Grizzly Bear Bulking Season | Deep into the Wild | BBC Earth

We've seen plenty of adult bears so far on this trip all busy eating or at least thinking about it. They're making the most of everything on offer during the short summer. This puts on loads of weight very fast. A built-in battery pack which allows them to hibernate for six months through the freezing winter. Bears can stuff down huge quantities of rich fatty food without suffering from heart disease and that's got doctors really rather interested. They're now beginning to look into it. What I'm looking out for now are some signs at least of this year's cubs. I didn't expect to actually see this but the cockle digging that we're talking about is going on right behind us. We've got a mother and two of this year's cubs doing just that. I'm trying to watch out how she's doing it but she seems to be flicking very small bivalve models, small cockles and things out of the sand, just crunching them up. If they were bigger ones like the really large specimens they'd probably be able to get their claws between the two shells and prise them apart but with smaller items that'd just be impossible. So they're probably just crunching them up like you would imagine eating a hazelnut. Crunch the whole lot up and spit out the bit you don't want the shell and keep the kernel in your mouth which is cause for quite a lot of lip dexterity. With all this time checking out bears I can't help but indulge myself in a little diversion. I'm a self-confessed bird nerd and this part of Alaska is home to one of my favourites, puffins. Tufted puffins to be precise. Bunk sent me to an island two miles offshore to check them out and to find the bears get everywhere. Well this is what it's all about. This is a young tufted puffin. Doesn't look like a puffin, hasn't got his adult colours yet but puffins nest in burrows. It seemed one intrepid bear sniffed out the puffin colony from the mainland, swam out here and proceeded to dig out the youngsters from their underground nests. After he'd worked his way through the colony he returned to the mainland. Bears one, puffins nil. Now this story is amazing because it basically illustrates a number of bear talents. For a start the bear could smell the birds from two miles away then it swam two miles across the ocean to get here and then once it was here it was using its hardware, its claws and its feet to pull puffins out of their turf nests and those that are in easy to get to rock crevices such as this one. And this is the remains of one such nest that's been dragged out by a bear. This is basically puffin down, it's the lining of the nest and if I look around a bit I can actually find that there's the remains of the occupant, one puffin bone. And here's one lucky puffin that got away. Bears nil, puffins one. Anyway back to bears, two adult bears to be precise. Now this looks like playtime but that's really unusual for these usually solitary creatures but they certainly seem to be enjoying themselves. I like moments like this because what you're seeing there we cannot explain. It's basically bears being social which they do from time to time. Now what's quite unusual is the fact that this is the sort of behaviour they expect either from siblings or from mother and cub or a breeding male and female. Unfortunately they're neither, there's two males possibly unrelated. And here comes a very big solitary male. Now this could spell trouble for smaller bears. Large males won't tolerate competition for food or mates and 800 pounds of muscle, tooth and claw is a formidable opponent. But at the moment there's plenty of food, life is good.