Katmai Brown Bears - Enjoying the Green Foliage

I hope everyone gets some needed rest and relaxation this holiday weekend! As you may have noticed, I’ve been a bit absent this week. Our internet connection has been quite troublesome, with outages lasting several hours and connections sometimes lasting only a few minutes. We initially blamed it on neighborhood construction activities. However, the TV cable was working fine. A call in to the cable company confirmed that our connection was poor and intermittent, and we were scheduled to have a service call later on today. 

While we were waiting for today's appointment, we realized that our cable modem was probably long past its serviceable lifetime. With fuzzy recollections, we surmised it to be at least 7 years old. So we took a gamble yesterday, bought a new modem, and got the connection setup completed with the cable company over the phone. Problem solved! The internet is fast and reliable once again. So, if you have been missing my posts and visits to your blog, now you know why I have been out of action. 

After that long-winded story, you need to be rewarded with some more of my brown bear photos. Coming right up!

I took all of these photos from the lower river platform at Brooks Camp. Green foliage is abundant in this marshland area. Tall grasses sprout throughout the riverbank channels, and the forest edges up on the southern shore, not far from the viewing stand. It pays to keep a close watch on a particular spot along the forest edge, where a well-traveled bear path is located.

The bears frequently travel through the ribbons of land that crisscross the marshland, stopping every now and and then to look across the expanse of water. 

In addition to fish, small mammals, and insects, the brown bear’s diet includes grasses, seeds, berries, bulbs, and roots. 

In fact, vegetation comprises between 80-95% of their diet! Given this fact, it’s not surprising to frequently see a bear settle into a grassy area and commence to have a picnic.