Raising our Spirits

We have just returned from a wonderful trip to the coast of British Columbia to see bears. For the next few weeks I will share with you what we saw. For those who are interested in the details of exactly where we were, and who organized it, read the PS at the end.

I start with the Spirit Bear, for me the Holy Grail of the trip. Spirit Bears are properly called Kermode Bears (Ursus americanus kermodei).They are not albinos, but white Black Bears, just as yellow Labs are beige Black Labs. The Great Bear Rainforest has one particular bear population that harbors a recessive gene for this unusual coloration, and 10% of the cubs are born with creamy coats. Here is a female:

They are found mainly on the islands of Gribbell, Princess Royal, and Roderick, 500 miles north of Vancouver, and it is estimated there may be only about a hundred white ones in total. Which is why seeing one is nothing short of magical.

We had landed from a small Zodiac and were sitting on logs in the rain

when she emerged on the far bank of the river, about 75m away. (Chris described it as 1 1/2 Olympic swimming pools from us!)

Worth the wait:

She spent 25 minutes entertaining us, clearly aware of our presence, but not too bothered.

In October, they are fattening themselves up for hibernation and eating pretty much nothing but salmon, either live salmon swimming up river to spawn, or dead salmon whose life’s mission to procreate is now done. In this next set of photos she is fishing for Pink Salmon:

The dead ones are easy pickings, as you can see in this video:

The fish would get stuck under the banks and roots, so she poked around in the overhangs:

and looked deep into the water (or maybe at her own reflection?):

She probably weighed about 300lbs, in prime condition. Males can be much larger. Eventually she melted back into the forest,

but a couple of hours later, as we re-boarded our boat, she appeared on the rocky foreshore:

had a good scratch:

and settled down to watch us watching her.

The First Nations of this area are the Kitasoo/Xai’xais and they have many legends about these bears, some collected in a book entitled Feathers and Feastfires. The creator, Wee’get the Raven, “set an island aside to be the home of the White Bear People, then went among the black bears, and every tenth one he made white, and decreed that they would never leave the island for here they could live in peace forever.” Hunting them is prohibited.

PS I’m updating this post because I have just watched the Forests episode of David Attenborough’s and the BBC’s new Planet Earth III, which includes a wonderful sequence on “this forests’s rarest resident”, the spirit bear. Watch it if you can.

PPS We went with Wildlife Worldwide, https://www.wildlifeworldwide.com, accompanied by Chris Breen the company founder (left) and Mark Carwardine, a renowned naturalist and photographer of Last Chance to See Fame. An excellent double-act:

We stayed in two lodges, Knight’s Inlet Lodge (orange star at centre of map, a float plane ride from Campbell River,), and Spirit Bear Lodge (orange star in top left of map, a 90-min boat ride from Bella Bella,) Both lodges are wholly owned by the First Nations. The coast is a misty maze of forested granite-edged fjords, and the only way to get around is by boat. As a result we also saw humpbacks, orcas, and sea otters, as you will see.