Author: myip2014

Some of our group had done a three-day pre-trip watching whales and orcas, but we had not. However our guide, Mark Carwardine, is one of the world’s leading marine mammal experts, so you could be sure he would magic up some orcas for us, and he did. In the pair above, the male has the very tall dorsal fin (at six feet, it is the tallest of any cetacean) , and the females and juveniles have shorter ones. Here is a another male:

Orcas, Orcinus orca, also called Killer Whales, are actually the largest members of the dolphin family. We mostly saw them either blowing in the distance

disappearing beneath the surface leaving a ghostly footprint behind, like these three:

or cruising around seemingly lackadaisically:

:

But they are faster than they appear: look at these bow waves:

There are three ecotypes in British Columbia: Residents, Transients, and Offshore Orcas. They eat different foods, use different hunting techniques, have different acoustic dialects, different shaped dorsal fins and saddle patches behind their dorsal fins, (see below), and do not appear to interbreed.

It may be that they are gradually evolving into distinct species. I highly recommend this if you’d like to know more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/killer-whales-are-speciating-right-in-front-of-us/

These are all Transient or Bigg’s Killer Whales. The name transient is misleading: it is now recognized that they too often stay in one area, but they move in smallish groups of 3-7 immediate family members, led by a matriarch. Any males in the group are likely to be her sons. A second difference between them and other orcas is that they eat only marine mammals, not fish or sharks.

From time to time these groups, or pods, join forces with others in super-pods, where they socialize and breed, but we saw only small groups.

My second-favorite encounter was with this trio, as they swam through glassy dark water making those sculpted bow waves:

but top marks go to a group earlier that morning which included this delightful baby, making his own miniature bow wave:

PS This is Mark’s latest book:

2. Fishing

Knight’s Inlet Lodge is located close to a salmon spawning channel, and a river, and they have built viewing stands to which the bears are now accustomed.

For about two months you can see them fishing here, but then the lodge closes because the weather gets too bad to fly in and out. We were the last guests of the season.

The bears wander down the spawning channel, watching out for fish:

At this time of year the species of salmon is the Pink Salmon, and the fish don’t seem to jump much. Instead, the bears dive in headfirst and fling themselves on top of them.

Missed.

It all looks a bit haphazard, rather than skillful, although I admit two of these three bears are inexperienced yearling cubs, with their mother:

In the deeper parts, they walk slowly on their hind legs scanning for a passing fish.

They will look underwater, too:

These shots show a bear fishing at dawn,

then one second later the moment of catch,

two more seconds to get a good grip,

and finally settling down for a meal:

They may eat in full view,

or retreat to the bushes.

The next shot is a grizzly near Spirit Bear Lodge, eating dead salmon that have already spawned:

If they are healthy and fat, they are picky eaters. They dissect the salmon, and the parts highest in fats and nutrition: the skin, the brain, and the roe (eggs). They leave most of the flesh, the parts we humans like to eat! Here is one eating, and what he left behind:

They often remind me of dogs, posing nicely for the camera,

or having a good shake

PS There is a side effect of the grizzlies’ taste for the roe, because they may then also inadvertently eat parts of the intestines. Salmon carry tapeworms, and these can get passed to the bears. There’s a photo which I’ve put at the very end so a squeamish reader can easily skip it. The tapeworm Diphyllobothrium latum can also transfer to humans who eat raw freshwater fish, and indeed I once had it (symptom free, and easily treated). Not recommended as a weight loss strategy.

The spirit bears were a one-day wonder. But grizzlies we saw virtually every day, in both locations. And they were busy getting fat for hibernation.

1. Foraging

In the fall, grizzlies are committed to eating. They do nothing else. This period, known as hyperphagia, has the goal of building up fat stores for the long hibernation to come. On Knights Inlet, they head for the estuary, seen here from our float plane:

and from our skiff:

This is where the bears come to gorge. From our small tippy open boats (not the ideal platforms for taking photos) they appear to us first as rather nondescript distant brown blobs:

The sedge grasslands are full of succulent roots rich in sugars and starches, so they put their butts in the air, their heads down, dig, and munch. They remind me of cows, or perhaps hippos.

One of their favorites is Rice Root, desired for its tiny white tuber the size of my little finger nail that tastes rather like jicama (I tried it!), though it is actually related to Fritillaria.

God knows how many they eat each day, but judging by their bellies it is quite a lot.

