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My posts from British Columbia got very long (sorry!), so I kept having to stop myself adding even more. Now that you are recovered from festive eating, here is something that got left out.

This is a banana slug, Ariolimax columbianus, posed on my hand for scale; they can be up to 25cm (10 inches) long. In many areas they are bright yellow, hence their name, but this was largely black. The striated lower portion is its foot.

Slugs are lopsided. They have just a single lung on the right, and a single orifice for breathing, called a pneumostome on their right side of their mantle. (The dark mark above it is just skin coloration.)

They have four tentacles on their head. The top two (on the left in the photo below) are called eyestalks, and detect light or movement, and also smells. There is a light-sensitive spot on the end, visible on the lower tentacle. The bottom two (on the right in the photo) are for touch and taste. If they get damaged, the slug can grow new ones.

This image from Oregon State University shows the slug’s anatomy really clearly.

Slugs like the rainforest for a reason: they are at risk from dehydration, and so their body is covered in a fascinating (if disgusting) mucus that helps protect from this.

The mucus is neither a liquid nor a solid, but a sort of liquid crystal which can absorb (and store) up to 100 times its volume in water. Apart from its off-putting texture, it contains a chemical that has a numbing effect on predators. The local challenge is to kiss a banana slug, and your lips will then be numb for several hours. I considered it, but declined.

Thank you for reading my musings, and have a wonderful 2024.

Now I’ve shown you the giants of the Great Bear Rain Forest, here are a few extras. When you are sitting around waiting for bears or whales, there is lots of spare time when nothing much is happening, so you pay attention to the smaller stuff. Somehow birds seem an appropriate topic as I prepare my turkey stuffing…

Great Blue Herons stalk their prey in the estuary:

but they also benefit from the leavings of the bears. This one was scavenging in the river:

rather successfully:

Eagles too, despite their noble mien, are scavengers as much as hunters. At one point we had six in view loitering near a favorite grizzly fishing spot. Here is a close-up of a juvenile:

and here is what he/she will grow into:

A local favorite is the Stellar’s Jay, but I got only one good look, in deep shadow:

And an even smaller resident is the American Dipper, searching for tiny invertebrates in the river:

Finally, this gull, seen at low tide from our boat, bit off more than he could chew. We watched him for a good fifteen minutes while he stood motionless, the food apparently stuck in his gullet. It appears to be an octopus, or perhaps a starfish:

Bears are not the only ones stuffing themselves as winter arrives. Enjoy the holidays.

Sea otters, harbor seals, and sea lions are all in my same conceptual filing system as furry water-adapted mammals. Sea-otters were right at the top of animals I had never seen in the wild, and now I have, thanks to a remarkable conservation success story.

Here is a sea otter, Enhydra lutris,

They have the densest coat of any mammal, about 500,000 hairs per square cm, and the fur trade almost exterminated them; in 1911 their population was estimated at about 2000 worldwide. After strenuous protection efforts the world population has rebounded to some 120,000, but they are still considered endangered.

The IUCN says “Between 1969 and 1972, 89 Sea Otters were translocated from Alaska .. to the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where they established a healthy population. Sea Otter range expansion has continued and in 2008 it was documented that they have left Vancouver Island and moved into northern Queen Charlotte Strait and the adjacent British Columbia mainland coast and in some portions of the central British Columbia mainland coast. The most recent population estimate is 6,754 (Nichol et al.2015), representing around 7–8% of the global population. ”

They are the most endearing creatures, very social and famously playful:

They swim just as comfortably on their back as on their front, nonchalantly corkscrewing through the water:

And when they rest, they bask on their backs, toes in the air,

and they gather in cosy social groups, among the kelp forests that are their homes. How many can you find in this picture?

This one is feeding, I think, but I couldn’t see on what.

[My last post went out too soon, a result of an overenthusiastic keystroke, so I’ve delayed this a bit to give you time to breathe!].

