The Alaskan photographer had never seen anything like it. When the action started, he put down his camera, picked up his video camera, and started recording.
The scene was of a hungry black bear hunting a pair of twin moose calves; the only thing standing between the bear and its meal was an enormous, lurching mother moose, hackles a-bristling.
All this unfolded before the eyes of wildlife photographer Coby Brock and company in early spring near Anchorage.
“Holy smokes!” pretty much sums up what was going through Mr. Brock’s mind.
“It was pretty exciting,” Mr. Brock, 46, told The Epoch Times afterward. “It was pretty scary. At one point, we thought we was going to get ran over by a moose and a bear.”
This action-packed sequence of a moose family encountering a hungry black bear was captured in one of Anchorage’s large green spaces, with over 4,000 acres.
It was around May 16. “I was starting looking for baby moose,” Mr. Brock said. “My buddy called me and he said, ‘Hey, we got a mom with a baby out here somewhere close to your house.’”
Mr. Brock drove over with his fiancée, Jenny, and they started photographing by the roadside.
Soon enough, Jenny yelled, “Bear!” and from behind them the hungry animal appeared suddenly.
“There was a bear crossing the street and going directly, B-lining for the calves,” Mr. Brock said. “A lot of moose calves get eaten by bears but … it doesn’t get recorded very often.”
Yet the hulking mother moose was no pushover, either. She kicked menacingly and charged ferociously at the bear. The black bear retreated, running and climbing up trees but, as it was famished, it persisted and was intent on claiming a meal.
“This was just a very hungry bear,” Mr. Brock said.
“We recorded just about 15 minutes of back and forth between the mom and the bear protecting her babies,” said Mr. Brock, who’s been photographing wildlife for around 15 years and runs his own gallery, Kiss a Moose, in downtown Anchorage. “Luckily, the babies did survive.”
Mr. Brock found it “quite interesting” to watch how bears go about hunting—dogging their prey, climbing up trees, and so forth.
It was “really cool” but also “pretty scary,” he said. “At one point that bear climbed—it ran up and climbed a tree within 15 feet in front of us.”
“I photograph bears in that area, and generally they just eat grass. They’ve eaten flowers and stuff like that,” Mr. Brock said. “I’ve never seen a bear chase after moose calves. It’s pretty rare.”
He showed the video to some biologist friends of his who work for the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary bear viewing program. They were keenly interested in it and hadn’t seen anything like it before.
“I’ve heard that half of moose calves won’t make it their first eight weeks because of bears,” Mr. Brock said. “I don’t know if that’s an exact statistic.”
Mr. Brock also shared the video on social media platforms, where it attracted over a thousand views.
Reaching a larger audience with his video, the wildlife photographer from Anchorage wants to convey a message to the general public when enjoying wildlife, particularly in Alaska: “Beware!”
“Be aware of your surroundings. That bear came in from behind us,” he said, adding that in Alaska there are plenty of animals “that can kill you.”
“You want to always be making some noise and give them a bit of a head start—if they want to get out of your way—and generally they want to get out of your way.
“When you’re in Alaska, at any point, things can get interesting.”
