WWF Travel Blog

© Steve Sickels/VisibleWind.com

Wandering along the observation deck of the bow of the Sea Lion as it sat positioned in front of the 8-mile-long Lamplugh Glacier in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park, something unexpected caught WWF member Dennis Fox’s eye.

Off the starboard side of the expedition ship, just above the vegetation line on the cliffs edging Johns Hopkins Inlet, Fox noticed shadowy movement. He grabbed his binoculars and zeroed in on the subject: a hulking brown bear perilously walking up a steep, rocky cliff.

The bear came out of the rough vegetation, walking up the smoother, flatter portion of the mountain. He ambled across the open expanse, seemingly walking with little direction but clearly on a mission, with his eyes fixed on the space before him.

He was foraging for wildflowers – likely borage and lousewort. With extreme precision, the bear climbed higher and higher, reaching a point where the rocky walls seemed too inhospitable to ascend. But the bear lumbered on, stretching across the rocks, digging its nails into crevasses and extending its snout seemingly beyond the limits of its reach, just to pluck one tiny yellow flower.

Fox couldn’t keep the sight to himself for too long. He pointed out the bear to a few of the naturalists, who in turn alerted the captain. This was something more remarkable to see, so the captain quietly turned the boat while whispered word spread among the 55 passengers of the presence of bear. Though calving in small fits, the glacier would have to wait.

“Walking on cliffs to eat flowers and berries is an extreme circumstance of bear foraging,” said one of the onboard naturalists, Doug Gualtieri. “It would be awfully grueling to make your living that way.”

Not very common behavior, yet it’s likely the coastal brown bear observed during a WWF Exploring Alaska’s Coastal Wilderness expedition has likely done this before, in an effort to meet a very specific objective.

And that goal? To eat. A lot. In fact, that’s pretty much all bears think about during the summer: Finding food. While waiting for vital, protein-packed salmon to come upriver during the peak of Alaska’s summers, bear forage on shoreline grasses, barnacles in the intertidal zones, berries, new grasses and flowers, nuts and seeds, and even ground squirrels and mice.

Despite the single-minded pursuit of nutrition, bears don’t take to such rugged terrain without thinking through the risks. In this case, it’s likely the bear knew exactly what he was getting into – and that getting those luscious flowers were worth the peril.

• Join WWF’s Exploring Alaska’s Coastal Wilderness, May 12 – 19, 2012, or June 9 – 16, 2012.