Just Treading Water?

Just Treading Water?

Ever feel like you have to keep working like heck just to keep your head above water? Well...I'm guessing that's how this bear feels! I've seen many bears swimming and wading over the years, but rarely do you see one with its head quite this low in the water. And - it actually isn't just treading water - it's fishing! A few years back I saw an excellent video produced by Jeff Turner that showed a grizzly doing what this bear is doing - but it was shot underwater. It turns out that the bear in the video (and this bear) are stretching their hind legs down as low as they can and waving them all over the place (almost like they're dancing) - all in an effort to churn up salmon carcasses that may be on the bottom of the pool they're in. And, sure enough, a few minutes later this bear DID stir up a carcass, catch it in its front paws, and then hauled it over to the shoreline for a snack (and she DIDN'T share it with her 3 cubs).

Subject: Adult female Grizzly (Ursus arctos) with her head JUST above water!
Location: Great Bear Rainforest, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D4s
Lens: Nikkor 400mm f2.8E VR plus TC-14EIII (1.4x) telconverter (550mm total focal length). Hand-held from floating zodiac. VR on and in "Sport" mode.
Exposure: 1/640s @ f5; ISO 2200. -0.67 stop compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting.
Crop: Moderate - this is about 75% of the full-framed image (after cropping into slight pano format)

More details about the image - including post-processing details and a 2400-pixel version of the image - can be found here on my website:

http://www.naturalart.ca/galleries/latest/.

Comments and critiques welcomed - probably best to view the larger version prior to doing so!

Cheers...

Brad