March is the perfect time to plan a vacation. What is better than planning a beach vacation? Planning a wildlife photo adventure of course! This is the first of a two part post about my first wildlife photo adventure.
To celebrate my 40th birthday, I took a solo travel adventure to photograph grizzly bears in their natural habitat in a special place just outside of Prince Rupert BC: the Khutzeymateen Provincial Park and estuary.
I first learned about the Khutzeymateen in the late 1990s shortly after it was established as a provincial park in 1994. It was the first area in Canada to be protected specifically for grizzly bears and their habitat and of course it went on my bucket list. I booked a tour with Sunchaser tours because it had the smallest number of participants (maximum 6) and provided the best opportunity to see and photograph the bears. The Sunchaser is the only operator permitted inside the estuary and while the accommodations and meals weren’t exciting, the bear viewing was extraordinary.
I spent three days on board the vessel never once stepping foot on land. We were either on the sailboat or in the zodiac and as luck would have it the other folks who were supposed to be on the tour cancelled at the last minute so I basically had a private tour. To maximize our sightings we headed up the estuary at every opportunity.
The captain and I saw lots of bears – at least 11 different individuals and we had multiple sightings each day. One pair we saw repeatedly was a mother and cub who were spending a lot of time actively avoiding one of the large males. A week before my tour a pair of cubs had been killed by a large male. I looked forward to seeing them each day and it gave me a real sense of how the bears live. Watching them in the wilderness was an incredible experience as it gives you a glimpse into their world, into the importance of the land and how they fit in to an ecosystem. It’s an understanding you can’t get from seeing a sleeping grizzly at a zoo.
The estuary is home to other species including wolves, seals, herons, eagles, gulls, and of course salmon. It was incredible to see so much wildlife in one place. One very damp place; it is a rain-forest after all.
Next week I’ll share some more images along with my favourite story.
See you next Sunday.