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I didn’t see any bears yesterday, but I enjoyed watching this Common Merganser family.  The chicks are almost as big as the adults!  This is another photo captured using a my Pocket Wizards and a 24mm wide angle lens – the ducks were about two feet from my lens!

 Tomorrow we are heading to Lake Clark National Park for 4 days.  It is kind of funny, when I booked this earlier in the summer, I was thinking it would be fun to concentrate on bears because I really haven’t focused on them before.  Of course, that was long before finding such great bears near Seward!  I’m also really hoping to photograph puffins.  There is an outside chance I will have internet access, otherwise there won’t be in activity here for a few days.

On a much sadder note, I think the bear in the last blog post was killed yesterday morning, and possibly the sow and cub as well.  I hate to say too much because there seems to be more rumors then facts, but at least one bear was killed for sure – and it was about the same size, age and in the same area where I photographed it the night before.  Supposedly it chased a dog.  It may explain why I never did saw any bears yesterday. 🙁

When I saw this dead salmon in the creek, I was so sure I would be able to get my wide angle close-up that I decided I would wait as long as it took for a bear to show up.  Well, along with a break for dinner, I had to wait 7 hours before this young adults showed up! 

I placed my camera a couple feet from the fish with a 24mm lens, and focused on the salmon.  I had a vision of the bear pulling the fish out of the water and practically filling the frame with his face!  Unfortunately, the bear never saw the dead fish and managed to stay out of my focus range!  These near misses keep me coming back day after day. 

I checked back this a.m., and sure enough, the fish was gone.

 The bears didn’t show up Saturday morning, but a family of Mergansers swam within inches of my camera as I waited.  I wish the camera was pointed down more, but I was expecting a much larger subject!  I usually don’t crop my images, but decided I would crop this one for the blog.

Since I share my successes, it is only fair I share my failures – and for this setup, I have had more then my share it seems.

You see I finally found the bears again and decided to try for my remote, wide angle, close-up thing.  As I was setting up my camera, my Pocket Wizard transmitter fell out of my jacket pocket and into the water.  I grabbed it fast and shook it off, it seemed fined.  I finished setting up, then stepped out in front and tested everything, and as you can see it was working fine.

Fast forward a half hour – here come the bears!  I anticipated their movement perfectly, they walked up stream, around the corner and right up to my camera – both the sow and cub side by side!  I was way back firing away like mad!  As soon as they moved on, I couldn’t wait to see what I a captured, man I was so excited!  Well, I captured nothing, my darn Pocket Wizard had stopped working – I don’t think I called it a “darn” Pocket Wizard at the time.  🙂 

So now both my receiver and transmitter have gone for a swim.  I took the transmitter apart and dried it out like I did the receiver, and all seems to be working again.  I have now had the bears walk up to my camera twice – I don’t know if I can get lucky and have them do it a third time, but I gotta try! 

Brown bear cub, Chugach National Forest, Alaska.

Today was the second consecutive day without a bear sighting, although I didn’t spend much time looking.  I think they may have moved on.  This was from last Friday.