A Canadian Tiger and a Curious Punctuation Mark

“I have never seen a bear in the wild,” said the hubby one fine day much earlier in the century.

“C’mon, that can’t be true,” I said.

But I thought it over, and I realized it was. Every bear I’d ever seen — and I’d seen many — was seen far away from our home, in the company of others.

My husband was born and bred in New Orleans. The Louisiana black bear had been a vanishing subspecies for… his entire life. (It was finally sufficiently recovered to be removed from the Endangered Species List in 2016.)

“We’ll get you a bear,” I said. “We’ll get you a metric e̶x̶p̶l̶e̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶e̶t̶e̶d̶ boatload of bears. I know the perfect place.”

That was in 2005. I scheduled our trip to Alberta, Canada for early September.

Well, a human plans, and God laughs. My diary says this:

“I don’t know how many people can say that their vacation was canceled because of emergency medical personnel performing triage on the baggage claim of their airport, but probably it’s too many by this time of century..”

Yeah, so. The trip was scheduled to depart from New Orleans airport on September 2, 2005. Needless to say, nobody was flying out of New Orleans airport on September 2, 2005.

But everybody was nice about it, and our trip was re-booked for June 2006. There was some well-meant advice about the rainy season and the threat of floods in Calgary in June, but c’mon. A little rain ain’t gonna scare off folks from Louisiana. So off we went.

And, yes, the bears were easy. A little too easy. Hubby was in heaven.

I lost count of the number of bears we spotted, but it was a great many. All of them were Black Bears except for a single very large cinnamon-colored Grizzly that we spotted from overhead when we were taking in the scenery from one of those tourist trams.

The mother bear in the above image had three cubs. You may rest assured that we stayed in our rental car. I zoomed all the way out to photograph this pleasant-looking lady.

Before this trip, I didn't know Black Bears could have more than two babies. Maybe because I wasn't looking for more, at first I only saw two of her youngsters playing in the tall grass.

Later, though, she chased all three of them up a tree, which gave me a great look-- although a little too far away for me to nab any worthwhile pictures.

My dedication to getting the shot goes only so far. Always treat wildlife with respect. Claws and teeth are all good fun until someone gets caught, cooked, and eaten by an angry mama.

There were a lot more species than just bears crying out to be photographed. And not just the big guys you expect like deer, bighorns, and elk, but the little guys too.

When I got home, I had way too much fun showing people my photo of a Canadian Tiger — actually an extremely cooperative Canadian Tiger Swallowtail butterfly.

The comma butterfly was a bit of a head-scratcher. I’m pretty sure I posted a low-resolution copy of this image to birdforum.net back in the day to see if any of the butterfly guys had an idea. It took a while to be confident in the identification of that critter.

I’m still not sure how you can tell just by looking at a photo whether it’s Polygonia comma (Eastern comma) or Polygonia satyrus (Satyr Comma), but the range map tells me it’s P. satyrus. So we'll go with that.

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Author's Note

A shorter version of this story focused on the two butterfly images was previously published as part of an arthropod photography challenge hosted by Wildlife Trekker, a Medium publication. I chose to add the bear images and a bit more of the story for my Vocal readers.

Want more? Check out my big photo album of Bolivian butterflies: