Emotional Response
Donning my chest waders, I pushed across the braid in the river and dropped onto my stomach. Tucking in behind my 600mm lens at the edge of a gravel bar, I found myself directly across from a bear more blond than brown. She was sitting back on her haunches watching the channel of the river with a fire in her eyes. The intensity of her stare was arresting. It was that hyper focused look you only find in the eyes of a predator whose belly growls with the pains of hunger, when survival depends upon the success of the task at hand.
The Coho salmon run had just begun. Known as silver salmon by the English-speaking world, I prefer the native nomenclature - for which Coho comes from the Salish language that was once spoken across coastal Washington and British Columbia. Over the course of the next few weeks, thousands of these platinum-sided fish will push their way up this small river bringing with them the life-giving nutrients of the sea and sustenance for an entire ecosystem.
The bear was all senses. If a fish’s back broke the surface of the water, she would know. It’s untrue that bears have poor eyesight. I watch as bears stop in their tracks and study other bears from several hundred yards away. If a fish jumps, this sow will likely see it. But more importantly is the sound. With hearing twice as powerful as humans, the tail slap of a salmon pushing across a shallow riffle of water will send the bear exploding off the bank.
Later in the week, I would have the chance to experience just how tuned in to the sound of splashing water these bears really are. While fishing myself, a member of my group set the hook on a fat pink salmon. The fish leapt high into the air, splashing hard back into the emerald waters of the channel. Almost instantly a sow with two cubs, that we had no idea was bedded down behind us, materialized from the aether. One moment the world was like a Thomas Cole painting, idyllic, serene, a romanticized expression of nature. Towering mountains in the background. The rush of water around our knees. The all-consuming silence of the Alaskan backcountry. The next, we found ourselves in a race down the beach to grab a knife and cut the line before 600lbs of brown bear attempted to wrestle a fish from us. We managed to cut the fish loose, although we did break the rod, a mere 3 seconds before the bear reached us.
Such situations negate the need for coffee in the morning but can often require a change of underwear.
No harm no foul. Everyone must eat. We were both in this spot for the same reason, us humans and bears. Brown bears are unique in this way. An evolutionary lifetime spent waiting on the salmon run has shaped the biography of these animals. They have evolved to share the rivers and fish with many other hungry bellies - other bears, wolves, eagles, and even humans who have been fishing alongside of these bears for tens of thousands of years. All of which has given rise to a behavior that accepts the close proximity of “others” along these rivers – something that stands in stark contrast with their inland cousins we call grizzlies.
With the fish lost, the sow simply settled in on the stream bank with her cubs and we promptly traded fishing rods for camera equipment.
Back in the now, I wished for Coho. The light was beginning to set behind the volcanic mountains of the Aleutian Range. The temperature had dropped to the low 50s already. And time was very much of the essence.
A spray of water kicked up in front of me. The tide was beginning to rise at the mouth of the river and I had missed the little V snapped wakes in the water that giveaway the location of large fish pushing against a current. A school of Coho salmon, fresh from the sea, was coming upriver. A dorsal fin broke the water, followed by a tail that thrashed back and forth as the fish pushed over a shallow area.
By the time I was able to grasp what was happening, the bear was already airborne. Like an NFL linebacker, she exploded with a strength and power that is a sight to behold in and of itself. Leaping from the bank, she seemed to be in a full speed run by the time she even hit the water. And coming straight at me.
It’s moments like these that keep me coming back to Alaska every August. And it’s moments like these that afford us photographers an extraordinary opportunity to safely photograph bears running towards the camera, water spraying, jaws agape, and claws brandished.
All of which gives me much to consider.
Today, wildlife photographers are in many ways the ambassadors of the wild world. Artists have always played this role, of course. But with more and more people wandering about with big lenses in their hands, each one of us are personally responsible for how those less fortunate than ourselves both see and psychologically experience the natural world.
