Some of the top photographic and behavioral highlights of this tour were provided during multiple encounters with a young mother brown bear and her two adorable 9-month-old cubs. Sometimes we were treated to very maternal interactions between the mother and her cubs, other times it was spectacular behavior between just the cubs that stole the show.
On several occasions, within 15 yards of us, the mother laid down on her back and allowed the cubs to nurse, ignoring us while sometimes cuddling the cubs. After being nursed, the cubs moved off about 20 yards or so and took a nap together. After the nap, they resumed playing, often standing up on their hind legs and wrestling, providing cute “post card” type poses that would cause a lot of us to giggle at the spectacle. In one case, the two cubs created an “awe moment” while standing erect on their hind legs, facing each other, and holding each other’s paws! In another case one of the standing cubs appeared to be grooming the hair on the top of his sibling’s head, resembling a human petting a dog.
Over the past 50 years, both as a bear research biologist and as a photo tour leader, I have seen hundreds of black, brown and polar bear mothers interact with their cubs extensively. But I have never seen a mother appear to enjoy playing with her cubs as much as this young brown bear mother did. It is normal for mothers to be maternal, occasionally playing with their cubs, but I have never seen a mother do what this mother did repeatedly. After the cubs were done nursing, they would move away from her and doze off in the grass. Simultaneously, the mother would stay bedded where she had nursed the cubs and take a nap while her cubs were resting at a distance. That is normal. Mothers usually greatly appreciate the break and are not in a hurry for the play interruptions to begin again. But in several cases, while the cubs were still sleeping, the mother would jump up, run over to the cubs, wake them up and chase them all over the place. What was strange about this was that it was the mother who was soliciting the play from the cubs, normally it is the other way around.
Though the young mother bear and her two cubs of the year, discussed above, provided some of our best highlights on this tour, there was another group, an ursid threesome consisting of one young female coming into estrus being followed by a small male and a medium-sized male that also contributed heavily to our experiences and photography. In addition to mating photos, multiple times most days we had opportunities to photograph interactions between these three bears both in terms of chasing between the males and a lot of play-fighting between the larger male and the female.
Twice during our week at Homestead Lodge, we took a several hour break from pursuing bears, during sunny afternoons when bears are usually inactive anyway, and focused on bird photography. One afternoon we took a short walk near Homestead Lodge, through the forest to a nearby lake covered with lily pads and dense shoreline aquatic vegetation, where we went out for a boat ride. While on the boat we had some wonderful opportunities to photograph a few tundra swans swimming, taking off and flying in a beautiful mountain lake scene. We also had several opportunities to photograph eight common mergansers swimming in a tight but evenly spaced row along the edge of the lake which created a photo I intend to enlarge and crop as a book marker.
The second sunny afternoon excursion was an add-on boat ride about a half-hour north of Homestead Lodge, along the western shore of Cook Inlet to Duck Island, where we primarily photographed horned puffins, and to a much lesser extent, tufted puffins. We got off the boat onto the southern shore, below the cliffs, where the puffins were nesting and attempted to photograph these brightly colored avian “footballs” as they passed close by us at about 50 miles per hour, after the acceleration of dropping from the cliffs to the shore. It was really exciting, though often humiliating, trying to keep them in our viewfinders as they zoomed by. Success rates are low, but volume of attempted photos is really high and after holding your camera and swinging hundreds of times for an hour our arms were sore, our cards were full, and we all had plenty of opportunities to capture stunning images of these incredibly beautiful birds. Finally, we boarded the boat and cruised along the southern shoreline to photograph puffins loafing and taking off from the water and then motored back to Homestead Lodge for dinner and returned to brown bear photography. These afternoon breaks from bear photography in pursuit of birds were brief but reinvigorating.
Another one of the most amazing and rewarding activities I enjoy at our Homestead Lodge-Lake Clark National Park destination is to get up early, have our guide take our group to the mudflats at the crack of dawn on a relatively clear morning, and try to locate a bear (or bears) walking along the shore. Sometimes when you get there it’s still dark—too dark to take pictures. If you are underdressed, it can be uncomfortably cold, especially if the wind is blowing hard. If you haven’t been there before, you may well think, “What are we doing here? Why did we get up so early?” But if luck is with you, as it was for one of our mornings, the bears show up and you get a colorful sunrise, you will soon know why you came. You’ll be shooting images of crisp bear silhouettes in an explosion of colorful sunrise reflections in the shallow flooded clam beds along the western shore of Cook Inlet. For me, those are the images that stand out in a large collection, the ones that are more likely to get enlarged, published or used in a presentation.
This was my 11th tour to Homestead Lodge, Lake Clark National Park. I have never been disappointed. I have always had a wonderful time and have had plenty of opportunities to capture stunning photos of brown bears and other Alaska wildlife, and have banked fond wilderness memories that I will always treasure. No two trips have ever been the same. Each was a little different, but all were extremely satisfying. If this trip sounds like something you think you would enjoy, please join me for my next Brown Bears of Lake Clark National Park photo tour, July 4-10, 2026. Hope to see you there!
