Salmon Have Arrived And So Did The Bears

The Pinks are in! There are 5 types of Salmon and they rank in this order of yum. King, Red (Sockeye), Silvers, Pinks, and Chum. Pinks are good for canning and if you are Alaskan, you don’t bother too much with them because the first three on the list are so much better. Salmon return to spawn where they were born and 30 million Pink Salmon will come back here to spawn and then die this year alone. There are so many fish you can practically walk on them to cross the river. The water appears to be boiling from the swimming fish. There is a fish ladder at the fish hatchery off of Allison Point. The salmon have to navigate through a small opening to reach the 1st level. At each level up there is another small opening in a wall that leads to the next level. A salmon maze is you will.     Only a very small fraction of these returning fish will climb  up the ladder to their birth place to spawn. The rest will swim and swim butting their heads into the fish ladder wall or rocks on the river bank until they are exhausted and die. Seagulls have a feast. Its almost hard to watch the Seagulls drag the salmon out of the water and peck their eyes out. They don’t hardly eat any other part of the fish, only in small amounts, but it’s the eyes they want. Hard to watch.

Now what’s not hard to watch are the bears. We were so close to this Black Bear, we could watch every detail. Black Bear are more docile than Brown bear, but they are bear and you need to respect their power. Bears are great fisherman and really only want the female fish. It truly was amazing to watch the bears catch a fish. They put their head in the water and with one try they come up with a fish in their mouth. Funny how they can tell on that 1st bite if the fish is female or male. If it’s a male, they spit it out. It’s the girls they want, filled with eggs. They will bring the fish up to a rock, lay it down, and with their paw, press on the fishes' abdomen, squeezing out the eggs. Then they lick every egg up not leaving one. Sometimes they eat more of the fish but pretty much when they have eaten the eggs, they go back for another fish.    As soon as a bear would arrive, a crowd would immediately gather. People came out of the wood work. The people did not bother the bear at all. He or she wanted fish and would eat until full. The people knew better than to stay where they were and decided to move away in a hurry when the bear wanted to fish on the other side of the river. After the bear was full, it would quietly walk away returning in a few hours for more.