Humans are emotional creatures. Even if we don’t want to admit it, our actions are governed by emotions. Any good marketer will tell you this. It’s not logic and the neocortex that dictates how we act. It’s emotions and our more primitive limbic system.
This is where we step in. Art is all about emotion.
So, I am left to ask myself what sort of emotions I’m creating in people with my photographs?
I think this is especially important when it comes to how I portray predators.
Predators have it tough. Across North America, these animals are given a bad wrap by humans. If something as small and harmless to us as foxes and bobcats are feared by people, then what about big predators? What about bears and wolves and cougars?
Each year, roughly 500,000 coyotes are killed in the US. Around the world, we kill around 150 million sharks in that same amount of time. In North America, people kill between 50,000 and a 100,000 black bears - a big number considering the entire estimated population is only 600,000.
And then there are species like wolves. Surrounded by misinformation, both fear and hatred of wolves is deeply woven within our culture and collective psyches. From the moment Europeans arrived on the shores of North America, they set about trying to completely exterminate every wolf on the continent.
The same, of course, can be said about brown bears and grizzlies.
Thus, the million-dollar question is this: when we portray predators such as brown and grizzly bears as ferocious beasts, with teeth bared and snarls across their faces, does this help to reinforce such negative perceptions of the species?
Sure, it’s exciting to capture those photographs. As the person behind the lens, we get caught in the moment, we experience the adrenaline, and we are the first ones to gaze on in excitement at the action.
But our experience of these bears is completely different than someone scrolling through Facebook and has never been here.
For us, we feel safe – content in the knowledge that the bears are focused on salmon. We are the ones that have already had the opportunity to watch as bears peacefully coexist with us and each other.
Our viewers, however, only see the snarling bear.
I have spent thousands of hours with bears. Honestly, I could never even attempt to quantify all of my experiences - rom chance encounters with grizzlies while hiking to the moments with camera in hand. These animals are anything but ferocious monsters.
I have watched as a sow with three cubs walked to within 10 feet of me in Alaska only to sit down and gather up her kids to nurse – basically at my feet.
I have set on the bank of a river in the backcountry of Alaska, 60 some air miles from the nearest road, and watched as a mom walked her cubs over and dropped them off beside me, as if I was her personal babysitter, before wading out into water to fish.
During a heavy spring snowfall in Wyoming, I had what is to this very day my all time favorite memory out of decades of a life spent in the wild. It was April and we were in the midst of one of those snowstorms that turns the world into a sort of monochromatic abstract painting. Snowflakes so big and fat they obscured the shapes and outlines of everything.
I had hiked into a small meadow where a sow was playing with her cubs. The game of choice was tag. The old sow would chase after her cubs and as soon as she caught them, she would spin on her heels and take off running in the opposite direction. She always slowed down just enough to let her cubs catch her, and when they did she would fall and roll across the ground while they piled on top of her. When the cubs starting trying to play in small aspen trees, she climbed the tiniest of them all, bending the tree over as she dangled upside down 2 feet of the ground. When she fell off, all the cubs leapt on top of her and they rolled and played and wrestled. The snowfall. The carefree excitement of a young family at play and living in the moment. It was truly a magical experience.
This was a last hurrah for the family – although neither I nor the cubs new it in that moment. But the following morning, she drove her cubs away, chasing them off for their own protection. She knew that she was coming back into estrus and the big males, the cub killers, would come to court her soon. She knew this was her last opportunity to spend one last day of bliss with her cubs, and she devoted 100% of her everything to them in that moment knowing that tomorrow nothing would ever be the same again for them.
My god, the stuff I have seen with bears – a species far more peaceful and civilized than our own.
Monsters? Bared teeth? Ferocious?
For me to capture black, brown, and grizzly bears in such a manner would be akin to only photographing portraits of people wielding machine guns, covered with blood, in the middle of a war. It’s like photographing serial killers in the middle of their crimes, only to then portray them as solid characterizations of all humans.
Does this characterize you?
Is that the picture you see in your mind when you think of your mother? Your children?