They dig away, rarely raising their heads, and thus thwarting most attempts at photography.

I did discover one technique for getting them to raise their heads. Lower my camera, and sure as God made little green apples, up come their heads. Every now and again, the stars aligned and I got a shot. This is Flora, the mother (right) and Fauna a 3-year old cub, left. More on them another time.

They’re so immersed in digging that they look up only briefly even when another boatload of photographers passes close behind them:

Here is a short video of them hard at work, first the cub then the mother:

There is apparently some mother-daughter friction vying for the best spot:

But the cub digs on, oblivious:

PS: They eat a range of plants. Here are some favorites:

In the mist, humpbacks are calm and peaceful.

But..

In a few parts of the world, including South-eastern Alaska and ‘our’ part of British Columbia, humpbacks have developed a feeding technique called bubble-net feeding. It is a behavior they learn from each other and pass on within their own community. It can involve up to 20 whales, but we saw small groups of two or three doing this, regularly, right off Spirit Bear Lodge:

Although we are close to shore, the water is about 300 feet deep. The first sign is an easy-to-miss faint ring of bubbles, 3 – 30 meters wide, sometimes also signaled by low-flying expectant gulls. (In the photo below the righthand portion of the circle is out of shot. )

The bubbles are created by the whales well below the surface surrounding the fish, and swimming upward in a spiral blowing bubbles, which apparently creates a barrier net that the herring don’t cross, for reasons that are unclear. Once they have the fish trapped, the whales burst upwards, together, gulping gigantic mouthfuls of fish and seawater.

There are three whales in this photo, all with their mouths wide open. Look carefully. (1) Left, facing left, lower jaw in the water, upper jaw vertical. (2) Centre, upper jaw with pink palate facing us at 45 degrees, lower jaw in water pointing towards us. (3) Right, whale on its side in the water facing left, with underside of lower jaw displaying the ventral folds.

These folds expand to hold a huge volume of water and fish, mostly below the waterline in this next photo.

Once the whale has a mouthful, up to 15,000 gallons worth, it closes its mouth

The water then spills out through the baleen plates, leaving the fish inside:

This all happens fast, and usually I was looking the other way when they erupted from the depths. The whole thing was 7 seconds from bubble circle to a calm ocean and scavenging seagulls again:

It can be very dramatic: behind this group is a stunned kayaker:

In closeup the baleen fringes surrounding the pink palate are quite visible. They are 2-3 feet long, and made of keratin.

Here you can see how they work as filters:

As the whales sink beneath the surface, the ever-hopeful gulls swoop in:

This feeding behavior goes on only during the summer and fall months when the whales gorge on the rich cold-water fish stocks. They build up body fat for their migration south to their winter breeding grounds in Mexico or Hawaii.

We went everywhere by boat on this trip, and on almost every outing we saw humpbacks. This is the first of two posts, setting the scene for the climax in Part 2!

One day was devoted to heading down Knight’s Inlet towards the ocean. As luck would have it, there was thick fog, almost whiteout, which didn’t really lift till after 1pm. It was beautiful in its own way:

We could hear humpbacks blowing around us. Usually we glimpsed just a tantalizing bit of a humpback, like this tail fluke

or just the dorsal fin disappearing into the mist, under a cloud of gulls:

or more excitingly a head:

Even when the fog lifted, it would be just a sliver of back, and a wraithly blow enshrouding another gull:

Sometimes there were two, the dorsal fin and humped back of one in mid-dive (how it got its name); and the final tail flourish of another at the end of its dive:

Individuals can be identified by their tail fin. I sent this photo in to the Happy Whale database, and they ID’ed it as Spectrum, aka BCY0944, first identified in 2004. He/she honeymoons in Hawaii, where he/she was sighted off Maui in 2019, and(update!) off Maui in 2025. That’s a 5400 mile round trip. https://happywhale.com/individual/68229;enc=321622

Occasionally, you see an entire whale, but obviously not when you are pointing your camera that way and have it in focus. (Mark Carwardine will have sharp beautifully lit shots of this behavior, but this is my blog, so you are stuck with my fuzzy ones.) For unknown reasons , humpbacks breach, the name for an explosive jump right out of the water, with no warning, taking a brief two seconds till it has disappeared once more:

In relative slow motion they backflop down, one pectoral fin raised skywards in a Roman valedictory wave:

You can just discern the white underside of that same pectoral fin amidst the plumes of spray below:

Adult humpbacks are up to 17 m (56 ft) long, or 1.5 double-decker buses, and weigh up to 44 US tons (40,000 Kg) , so the ensuing splash is quite magnificent.

