Princess Royal Island, B.C.
Wow! This exclamation expresses how we all felt today when one of our sharp-eyed shipboard naturalists, David Stephens, spotted one of the rarest mammals on earth on Princess Royal Island in British Columbia. The Sea Bird was cruising slowly along the fringe of the island in search of the extremely rare Kermode bear. Only ten to twenty of the Kermode (or Spirit bears) are known to exist on Princess Royal Island, with a few more inhabiting three adjoining islands. The bear was named in 1905 by Francis Kermode of the provincial museum in Victoria who thought it was a new species of bear. That proved to be a misperception. The bear is actually a black bear that has a recessive gene to give it white fur. Emerging out of the fog, the bulky animal must have seemed like a ghostly presence. We spent about an hour watching the bear forage in its natural habitat—a beach clearing in the dense forest. It was truly a magical moment.
Earlier on Princess Royal Island we visited the abandoned salmon cannery community of Butedale. Its crumbling buildings offer a mute reminder of what was an active center of industry from 1909 until the mid-1960s. Now the forest slowly but relentlessly is reclaiming the clearing, and the salmon canning industry has moved elsewhere. Boom and bust is a common story on the natural resource-dependent North Pacific coast of the United States and Canada.
Wow! This exclamation expresses how we all felt today when one of our sharp-eyed shipboard naturalists, David Stephens, spotted one of the rarest mammals on earth on Princess Royal Island in British Columbia. The Sea Bird was cruising slowly along the fringe of the island in search of the extremely rare Kermode bear. Only ten to twenty of the Kermode (or Spirit bears) are known to exist on Princess Royal Island, with a few more inhabiting three adjoining islands. The bear was named in 1905 by Francis Kermode of the provincial museum in Victoria who thought it was a new species of bear. That proved to be a misperception. The bear is actually a black bear that has a recessive gene to give it white fur. Emerging out of the fog, the bulky animal must have seemed like a ghostly presence. We spent about an hour watching the bear forage in its natural habitat—a beach clearing in the dense forest. It was truly a magical moment.
Earlier on Princess Royal Island we visited the abandoned salmon cannery community of Butedale. Its crumbling buildings offer a mute reminder of what was an active center of industry from 1909 until the mid-1960s. Now the forest slowly but relentlessly is reclaiming the clearing, and the salmon canning industry has moved elsewhere. Boom and bust is a common story on the natural resource-dependent North Pacific coast of the United States and Canada.
