a bigger bear immediately charged in to steal it. There seemed to be very few salmon and so tension between bears was high. We all kept waiting but things didn’t improve.
Occasionally, a bear would sprint through the water. But they never came up with a fish. And I sat for hours day after day and I never filmed another bear with a salmon.
This was definitely not what I or the bears were hoping for. The salmon run this year seemed to be a dud. Sometimes that’s how it goes. You don’t always get to film what you set out for. Alaska Game & Fish did report very low salmon numbers in that drainage this year, which tracks with what I saw on the field. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why.
There’s a lot of factors that can contribute to it, but watching this play out, you’re just reminded of how important salmon are for these ecosystems. Last year, there was actually a really solid run here, and I’m hoping that next year will be the same. But it definitely does not make this one any less disappointing. Even though they were having very little success, most of the bears were still out there trying.
And that distraction actually created a safe space in the meadow for the mother with her little spring cubs. Our mom and two cubs is actually out in the sedge and she’s actually pretty far away from the tree line. I’d say this is the farthest that we’ve seen her from the trees, which is just an indication that she’s probably feeling more relaxed today.
I think that maybe some of those bears that she was more nervous about are preoccupied out there and she can relax a little bit more in here. And so it’s just it’s encouraging to see that she’s far away from the forest. She’s comfortable. She’s relaxed. So we’re going to try to go out there and get in position to film her. It was hard to shake off the disappointment of the salmon run, but it did feel nice to have a moment with this family again before I left.
And I still had one last hope. The camera traps had been in the woods now for over a month. So, we’re just easing into the woods here to make sure we don’t bump a bear. The first thing I look for is just to really to see if all the cameras are still standing and the sensors are still in place, which everything looks pretty much untouched.
It looks like it was when I left it, which leaves me with mixed feelings. Part of me would like to see it trashed because then you know at least something has been here. But best case scenario, the bears were here, they rubbed on the tree, and they left everything alone. So, we’ll find out here in just a second. Man, this is so fun. It never gets old checking camera traps.
Many of the bears that came through I recognized from out in the meadow or the flats. And so it was really cool to see them in a different environment. I looked at a few different rub trees, but this one stood out to me because it sat on the confluence of four different bear trails, and it was loaded with bear fur when I found it.
These trees are kind of like bull3tin boards in the woods. The bears will gather information from each other here. And then sometimes they leave their own message behind. It’s also something that they just really seem to enjoy.
As much as you want to control the outcome, filming wildlife in wild places means that there will always be much that you can’t control. This tr.i.p was a reminder of that for me. But I was still leaving with a full heart. It was time to head home, but I had one last surprise.
Besides the bears, there’s one feature that really defines this place. The bay sits at the foot of a towering active volcano. Mount Illiamna. And today, since the weather was unusually calm on our flight home, our pilot thought we could circle it until we reached the summit and could see the steam vents. Here we go. We’re about to fly through the steam vent.
Whoa That was pretty cool. I’ve been looking up at this mountain for 3 years every time I’ve been here and never had a chance to see it up close like that. Incredible. Hey guys, real quick. Thanks for joining me. I’ve got a lot of exciting plans for this channel coming up.
So, if you enjoyed that video, consider dropping a like or hitting that subscribe button. Or if you feel so inclined, you can even donate to this channel at the link up above. All of that support really means so much. So, thanks guys. I also just want to say a quick thank you to Brown Bear Bay. That’s who hosted me out here in Alaska.
If you guys are looking to experience brown bears in the wild, this is an awesome place to go. I have a link to them down in the descr.i.ption. Okay, until next time.
