The Day I Sat Down With A Grizzly

WANTED – A visitor. Free room and board. Room with a view. All you can eat salmon. All you can see scenery, bears, fish, eagles, and other wildlife. Can work around your schedule. Contact ME.

Oh you guys though I was joking around with that classified ad stuff... no. I was serious about this one! I really do want and need a visitor.

I have a few things on the agenda for today's meeting.

- Sun
- Fish
- Tucker
- Hummingbirds
- Grizzlies
- Vacation
- Mothers

We've had alot of sun in the past few weeks! It's been great, except we are now running out of water! That's the problem with living on collected rain water. We had this happen last year too and that two weeks of sun was basically our summer! We are hoping we aren't using up our summer right now.

With sun, comes warmer water! The fish love the sun. And they are growing like mad this week. I'm not even sure if I've talked about this year's fish at all. We are doing a food trial this year. So half of our fish are getting fed the same food as past years, Bio-Oregon, which I feed, and the other half, EWOS food. Well the EWOS fish have been lagging behind and had some bad growth weeks, where as my fish are cruising on schedule! This week though, they ALL grew like crazy, which is CRAZY. Adam was worried that our scale was off when we weighed them, they grew so well, but it wasn't. They just had a really great week. Now it seems the fish are AHEAD of schedule and growing too well. That might sound weird I guess, "Don't you want the fish as big as possible?" Well they like to release the fish at around 2 grams. Yes larger fish would do better in the open ocean. However, when they start getting really big, they start competing for oxygen in the net pens and just running out of space. Think of 4 little kids living in one room... that's ok when they are little, but eventually they are going to start fighting for some more space when they grow older and bigger. Anyhow, it's hard to complain about your fish growing really good I guess!

Speaking of things growing like crazy, we all swear that Tucker is huge now! He weighed 40.5 lbs two days ago, which is a 4 lb increase this week. I can't pick him up as easily anymore, which is sad. He's listening a little better now, but Adam worried today that when he sees his first bear, he's going to think it's another dog and run up to him. Who knows... He's lost 5 little front teeth so far and one more is close to coming out. The last tooth that fell out and the one almost out already have (had) a tooth coming in behind it before it's even out! It looks weird. Not pushing through right under it, but literally behind it so he's got two teeth right there. He's been a little off this week... we are sure if he felt a little sick or if it's the teething. We wondered if his stomach was upset from eat a few little dead fish but we aren't sure. He has been eating but not the same way he always has. Earlier in the week, he wouldn't eat out of his bowl but would eat little piles of food off the ground. Now he's eating all of it but he picks at it a bit. He used to just chomp it all down without breathing! Dad have you experienced that with your former 4 month old teething puppies? That's what we are hoping it is.


"HI GUYS!" Eventually he's going to get big enough to jump up on the bed.


His favorite pasttime. This was from last weekend but I don't think he tried climbing UNDER the bed this week. Perhaps he's realized he's now too big. He still does love that carpet in our room though.

Hummingbirds.... they... are... CRAZY! This year, we must have 8 or more hummingbirds fighting for our feeder. It's like a beehive because they are always buzzing around, swarming it, chasing each other off. When you stand out there, it's almost a little scary! They are mostly boys, but we have see a few females. (Boys are red, girls are green.) They will drink through a cup of "crazy juice" in a day or two. We ran out of sugar this week so we had to make it with brown sugar. It worked and they drank it but it looked like we put beer in their feeder!


4 birds around the feeder. I do have a picture where two birds are trying to drink out of the same flower too. It's funny.


This goofy guy... we aren't sure if something happened to the top of his head or if that's just how he looks. He's missing a few feathers or something. See how the neck feathers look all rainbow-like. Well that's just how they shine in the light... it looks like they change colors but it all depends on the way they are turned or how the light hits those. It's really cool.

Now onto the best part... the grizzlies! At Takatz, we usually see a few bear hunting boats come into the bay and head to the back. Well a day this week, we were sitting on the deck and we see a bear boat that was heading in but stopped across from our site (in the middle of the bay). So we look over to shore and sure enough, there is a bear. This is the shore FAR across, not the really close shore, so we had to look through binoculars. This is the first bear I've even see in TK and the second Adam has seen so we were surprised. So the boat is checking this bear out, and Adam though it was probably a pretty decent sized bear by looking at it. The bear is strolling down the rocky beach, not seeing the boat, then it goes into the woods because the beach was real steep. We figured it would come out on the other side. Unfortunately, that little island right next to site blocked our view for a while but we did see it had come out on the other side, if you went to the end of the pens. The boat followed him for a while, about 30 minutes or so. We had to feed but we were checking it out with the binoculars every once in a while. Then, as we were close to being done feeding, we hear a gun shot. It scared the crap out of me. Adam grabbed the binoculars. The guy shot a few more times, and missed a few of those but Adam saw the bear go down and fall into the water. Right before then, we heard the bear make a growling, growning sound.

Well we finished up and hightailed it over there! I really wanted to see it and Adam figured they could probably use some help. They were pulling the bear with a rope to shore through the water as we got over there. Then Adam helped the guide and shooter roll it up on shore and onto this rock so they could get pictures. I was pretty interested in getting a close-up look at one of these things so I was pretty excited... and of course I got pictures! :-)



Valerie, you did say once you wanted me to take a picture with a bear! Steven said he looked like he was passed out after a long night of drinking. No, he was posed.


He had a bit of a beat-up nose.


This is the shooter with his bear. The guide thought he was about a 900 lb. bear. He was pretty beefy for being a spring bear. He would have added a few hundred pounds of fat on him and been a scary beast!


They were talking about how good the teeth looked, not ground down at all, so he's probably a younger guy.


Those are some big paws! And this legs just felt huge... SOLID.


Feet paws.


They pulled the bear up on shore right in front of one of the landslides. Right now it's just full of snow...

So vacation. I am going to plan for July 9th-27th. I was worried that it would be too close to spawning time and the boss wouldn't let me go, but he said it would be ok. Since I'm "permanent" now, I have to put in a "leave request" and get it approved by the boss and the bigger boss, but Adam said it will. I won't buy my ticket until it's approved but that should be the days, which means I'll really be home the 10th I guess since mostly it's a red-eye flight I catch home. Just letting you know the vague details.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST... Happy Mother's Day this weekend! I know there are alot of Mothers AND Mothers-to-be that read this. Even if you aren't MY MOTHER, you are my step mother, grandmothers, mother's of my cousins, and mother's of my future niece and I appreciate you for all that you do! You all are truly special ladies who are fantastic! I love you all!