The Fight Club

The December issue of National Geographic (Dutch edition) features three pages of the brown bear images I shot in Finland. This is one of the shots that they selected, showing two playing brown bear siblings, just after the rain had stopped. The one on the left hit the one on the right on the head, causing a spray of drops from the wet fur.

The image was shot from a hide in an open swamp area, close to the Russian border.

Photographing bears in Finland is very different from photographing them in Alaska or Canada, even though they're basically the same species. In Finland you can hike in the forest for months and never encounter a single bear. One of the reasons for this is that there are simply fewer brown bears in Finland - an estimated 840 bears, compared to over 30,000 bears in Alaska. I once witnessed a scene in Alaska where 26(!) brown bears were simultaneously fishing in a salmon infested river - something not very likely to ever happen anywhere in Europe. Another reason is the fact that killing bears is the favorite hobby of many Finnish men, so bears prefer to stay away from people as much as they can.

To be able to photograph a European brown bear therefore takes some extra effort. We used a couple of hides (so that the bears couldn't see, smell, or hear us) that were put in an area with a relatively high bear density. We then had to attract the bears to this open area in order to actually get to see them. For this we used pellets of pressed vegetable matter, a responsible little bite that doesn't ruin their appetite nor impact their normal feeding routine. Most of the times this proved a succesful strategy, although there was still no way predicting what would happen.

On our first week the weather was pretty bad - heavily overcast and constant rain and drizzle. Not good for shutter speeds, but very good for bear activity. On one of the nights we saw a mother with three cubs crossing the swamp. Mum was just walking around, checking the surroundings, but her kids were playing as if their lives depended on it. Especially these two really gave a great show. I've got quite a few shots of brown bear cubs, but it's not very often that you get to see this kind of activity, so I'm very happy with the shot.

A while back someone asked me what I preferred: photographing brown bears in Finland or in Alaska. That's actually not an easy question to answer. The main advantages of photographing them in Alaska for me are; it's easier - there are more bears, you have a constantly changing scenery, changing backgrounds, you can adjust your position (up, down, left, right), and you can work with the light. When you shoot from a hide, you're stuck in one place and you just have to sit and wait. The nice thing about that though is that it makes it very exciting, and there's the fact that the bears don't notice you when you're in a hide whereby they sometimes get very close without any danger for either party. So there's something to say for both.