Digging for clams

One of my most exciting wildlife experiences was seeing and photographing a mother Kodiak brown bear in Alaska’s Katmai National Park teaching her two cubs how to dig for clams. These coastal bears are very large, weighing up to 1200 lbs, thanks to a plentiful diet of clams, salmon, and sedge grass.  To get these shots, I was hanging off the bow of a Zodiac with a 400 mm telephoto lens and a fast shutter speed of 1/1250 sec. Although it looks like I could reach out and touch the bear, I was at least thirty feet away, and the bear never seemed to notice us.  She would periodically plunge her head under water while blowing copious bubbles and then emerge usually with a large clam in her mouth.  Using her paw and her teeth, she would crush the shell and extract the meat.  Her two cubs followed in her wake, but they didn’t appear to have successfully acquired the skill yet.

Although the cubs didn’t seem to go for the clams, they were making do with eating mussels and vegetation on the rocky shore.