The bright purple Nootka lupine, another favorite bear food, is found along the banks of Great Bear Rainforest rivers and estuaries.
The bright purple Nootka lupine, another favorite bear food, is found along the banks of Great Bear Rainforest rivers and estuaries.
Summer
Ah, summer. In the Great Bear Rainforest it’s as changeable as the wind. In a good year the rain will let up somewhat, and there will be days—maybe even weeks—when the gray sky turns blue. In a bad year it will rain so hard you’d think someone had turned on a heavenly tap. It’s impossible to predict. It never gets really hot in the rainforest, but on warm, dry days in July and August you can wander around in shorts and a T-shirt and feel fine. Not only that, you can wander around in daylight from early morning to late at night. Because the Great Bear Rainforest is so far north, the midsummer sun rises before 4:00 AM and sets after 11:00 PM. And when it does get dark, it does so halfheartedly, as if the sky can’t make up its mind.
If you did wander around, you’d better watch your step because the rainforest is an unpredictable, even dangerous, place. There are no human-made trails in it the way there are in a park. It’s not a place where the roses are here and the tulips there. In the rainforest everything grows everywhere. There are no empty spaces. That’s because no matter what the space is like—smooth, rough, sandy or peaty—something will grow on it. And summer is when plants grow like crazy—so fast it seems as if you can watch them grow. It’s a time when even a family of bears may have to think twice about whether to zig or zag or turn around and go back the way they came.
In summer there are so many plants in the rainforest, and they grow so fast and dense, that no sooner do you break your way through a wall of salmonberry or salal bushes than they’ll close up behind you as if you’d never been there. Devil’s club, a plant with a cone-shaped cluster of flowers and painfully sharp spines, which is found only in Pacific rainforests like the Great Bear, grows so tall that even grizzlies have to look up to see the top of it. And summer is when it grows to devilish proportions.
Over 100 of the rivers in the Great Bear Rainforest are still untouched by logging and industry, and so provide some of the best bear habitat in the world.
Mother and cub, up to their shoulders in delicious sedges. This salt-water-tolerant plant can grow over two meters (six feet) tall and will be taller than even the largest bears by the end of summer.
And yet, if there is a time when life in the rainforest gets easy, it’s summer. With food of every kind so plentiful, finding it isn’t the hard slog it is during the rest of the year, especially in winter. We know bears sleep during the winter, but for other rainforest animals like wolves and deer, winter can be a desperate time as they search, often in vain, for a meal. Not in summer. When everything is tall and green and full of life, there’s always something for the forest’s plant eaters to chew on. And after a long, hard winter they often have a lot of chewing to do. Meat eaters, or carnivores, like wolves, also have more choice because there are more small animals around—animals like mice, voles and marmots, who spend winter hibernating underground.
Late May and early June are also when the bears of the Great Bear Rainforest mate. When they’re ready, males will secrete natural chemicals from their bodies into the sap of the “mark” trees for females to recognize and respond to. You could call it advertising, and what they’re advertising is themselves. The biggest, strongest, most powerful males get the greatest number of mates. Unlike some animals, such as eagles, who find one mate to share their lives with, male bears will mate with as many females as they can, both in a single season and throughout their lives. By doing this, they better their chances of ensuring that their genes will be carried into the future by cubs.
A tree-hugging bear rubs his scent into this Sitka spruce. These scent or “mark” trees are used by bears to keep tabs on each other in the rainforest. All a bear has to do is smell the tree and he or she can identify other bears who have also signed in there.
A mother grizzly and cub share a quiet moment together before they move down to the river to begin fishing for salmon.
By mid-June most female bears that already have cubs and therefore aren’t interested in mating will have done their best to find prime feeding spots. Among the places they like best are avalanche chutes. These are tracks along mountainsides where avalanches routinely fall, so there are few, if any, tall trees in them. This absence of trees means the sun reaches these chutes before it strikes anywhere else in the forest, so plants grow faster than in places where it’s shady. Unlike people, bears don’t need to be told to eat their greens, and many of their favorite greens grow in avalanche chutes. As well, these chutes may be close to the sea, so it’s easy for bears to get from them to the beach and all the delicious sea creatures that live along the shore. Chutes also provide perfect places to nap, which bears enjoy doing when it gets hot. These napping spots, which are usually no more than shallow beds dug in the ground, are high up, so when the bears wake they have a clear view of everything around them. That way they can hear anyone or anything that might be coming their way. This makes them feel safe. And it allows the bears to keep from tripping over each other in the same rainforest berry patch.
These two-year-old grizzly cubs will spend another full year with their mother before they set off to start their own families.
This five-year-old spirit bear lives on an island in the middle of the Great Bear Rainforest and each summer patiently awaits the return of pink salmon.
Speaking of berries, bears are nuts about them. They like nothing better than to plunk down in the middle of a thick bramble and chow on the juicy ripe berries that grow there. And summer is when berries are their sweetest and tastiest. Devil’s club berries, elderberries, twinberries, salmonberries, huckleberries, blueberries, thimbleberries, salal berries, gooseberries and saskatoons: if it’s a berry, a bear will eat it. When you’re as big as a bear, you have to eat all the time to maintain your size and strength, so bears can spend twenty out of every twenty-four hours doing nothing but stuffing their faces. You’ve probably heard the expression “hungry as a bear”; now you know where it comes from. What makes things tricky is that not everything’s ready to eat at the same time. Salmonberries ripen in June, thimbleberries in July, huckleberries in August and rosehips in September. So cubs have to watch their mothers closely to learn when to eat as well as what and how.
Bears also dig up the ground to get at roots, tubers and bulbs. But just as they do with berries, they eat different roots at different times. Why? Think of carrots. Baby ones may be sweet and tender when they start growing in spring, but if you wait till the end of summer when they’re full size, they’ll be that much bigger and more nourishing.
Bears also need protein, and while grizzlies are certainly strong enough to kill a deer, insects are much easier prey. For bears, the ants and termites they find when they overturn a log or tree stump are a feast. Because, don’t forget, turning over a log is no trouble for a bear. They can push a log over as easily as people can fall off one. Coastal bears also love beetle larvae, bees and wasps. After all, what are a few pesky stings to a grizzly? And like people, they like honey. It’s sweet, gooey and full of good stuff to grow on.
Sometimes mother bears want their cubs out of the way so they can go off and feed by themselves. But how and where do you store two or three young cubs safely for a few hours? Up a tree, that’s where. Imagine looking up and seeing a family of bear cubs, none of them bigger than a round-eared, long-snouted dog, staring back at you. And when their mother tells them to stay put, they stay put. Unlike human children, they won’t sneak back to the ground just to see if they can.
However, even though sending cubs up a tree is supposed to keep them safe, it can have the opposite effect. Hunters aren’t allowed to kill mother bears with cubs, but if the mother is seen to be alone while her cubs are up a tree, a hunter would have no way of knowing she has cubs. So he might go ahead and kill her anyway. This is one reason so many bear cubs are orphaned each year. And an orphaned bear cub can’t survive without his or her mother.
Meanwhile, at the seashore, rainforest bears never know when they’ll run across a beached gray whale or an elephant seal to take a bite out of. That’s why the beach is like a big banquet table for them. Except, unlike a lot of people, bears don’t care for sunbathing. Would you if you wore a fur coat all the time? That’s why in the summer the best time to see bears is when the tide is out, either early in the morning or when the sun is ready to set. Then it’s cool and damp—perfect bear weather. Picture it: a shoreline bathed in cool gray mist, green trees, reddish seaweed, black rocks, a silver sea and a family of clam-digging, crab-grabbing, rock-flipping, beachcombing bears.
