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Beware of the brown bear

By Tan Chung Lee | Wed, Jan 13 2010

Shotgun-toting wardens escort visitors around in Kamchatka in the Russian Far East, home to bears, reindeer and volcanoes.

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(above: A bear catching salmon on Lake Kurilskoye located in the Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East.)

The sight of a rump can cause much excitement, even more so when it belongs to a giant brown bear. I had been wading thigh-deep with nine others, including a national park warden, Vasily, who had a shotgun slung across his shoulders, in the cold waters of Lake Kurilskoye and was approaching the mouth of a river when we saw a huge dark rump.

It could only mean one thing - a brown bear, our first sighting in the Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East, known for volcanoes and bears.

We scrambled ashore for a closer look and soon saw another bear with a light blonde coat, accompanied, to our delight, by three cubs.

Ten minutes later, an even larger bear than the first two showed up. All the bears were attracted to the river by one thing - salmon, which we could see writhing in thick waves in the clear waters.
It was August, the end of summer and the peak of the salmon-spawning season. The sighting of Kamchatka's brown bears was almost guaranteed.
Salmon are born in rivers but swim out to live in lakes and seas. Upon reaching maturity three years later, they make their way back to the same river where they were born, to spawn. As they journey inland, the fish become targets for bears, which feed on them in a frenzy.

We soon saw this in action. Bear No. 1, which like the others had been stalking the banks of the river, plunged into the water at lightning speed despite its hefty 400kg body weight. With a sharp-clawed paw, it caught a fish, scooped it up with its teeth and hurried out of the river to a sand bank. Quickly it began to eat the flesh of the fish bit by bit after stripping it off the skeletal spine.

Bear No. 2, the blondie, turns up to chase away Bear No. 1 and then guards the half-eaten fish as a meal for her cubs.

The entire drama unfolded just metres away from our vantage point on a sandy beach. We were to witness this bear fishing and feeding frenzy regularly over a four-day stay at Lake Kurilskoye.

The lake, created out of a volcanic eruption over 8,000 years ago, is the second largest of Kamchatka's 100,000 lakes and is the biggest spawning ground for numerous varieties of red salmon. Little wonder it is also home to a substantial population of Kamchatka's estimated 12,000 brown bears.

It was easy to see why the bears love to come here. As part of the Yuzhno-Kamchatsky Reserve, the lake area is completely uninhabited and two armed national park wardens are present throughout the year to keep out bear hunters and poachers.

With three million salmon descending on Lake Kurilskoye every summer, the bears need never go hungry. Outside the salmon-spawning season, they feed on the numerous varieties of berries growing on the grassy tundra surrounding the scenic lake.

Like most places in Kamchatka, Lake Kurilskoye is remote, accessible only by a 20-passenger Mi-8 helicopter. But it is worth the 90-minute to two-hour flight to get there. Accommodation is in a wooden lodge, Grassy Point, overlooking the lake.

The bears are so at home in this area that we saw them wandering around the shores of the lake below our lodge and even behind it. For this reason, we were escorted everywhere by the wardens with shotguns and were warned never to venture out of the cabins at night.

One Japanese photographer was killed because he insisted on sleeping in a tent outside to get shots of the bears. His memorial is just in front of the lodge where he had his tent.

As adventure destinations go, few come close to the rugged Kamchatka peninsula. Apart from brown bears, the peninsula is home to moose, wolves, foxes and other wildlife.