Tag: bear viewing

National park quiz: How many bears can you spot in the photo?

Katmai National Park and Preserve this week quizzed followers by posting an image and asking how many bears are visible on the landscape.

Katmai National Park and Preserve this week quizzed followers by posting the accompanying images and asking how many bears are visible on the landscape. (A link to the answer is provided at the bottom of this post.)

The Facebook post explained that rangers each August conduct surveys around Moraine and Funnel Creeks at regular intervals, as part of their monitoring of salmon, people, planes in the sky, and bear activity.

Blow up image and try to guess the number of visible bears

With each bear sighting biologists try to determine age, sex, and the type of behavior.

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Of the accompanying images, captured during a survey, the Alaska wilderness park requested: “Test your skills and see if you can find all of the bears.”

Viewers might want to blow up the image because the quiz is difficult. Viewers can CLICK ON THIS LINK to discover the answer, as provided by the park. (Best to look at both images in the “answer” post.)

Katmai National Park and Preserve is in southwest Alaska, on the Alaska Peninsula, and encompasses more than 4 million acres. The park is famous for bear viewing at Brooks Camp, where the bruins gorge on salmon during the summer.

Sigh of relief as beloved brown bear Otis is alive and well

A Tuesday night sighting of Bear 480 Otis, one of the oldest (and fattest) brown bears residing in Alaska’s Katmai National Park & Preserve, was a moment worthy of celebration.

A Tuesday night sighting of Bear 480 Otis, one of the oldest and most popular brown bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park & Preserve, was a moment worthy of celebration.

“Otis is indeed in the house,” the park announced Wednesday on Facebook. “480 Otis is one of our oldest and probably most beloved bear. He has been missing in action. Last year he arrived at the Brooks River on June 23rd. The latest he has ever arrived is July 17th. We were concerned.”

The male brown bear, first identified in 2001 as a subadult or young adult, is believed to be 25 or 26 years old.

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Bear 480 Otis is a fixture at Brooks Falls and an occasional star on the park’s live bear cam. He was the inspiration for the 2008 Katmai National Park booster pin. Footage of Otis appears in the 2014 Disneynature Movie, “Bears.”

Otis is a past winner of the park’s annual Fat Bear Week competition, which celebrates “all the hard work that these bears do to survive and thrive and get through six months of starvation,” Naomi Boak, a park media ranger, told the Washington Post.

But as Bear 480 Otis ages, park employees and the bruin’s many fans become worried when he does not arrive at the river in the same timely manner as younger bears.

On Wednesday a bear-cam viewer who had not heard the good news commented, “Otis is a master fisher bear! The younger bears should watch and learn. Come back soon Otis, miss you already.”

The park concluded its Facebook announcement by stating, “Brown bears lead challenging lives and 26 is quite an achievement, especially for a male bear. So celebrate the return of Bear 480 Otis with us!”

–Image courtesy of NPS Photo/N. Boak