Wildlife everywhere

It is still astonishing to me just how much marine wildlife we have seen in the last two weeks of paddling. Glacier Bay National Park is home to humpbacks, harbor porpoises, stellar sea lions, harbor seals, sea otters, bald eagles, tons of different shore birds, and of course bears (both black and brown). And except for the bears we saw A LOT of them all. These are some of our more interesting animal interactions from the first leg of our trip.

Bears

The very first day of paddling (within the first two hours) we saw a momma bear and her cub. We were drifting along in the early morning calm after just rushing to make "the cut", a small channel that is only passable at high tide, to get into a small, protected group of islands. I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Something large and brown and running. No, not running, sprinting. Out from behind a large boulder they came, a large mother black bear and her cub. They were covering ground very fast and paid no mind to us in our boats. They lumbered into the water and very speedily swam in front of us across a channel to a neighboring island. Once across they noticed us and gave us a once over before disappearing into the trees. The ranger later told me that usually when you see black bears running fast like that it is because they are getting away from a grizzly. We have yet to see another bear.

Sea Lions, Otters, and Seals

One sunny, calm day (the fourth or fifth) when we were near the end of a fifteen mile paddle, we accidentally cut off a trio of hunting sea lions. We were wearily paddling along when all of a sudden a HUGE sea lion leaped out of the water, completely out of the water, and with a hefty salmon in his maw, as if in slow motion, looked at Kelly in her boat, dropped his jaw (and his fish) in shock and splash landed leaving an enterprising eagle to swoop out the neglected fish. We were startled and fairly frightened. So we started paddling harder toward our destination. Just when I thought that I could slow down and stop to take a glance behind me they all popped up literally feet from the side of my boat. "JESUS!" I exclamed loudly. "SNORT! HUFF!" they announced back and dipped back under. That happened several more times as they followed us and kept checking us out (and scaring the crap out of us) everytime we stopped.

Since that slightly alarming experience we have seen tons of troupes of them. Always curious and in packs. They are showy and cocky, they are the the Jersey Shore of the marine mammal world. Whereas we also saw sea otters everywhere. They are soooooo cute, lying on their backs, clapping their rocks together, eating shellfish and hugging their little otter babies. A little too cute, and they know it. They give off a feel of "look at me! look at me! I'm soooooo cute". Then there are the harbor seals, probably my favorite. They are cute but discrete about it. Sleek and solitary, the unsung heroes.

Humpback Whales

They were everywhere in Glacier Bay and because it was so calm and there weren't very many motorized vehicles you could hear them exhaling from all around you. We haven't had any super close interactions with them. We have seen them spy hopping, breaching, and doing this crazy tail slapping.


Black Oyster Catchers

I didn't think I would every be anywhere where the predominant large black noisy bird is not a crow but a black oyster catcher. They were everywhere we wanted to camp. We would pull up to a beach and one of them (they are always in pairs) would start squaking its head off telling the whole world we were there while the other would duck it's head down and stalk around trying to not be seen. They are cute but very territorial.