The last night with the Bear and Wolverine

This was my third morning at the Lodge so I knew the routine.

Breakfast, shower, download photos and prepare for next photo session in the hide. I think it’s good to make a sort of a ritual of some of the preparations so you don´t miss anything crucial. I always start with inspecting my lenses and using the air rocket to remove dust from them. Then I download the last batch of photos and look at them to see if anything has improved.

While looking at the photos I saw that I the photos were better, technically speaking, but I still rate the first night photos higher. It’s good to see the improvements but also how I start to anticipate the movement of the wildlife. I could just hope that the forecast I saw yesterday still was true. We would get almost clear skies from noon until dusk and that would mean I could use a smaller aperture to get better sharperness. That has been my main concern during the first 2 nights with the lack of light that we had.

The hours passed quickly and after the workshop and dinner we headed out again. This time it was hide 2 for me and Jan-Olov. I collected my special chair but discovered that it was to low in this hide. The hides window was higher up so I could use a proper chair this time, lucky me. It was a huge bonus but on the negative side we didn´t have the peripheral vision that we had in the 2 other hides because the window didn´t run from side to side.

Once seated I could see that the Crows and Ravens were more active than the days before. The biggest surprise from the 2 first nights had been the lack of birds on the ground. It had more or less just been Gulls and I wonder why.

I had hoped to get a chance to photo the Raven and I would get a better shot so I started right away. It is always hard to get a good photo of something that is as black as the Raven but after many tries I started to get some good photos. The one that caught my eye is this.

The eye is maybe the first thing one see but I really like that you can see the individual feathers and that the picture has a sort of comic book character.

I continued my Raven mission but then the Wolverine appeared. We hadn´t been in the Hide for more than 90 minutes when it came out of the woods. I was surprised to see it this early when the sun was so high up. It was interested to see what the Ravens had found. It investigated it quickly and soon it was on the move again. It stayed for no more than 5 minutes and in retrospect I see that I have used a much higher exposure value than I should’ve. This is the Ravens fault but I should of course have checked the histogram earlier than I did. Still I get some okay photos but they aren´t nearly as alive as the one from the first night.

Now things went quiet and I just sat there hoping for the Wolverine to cget a second chance but instead the Bears came. It seemed like the Bears appeared one after another. In just a 2 hours time we had 4 Bear sightings. I think it must have been 2 individuals because their snouts look different but this I saw first afterwards.

So when the good light came so did the Bears. They didn´t spend as much time on site each time but now I could get some good Bear photos. Because of the good light I could raise the F-value but still keep the shutter speed and low ISO.

This is my favorite photo from the day.

I like the regal pose that the Bear have when it stand there looking slightly upwards. One can also see how wet the fur is from the melting snow. It almost looks like a cuddly toy.

It was also nice to get a series of action photos when one of the Bears got scared. I just upped the shutter when I saw that it took off and therefore the ISO hit 3200 but they are still okay photos to put up here.

So please enjoy the last batch of photos from my Bear and Wolverine experience in Finland.

Day 1
Day 2

Photo Gallery: The last night with the Bear and Wolverine