Back to StoriesAutumn Interlude: Painting Grizzly Bear Mother 399
September 25, 2017
Autumn Interlude: Painting Grizzly Bear Mother 399The Famous Jackson Hole Matriarch Guides Her Cubs Around During Hyperphagia
This watercolor is very special to me because the scene in
front of you here is what I saw while photographing grizzly 399 and her two
cubs-of-the-year just a few days ago. It
also holds personal significance because I’m at the halfway point of making a
new painting every day for a year.
By now, certainly, you know about grizzly 399? She is 21 years old and this may be her last
set of cubs, we don’t know. Many people have spent the last decade observing
and photographing her and her many offspring and the offspring of offspring. An
era will surely be over the spring that arrives and 399 does not come out of
her den. For this day I just had I am surely thankful for all the hours I have
spent in the presence of this amazing grizzly bear.
We first saw this bear matriarch and her growing cubs a
couple of mornings ago near Spread Creek in Grand Teton National Park and then
they ambled north across Elk Ranch Flats.
As we waited for them to re-appear—in the vicinity of hawthorn berry
bushes where they’d been in the last hours of summer—luck was on our side.
Bears in the Greater Yellowstone are in that physiological condition known as
hyperphagia when they are trying to take in as many calories as possible prior
to denning over the long winter. How much protein and fat they consume can mean
the difference between life and death.
Bears roam far and wide, going to places where they’ve found
wild foods in the past. 399 and company
traversed the hillsides foraging in her traditional old haunts. Then up they went into the forest
and were out of sight.
We drove northwest to the Pacific Creek Road hoping she was
on her way back to the meadows along the Two Ocean Lake Road where she had been
off and on over the past few weeks. We sat for over an hour and sure enough
here she came, walking along the sand bars, her two cubs leading the way.
They were specks in the distance. Closer and closer they
came until finding the berry bushes. But the scene that really stuck in my head
was this—a braided riverbed and three wild grizzlies making their way in this
complicated landscape.
When I started my daily paintings last March I never could
have imagined that I would have been able to keep up the schedule. Now here I am with 184 watercolors under my
belt.
An integral part of my day, if I don’t paint I feel like
something is missing. Some days I see something that I know will be my next
painting. Other days I wake up and wonder what the subject will be. I head out seeking it. As a result, I am going through these days
seeing more, being aware of more, because I am consciously looking trying to
dwell in moments.
We take so much for granted. This kind of challenge, of trying to literally make sense of
what I see, has left me more observant and feeling more alive.
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