In addition to Spirit bears and Grizzlies, our other goal on this trip was to see a properly black Black Bear, but although a few of the group glimpsed one, we didn’t. Still, those of you who read this regularly know I have them at home ! The temperate rainforest nonetheless showed us other mammals.

We saw several Black-tailed Deer:

It was the time of year when the males begin to fight for a mate, and so their antlers need to be in prime condition. When they are still growing, they are covered in velvet which contains blood vessels, and when growth is complete this velvet is rubbed off. Look closely at this guy:

The most striking thing is the color of his antlers. They are red and shiny, but this is temporary. When the velvet has just been shed, the antlers still retain a coating of blood, which will soon rub or wash off. At the base of the left-hand antler you can see greenery: he has been rubbing his antlers on trees or on the ground to get rid of the last vestiges of velvet.

A much smaller and shyer local resident is the Pacific Marten, Martes caurina, or perhaps an American Marten, Martes americana. Until recently, these were thought to be a single species, but now they are divided into a species native to the Pacific coast, and one spread throughout North America. Since they also interbreed, and they look very similar, I am not entirely sure which this is:

They are related to the European Pine Marten, Martes martes, but distinct. They are about two feet long, and weigh up to 3 lbs. They are predators, eating rodents, rabbits, and birds, but they particularly like voles, preferably three a day!

Pacific Martens face threats from habitat loss due to logging, and from interbreeding with the American Marten (which was introduced by the fur trade).

3. Family

[My last grizzly post.]

In the fall, one can see this year’s cubs, now around seven months old. At Knights Inlet, from a stand, we watched one mother and this spring’s cub cross the river:

The mother climbed on a log, and the cub rather tentatively followed her:

Changing her mind, the mother walked along the log:

and jumped off:

The cub was not at all sure about this:

but eventually he followed, scrambling to catch her up.

The guides told us that he was smaller than he should be at this time of year, so let’s hope he makes it through the winter.

The Spirit Bear Lodge area is also packed with grizzlies, largely on the mainland. If the grizzlies were to cross to the spirit bear islands they would be likely to outcompete them, so this is a case of separation being desirable. There are no viewing stands here, so we took the zodiac up a shallow river, and found this mother grizzly with two of this year’s cubs, moving along the river’s margin. The shore was steep, rocky, and thickly vegetated, so she was swimming (acting as a barrier between us and her cubs), but the cubs were doing a bit of each. The bears let zodiacs get relatively close; people on foot are much more threatening to them.

When they are wet they look like drowned rats,

but after a good shake their coiffures improve .

The cubs played on fallen logs:

And then they all found a shingle bank where they dug for molluscs:

until they strolled off across the strand:

These are the freshest grizzly tracks I have ever seen, or hope to see.

And with my cap, for scale:

Cubs usually leave their mother by the age of three, but no-one told Fauna, below. She apparently did leave around that age, but just like a human boomerang kid, she reappeared at her mother Flora’s side a few months later.

And Flora didn’t have the heart to chase her away. However, once she has another litter she will not tolerate Fauna any longer.

PS I recommend this website specifically about the grizzlies of British Columbia.

The passage below is taken from there:

Click to access grizzly_in_bc.pdf

“…one to four hairless cubs weighing only about 0.5 kg (1 lb.) are born in
the den in January or February. The mother nurses her cubs in the den until they all come out in late April or May.

Grizzly cubs usually stay with their mother and den with her for at least two years. During that time they are fiercely protected and learn where to find food as the seasons change and when, where and how to dig a winter den. Grizzly cubs also play a great deal. The period of dependence on the mother is relatively long compared to other mammals. This prepares the cubs for an independent life. In June of the third year, adult females usually breed again, and they chase the cubs, now quite large, off to become self-sufficient. … Sow Grizzly Bears don’t produce their first litter until they are about five or six years old or even older. Delayed sexual maturity, together with a three-or- more-year interval between litters, results in a low reproductive rate. The maximum life span of Grizzly Bears in the wild is more than 30 years. “

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.