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Liz Newman travelled on our 'Finland - Just Brown Bears' holiday and submitted this entry to our writing competition.
Brown Bear
Do you want this raincoat?” asked Jan. “It’s too big for me.”
I was going to make do with a cagoule, but this was a nice one. “Thanks,” I said. “Although surely … in July?”
As we peeled off our soaking wet gear for the second time on day two, we reflected that the muskrat’s nose had been a bit of an event, the elk poo had been riveting, and the waterfowl excitingly similar to that in the UK. Otherwise, it had been hard to see anything through the curtain of water between us and the landscape, designed to test the new raincoat to its limits. At least we experienced the afternoon power cut in the dry.
But then, to everyone’s surprise, the sun came out. The red squirrels started being cute, the Siberian jay did some creative acrobatics and, as we made our way to the hide for the first night’s bear-watching, shafts of sunlight lit up the lichen-covered trees, making them look like vegetation from fairyland. We walked in single file, knowing that although it was unlikely there would be bears in the vicinity before we arrived, there was always a possibility …
The hide was surprising in all sorts of ways, not least for the clever recycling of old car seats - perfect if you felt yourself dozing off. And, let’s face it, when you’re up all night in the twilight that illuminates the small hours of midsummer, there’s always a chance.
Bang on cue the first bear arrived, to the sound of twelve shutters clicking simultaneously. Jan’s camera had far more long-lived batteries than mine and, before the night was out, mine had given up the ghost. It did mean that I spent a lot of time just watching the goings-on, instead of trying to get the perfect shot.
At one point we had fifteen bears in the clearing, all at once, and we saw a total of twenty-three different ones over the course of the holiday. You got to know them: the black one with a torn ear, the brown one with a scar on her face, the blond one that was photogenic enough to advertise honey. The mischievous cub that was always straying that little bit too far, the good mother who seemed to have eyes in the back of her head, the bad one who preferred to spend the time scratching her backside against a tree trunk, the foul-tempered male that had all the cubs shinning up the closest tree like pole-dancers. Brown bears don’t normally mix, and it was the generosity of the salmon-canning plant downriver that brought them here in such numbers. There were altercations, cuffings, scuffles, growls, sudden retreats.
What’s so wonderful about a holiday like this is that no one’s edited it. There isn’t a producer somewhere, deciding what’s of interest and what isn’t. Anything could happen, and bear cubs are very entertaining. Your experience is unique, because even in a party of twelve no one’s looking at exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.
The brown bear is the same species as the grizzly bear, although there are a lot of subspecies, and they vary enormously in size. There have only been three fatal attacks in Scandinavia in the last century, but that’s enough to make the precautions taken by Naturetrek sensible. Once in the hide, you don’t go out again until the following day.
“It’s raining,” said Jan, as we emerged into the grey light of morning.
But I’m not sure that any of us really cared. The first night had been a night to remember.
Despite there being less than one thousand individual bears in Finland, there is still a hunting season. And the on the very day that it starts, most of them scarper back across the border into Russia.
How do they know?
Read more about our 'Finland - Just Brown Bears' holiday.