A brown bear will eat just about anything and as much of everything as it can find.
Brown Bear at Brooks Falls, Alaska
Photo image: Brocken Inaglory. CC license 1.0, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0.
Brooks Falls is located in Katmai National Park and Preserve, on the Brooks River. Salmon are said to leap over the falls on their way to the Brooks Lake spawning grounds.
Bears Catching Salmon at Brooks Falls
Photo credit: Katmai National Park Preserve. Public domain.
Grizzly Bears and Brown Bears
According to the U. S. National Park Service, grizzly bears are brown bears. They just go by different names in different regions. Brown bears live by the water, and grizzlies live inland. Call it grizzly, call it brown...this bear has a voracious appetite and is a dedicated omnivore.
A Grizzly Claw
Image credit: Pierre5018. CC license 4.0
The omnivorous grizzly is aided in its food hunt by a remarkable claw. According to the Agricultural Department of Washington State University, grizzly claws, "are as useful as Swiss Army knives". The claws are used to catch fish, dig in the ground for small prey, and forage in tree trunks for insects.
The claws are long (estimated at 4"), more straight than curved, and are not retractable.
Grizzly Bear Cubs
Image credit: U. S. National Parks Service Public domaon
Grizzlies have a very low reproduction rate. It is estimated (by Western Wildlife Outreach) that it takes ten years for a female grizzly to replace herself in the wild. Her lifespan is only 20 to 25 years. Litters may have as many as four cubs, but the average size of a litter is two. The female is not monogamous. Cubs in a litter may have different fathers.
Foraging Grizzly with Cubs, Denai National Park, Alaska
Photo credit: Amanda Lea. CC 4.0 license
A cub does not leave its mother until it is 2 or 3 years old. The mother will not mate during this time.
Grizzlies as a Threatened Species
According to endangered.org, the number one threat to grizzlies is death caused by contact with humans. In the U. S.'s lower 48 states, it is against the law to "harm, harass, or kill" a grizzly unless this is done to protect your life or someone else's life.
Grizzly and Cubs Cross the Road, Madison Junction, Yellowstone Park
Image credit: Jim Peaco, Yellowstone National Park Service. Public domain.
100,000 grizzlies once roamed the U. S. West. Today, only isolated, so-called island populations remain. Grizzlies are an umbrella species, "when grizzly bear populations are healthy, their habitat also protects about 80 per cent of other species that live in the same region".
Photo credit: Ashley Lee. CC 4.0 license
Grizzlies are smart, beautiful, environmentally significant animals. I hope that , in the future, there's a place for them in the U. S. West, besides zoos and natural history museums.
My Collage for LMAC #51
All @shaka's pictures are beautiful, but this one had a mood I didn't want to destroy. It took a while for me to get the effect I was going for, but I always knew I wanted water at the center, and I wanted animals.
The water I created by using an AI program called Nvidia Gaugan. A child who blogs on Hive, @steemean, introduced me to this program. Here's the picture from which I took the lake. I made the picture specifically for this collage, because I knew what I wanted the water to look like.
After I put the lake in the scene,
I tried all kinds of things, but then settled on the simple. I first ran it through Lunapic to give the image a kind of fantastical, lyrical mood. But the filters looked weird in a GIF so I had to go back and redo the whole thing in an edit.
Then I went over to Paint3D for the fish and the bears. The GIF I made with GIMP.
I think it's obvious I had great fun making this collage. It's always an adventure. I won't share all the messy steps and bad moves I made on the way to the finished product :))
Thank you @shaka for putting in the work it takes to keep this community vibrant. You offer an opportunity to win prizes, to network with other Hiveans, and to create.
For anyone who is not familiar with the LMAC contest, or the community, head over to @shaka's blog and check out some of the collages posted there. These will be pouring in until sometime on Monday, so come back and check again.
