Boolie’s Blog

“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle during the 1988 Vice Presidential debate

I’ve often wondered what wildlife thinks of me when I pass them on hiking trails, do they consider me to be some sort of hairless bear? I got my answer on my recent trip to Mount Rainier when a black bear passed this hoary marmot and its colony beside the Skyline Trail. The colony let loose with a raucous series of calls when the bear got close and kept it up until after it left.

I couldn’t see the marmots as I was too far down the trail to see that high in the talus field, but upon hearing the chorus of boos that rained down from above, the bear climbed up onto the rocks. It was a very casual pace and the bear wasn’t trying to catch the marmots, it seemed more curious than anything, but the marmots had good reason to be upset. According to my field guide, bears do eat marmots, especially in the spring when they dig out marmots that are still hibernating.

But to answer my question, marmots at least certainly don’t think of me as some sort of bear. I never got anything like the reaction the black bear got — I saw many marmots on my hikes and while I heard an occasional alarm call, it was always short and usually due to a hawk flying overhead or some other perceived threat.

This picture was taken the following day from the bear encounter and is from the last series of pictures before I left the park to go to Olympic National Park. I brought along the big lens on this hike and took shots both with it and my telephoto zoom, in this case I preferred the pictures from the big lens. I chose a position to give a background with gray from the rocks and green from the foliage.

My favorite moment with this bear, after stopping to eat huckleberries beside the trail (the picture in the previous post), it returned to the trail but soon turned aside again, stood up on its hind legs and began rubbing its back up and down on this tree. I guess it had an itch that needed scratching.

Another picture of my favorite bear from my trip to Washington. I watched it graze on huckleberries for an hour in a meadow below the Skyline Trail in Mount Rainier National Park, so it was already pretty comfortable with me when it started moving up towards the trail. I could tell where it wanted to go so I moved down the trail in the opposite direction to give it plenty of space.

I assumed it would continue higher up the hill but instead it started walking down the trail in the same direction I hoped to head. I followed at a long enough distance to keep it in its comfort zone, so mostly I had a view of its rear end. I should post a gallery of animal rear ends I’ve taken over the years, keeping an animal in its comfort zone doesn’t necessarily lead to the best pictures ;)

I’ve experienced this in my own home, Scout has liked to sleep on me ever since she was a little kitten, but unlike Templeton she often sleeps with her rear end pointed towards my face. Sometimes to the point that she actually sits on my face, when she was younger I woke up many a time getting smothered by a little kitten butt. My wife convinced me to take it as a badge of honor, that she was showing trust by exposing her most vulnerable position, so I’ve adopted the same philosophy to animals on the trails. Missed picture opportunities are a small price to pay for earning their trust.

In this case though, the bear’s desire to fatten up for the winter worked to my advantage, it turned aside for a moment to grab a few more huckleberries before continuing down the trail.

I knew that there were Elk in Olympic National Park and we had seen one on our trip there a few years ago, but I hadn’t expected to see them on this trip. As it turns out I saw them in both the Quinalt and Hoh Rainforests and wanted to photograph them in the lush green forests to contrast with the sea of browns of many of my elk pictures from Yellowstone. This bull was one of two that were browsing in the streams next to the Hall of Mosses Trail in the Hoh Rainforest.

This is yet another picture of the pika from the Palisades Lakes Trail in Mount Rainier National Park. Here it decided to eat the plants it brought back rather than store them for the winter.

I had a number of opportunities to watch pikas eating on this trip and realized something I had never noticed before: pikas don’t use their hands when they eat. Many mammals will use their front paws to guide plant stems into their mouths, but pikas pick up the entire stem with their mouth and eat a little bit at a time until the entire stem is gone. In this case, the stem was so long that the pika chewed the middle first to break it into two parts and then ate each part separately.

This was one of those times that I really wished my camera could capture video, the still pictures don’t do justice to how fascinated I was watching the pika devour these plants without ever raising a paw.