This jump consumed as much energy as a 60Kg human uses to run a marathon.

There is an excellent discussion of breach behavior here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7065906/

in which the authors report that Segre et al. (2020) call a breach the “most expensive burst maneuver” in all of nature, pushing the boundaries of muscular performance and providing an honest signal of a whale’s general health. That would send an important signal to surrounding males, and might make the energy expenditure worthwhile.

PS Humpbacks are, on the whole, a conservation success story. The US has now removed 9 of the 14 sub-populations from the endangered species list, including the ones like Spectrum that breed in Hawaii. But 5 sub-populations are still on the list, and categorized as threatened because their numbers are still low. This includes the ones that breed in Mexico, where some of the ones we saw most likely go. On the bright side, at least some go to Hawaii! And all humpbacks are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the international ban on commercial whaling.

PPS Next time, bubble-netting.

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.

It was a rather quiet summer and fall, wildlife-wise, in Maine, and anyway I had an abundance of Pantanal things to show you, but now I am back at base camp, and I thought I’d dig out some favorite photos from the last few months at home before telling you about my most recent trip… to see bears!

Most of these photos don’t come with any particular story, they are just for you to enjoy.

Woodpeckers worldwide just ooze character, and the Pantanal has a range of species. I already showed you a Campo Flicker. But how about this Cream-backed Woodpecker, Campephilus leucopogon, a dead ringer for Woody the Woodpecker of cartoon fame:

It refused to come out of its nesthole, but in the second photo you can admire its crest, and just glimpse its white back:

Much more discreetly colored is the Pale-crested Woodpecker, Celeus lugubris, feeding deep in the trees:

She is a female; the male has a red cheek patch.

And conveniently out in the open, the boringly named White Woodpecker, Melanerpes candidus, gives us a beady eye:

It takes me happy to tell you that none of these is thought to be endangered.

PS I mistyped ‘happy’ in the last sentence, and my spellchecker serendipitously autocorrected so it read “It makes me hoopoe to tell you”, which seemed appropriate.

PPS This is my last post from the Pantanal. It’s not that there is not even more to show you, but it feels like time to move on, at least for now!

The star mammals are of course jaguars and tapirs, but there are other mammals to be seen too. At dusk, we often saw small delicate crab-eating foxes, Cerdocyon thous, usually in pairs:

They do not immediately run off, so we got a good look:

As their name suggests, they eat crabs, but also small mammals, amphibians, fruit, pretty much anything, including kitchen scraps from lodges. I found them rather charming.

The most ubiquitous and laughable mammals are the capybaras, Hydrochaeris hydrochaeris, although we saw far more of them ten years ago in the Northern Pantanal than we did in the south. They are like giant guineapig/beaver crosses, and are the world’s largest rodents.. This mother and baby hung out near Caiman Lodge.

The guides had named the baby Bean.

An adult male can weigh 50Kg, and makes a good meal for a caiman. The dock at the lodge is a pretty safe space:

They are vegetarian, and eat water plants especially. An egret is standing on the submerged shoulders of this one:

A family group were grazing in the shallows, and some unseen predator, almost certainly a caiman, made a charge from the left. Look carefully and you can glimpse two tiny babies in front of the leaping adult’s back, peering out through the water hyacinths as the adults scatter:

They have a large scent gland bump between their eyes:

and they rub this against the lower branches of trees to mark their territory:

Finally, the Coati, Nasua nasua, a relative of the raccoon, and also an omnivore. We saw solitary males on three occasions, but only briefly. This one was on the far side of the river, and stayed visible for long enough to photograph :

On our previous trip, we saw large groups of females and youngsters, like this, often with their tails in the air:

The Pantanal would be a good place to be a pirate: a big choice of macaws, parrots and parakeets to carry on your shoulder. That very desirability is, of course, why the pet trade poses such a threat to some of these birds. Here, in no particular order, is a gallery of the ones I managed to photograph:

At first my overactive imagination thought that this one was using a tool, but disappointingly it was just chewing on a grassy seedhead.

and just underneath it on the same fencepost was a Campo Flicker, a ground-feeding woodpecker:

Flashes of color in every tree.