Introduction

Each August, large concentrations of brown bears gather along the rivers and creeks in Katmai National Park in Alaska, waiting for the annual arrival of salmon from the coast. The salmon return to the rivers of their birth to spawn and die, enriching this ecosystem and providing critical sustenance for wildlife, such as bears.

I traveled to the Alaska Peninsula during this time (early August) when the migrating salmon appear in their vibrant red spawning colour with the desire to capture some dramatic interaction between predator and prey. Our tented camp was located on a beautiful lake close to the twin water courses of Moraine Creek and Funnel Creek where most bears congregate.

Brown Bears Fishing

To capture some of my images of bears hunting salmon from an aerial perspective required a two hour walk from our camp to a cliff overlooking one of the pools that salmon are known to frequent. One afternoon I caught sight of a large number of salmon swimming in the pool from atop the cliff. I positioned myself at the cliff’s edge to get a unique perspective looking down on the action below and used a polarizing filter to cut any glare from the water’s surface, highlighting the salmon’s striking red hue. Several brown bears approached the salmon pool with varying tactics to capture a fish, some nonchalantly swimming toward them and others actively diving.

For my award winning image ‘Splash’, as a hungry bear approached the water and suddenly burst toward the salmon, I used a fast shutter burst to freeze the moment when two nearby fish darted away in diagonals from the outstretched claws of the diving bear.

An Ecosystem Under Threat

The Bristol Bay salmon run is one of the world’s great annual wildlife migrations, however, it is currently under threat from proposed copper mining activities and warming waters caused by climate change influencing salmon movement. In their laying of eggs and the nutrients released in their decaying bodies, the salmon are critical parts of the ecosystem, and their loss would be a major ecological blow.

The images I captured of the fishing bears of Katmai represent the symbiosis between the salmon and the bears reliant on their annual arrival for food to carry them through the long Alaskan winter.