A Summertime Feast

By George W. Frame • Photos by the author

This bear is searching for a salmon dinner.

The young black bear was small but very fat. He had the longest, blackest, and shiniest coat of all the bears I’d been observing. I watched him walk along the edge of a swiftly flowing stream. Suddenly he plunged into the rushing water. Salmon splashed in all directions. The bear lunged toward the swimming fish, but too late! The salmon were gone.

The bear seemed confused that all the salmon disappeared just when he arrived. He saw a fish upstream and ran quickly in that direction. He missed. He dashed and splashed toward another salmon. He missed again. After a minute or two he stopped and panted. I thought he was going to give up. But one last time he lunged again. There! He emerged from the swirling water with a salmon in his mouth.

The bear, however, wasn’t going to eat just any fish. He held the salmon against his chest with a curled paw as he looked and sniffed it. Nope. Not the kind he wanted. He let it fall. The bear turned and began splashing downstream.

Scavenging sea gulls often join the bears at the stream.

In the next lunge, his head went completely underwater, and he stood up with a plump female salmon. He hurried ashore and began eating the delicacy he apparently had been searching for all along—the eggs.

Each summer the black bears along the southern coast of Alaska eat salmon and very little else. The abundance of fish to eat makes young black bears grow rapidly during the short summer. All the bears become fat, which is important because the fat stores the energy that the bears will need during winter hibernation.

During the summer that I did my research, I was working as a government fisheries biologist. I came to this stream to learn how successful the salmon were in spawning. As I heard about the concern of Alaska’s commercial salmon fishermen over how many salmon the bears catch, I decided to study the bears, too. I hoped to find out whether bears were endangering the next generation of salmon by catching too many fish.

Several species of salmon enter shallow streams along the Alaska coast to spawn, after spending several years far out in the Pacific Ocean.

Each spawning female salmon scoops out a depression in the stream bottom by vigorously swishing her body and tail. The depression, or nest, is called a redd. She then is joined by one or several males. The female fish lays a few dozen pea-sized eggs, and at the same time the males emit clouds of white milt (sperm) into the water to fertilize the eggs. They then move a few inches upstream and dig a new depression, letting the dislodged gravel flow downstream to cover the first eggs. The female lays more eggs, and the males fertilize them, too. They do this over and over, until the female has laid from one thousand to five thousand eggs.

After depositing their eggs and milt, all of these adult male and female salmon die.

After making a catch, the bear carries the thrashing fish back to the shore to eat it.

The stream where I studied the salmon and black bears was visited by more than 50,000 salmon and eighteen black bears during the summer that I did my research. I learned that the bears aren’t a serious threat to the salmon. The black bears are just doing what they have done for thousands of years.

During my study the bears caught only about eight percent of the female salmon before the females had an opportunity to lay their eggs. They caught even fewer males. This meant that tens of thousands of male and female salmon were left to spawn and produce a new generation.