Blogs
It's 5:30 am, I slowly wake up to branches cracking near my tent. I thought it might be a Douglas squirrel nearby eating some salal berries, but the noise was a bit too loud for such a little creature. I pay closer attention to the noises and hear heavy breathing and some grunts... It had been a while since we had seen black bears on the island and from my two weeks of observing black bears, I knew they were a little more clumsy. I recall a few nights before when I thought I had seen a grizzly bear on the beach, but my friends didn't believe me. For the next half hour, I laid in my sleeping bag ready to get out of my tent with my bear spray in case the potential grizzly was interested in getting in. At around 6:30 am, I wake up again from a short nap and listen for a few minutes to make sure the coast was clear. After only hearing the waves splashing on the rocks, I get out of my tent to go make breakfast and tell my friends about what happened. Later on my way to the outhouse, I peered at the beach, as I always did, and saw the grizzly bear flipping rocks to find crabs. Since I was far enough from him and he didn't notice me, I ran back to the cookshack to tell me friends to get their cameras (in my case, my phone and a pair of binoculars) and bear spray. We headed back to the beach as a group and took a few pictures of the bear; it was my first time seeing a grizzly bear.
During my internship, I spent 3 weeks on West Cracroft Island, British Columbia, with a group of employees from Cetus to study whales and orcas in the area. This island is uninhabited so there were lots of bears. Every morning when we hiked our 3km to the observation point named Eagle eye, we would count the number scats that the black bears would leave for us on the trail (it got up to 10!). By the end, I had seen 4 black bears including a mom and her cub and one slightly skinny grizzly bear. In all, it was great to be studying wildlife while living in the wild.
