Readers’ wildlife photos

We have two sets of photos today from physicist and origami master Robert Lang. Robert’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. First, “bear camp,” and then two photos of scorpions.

Bear Camp

In August, we spent a few days at a camp in Chinitna Bay, part of Lake Clark National Park in southwest Alaska (across the Cook Inlet from Homer, Alaska). There we got to watch bears feeding on sedges along the river that runs into the bay, attempting to catch salmon when the river was shallow at low tide, and clamming on the mud flats in the Bay. Though it was perhaps not as spectacular as the bears that congregate at the famous Brooks River falls, we still saw plenty of bears, and the vast open spaces of Alaska made for a stunning background.

Bears weren’t the only wildlife we saw. On the way there, we saw this juvenile Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) trying out his wings on a cell phone tower in the town of Homer (our jumping-off point for the final puddle-jumper flight to camp).

Once we got to Chinitna Bay, we regularly saw adults, though usually at a distance, and heard them more often than we saw them:

An amusing thing about bald eagle calls: in the movies, when they show bald eagles to establish “the wild outdoors” for a scene, they’ll often play the call of a red-tailed hawk, because an eagle’s actual call is a seagull-like chittering that seems incongruous with their majestic appearance.

During the trip, we also took a short boat ride on the bay that showed a few interesting waterfowl. First, a Black Oystercatcher (Haematopus bachmani):

This bird should be cancelled, of course.

And we saw a few Tufted Puffins (Fratercula cirrhata), including this greedy fellow:

What I wonder is, did it catch all five fish at once, or one at a time?

Another on-the-water sighting was a sea otter (Enhydra lutris). This one told us “I once caught a fish that was THIS BIG.”

The camp we stayed at was surrounded by an electrified fence, which sounds like a nice, secure barrier, but it was low enough that humans could easily step over it.( I suppose, though, that bears have a shorter inseam than humans.) It was no barrier at all for the resident family of red foxes (Vulpes vulpes), whose kits scampered all over the camp, wrestling each other and playing in the grass.

But enough with the small critters; let’s get to the main event. The Alaskan brown bears (Ursus arctos) were all over the place. We kept to a respectful distance, of course; they knew we were there, but in this area and season, food was plentiful, and they mostly ignored us in favor of sedges, clams, and salmon.

This time of year, the males had mostly headed to the high country, so most of the bears we saw were females, usually with cubs.

The cubs ran around and played and then periodically stopped to get drinks from Mom:

They mostly grazed in the sedge meadows to either side of the river, but at low tide would go into the river to hunt for salmon that were making their way upstream in the shallow water. The bears would stand up, looking for ripples in the surface:

And then when they saw something, make a mad dash for it:

Most attempts ended in failure, but occasionally, they got one. (Too far away to get a good photo, though.)

We sometimes got to a viewing site by driving along the beach. Our vehicle left tracks in the sand, but we weren’t the only ones doing so.

And lagniappe on scorpions:

 I know you sometimes show a batch of onesie-twosies in the Reader’s Wildlife Photos, so I’ll pass on two photos from a recent night hike on the trail behind my studio in Altadena. I took my UV flashlight to spot scorpions, which fluoresce green in UV light. So here’s one (unknown species, I would welcome expert ID). First photo is in UV, second photo is the same one with camera flash. For scale, it’s about 2” long.

There are some theories about why they glow (see, e.g., here). I can’t readily evaluate the strength of the argument, but it sure makes it easy to spot them!