In my previous post I referred to white tailed deer as the squirrels of Shenandoah. Indeed, white tails were the most common animal we saw last week, bar none. They were pretty much everywhere - even throughout the campground. It was mind boggling to see a herd of deer pass within 50 feet of the nearest tent with nary a care. Even more astonishing was their behavior when our dogs barked at them from 50 feet away. They just stopped and LOOKED at the dogs barking their heads off at them. I had never seen anything like it.
That said, there was another, different kind of “squirrel” at Shenandoah. My wife and I saw more black bears at Shenandoah than we did at Yellowstone some years ago. In evening light it was possible to sight bears almost at will by driving along Skyline drive. As a matter of fact, one other park visitor told me that they had sighted bears five times in the span of one hour. The most bear sightings we made in an hour was two, but we did sight bears a total of six times in our eight day stay. Five of our six bear sightings were willful. By willful I mean we went out driving to sight bear and found them - only one sighting happened by accident. We found that you could pretty much predict that you would sight bear if you drove along Skyline Drive between one hour before and one hour after sunset. We generally went for a one hour drive during this time, just for this reason.
I learned a bit about equipment readiness in the process of trying to photograph bears - a much greater challenge than photographing the deer of Shenandoah. Bears turned out to be much more wary when approached by vehicles and also tended to be visible only a little later in the day than the deer. My first photograph of a bear was botched because I fumbled with my equipment for too long and couldn’t get a shot off at all. Because of this I began leaving two cameras out each time we went out for our evening drives. One camera was equipped with a fast telephoto lens (anticipating low light conditions), my 70-200 f/2.8 VR Nikkor lens. The other camera was equipped for landscape shots with an 18-70 zoom lens. The camera with the telephoto lens was my Nikon D300 and the landscape camera the D200 (you can find a quick review and comparison of these two cameras elsewhere here on this site, but the main reason for choosing the D300 for the animal photography was the better low light capability of the D300.) Additionally, I dialed in an ISO of 2000 and an aperture of f/2.8 with an exposure compensation of +0.3 on the camera I intended to use on bears (my reasoning on the exposure compensation was that the bears were all black and could therefore easily lose detail if underexposed.) My choices of set-up were rewarded the first evening I did this. A sample shot of a solitary bear can be seen below.
Black Bear at Sunset
I wasn’t all too displeased with that one, but remained on the ready on our next outing. This time I almost didn’t bother getting the equipment ready. It was so dark and foggy that I didn’t think there’d be any way I would get a decent shot. Yet, an opportunity presented itself where we saw a mother bear with two cubs. Notice how wet the fur on the mother is. It had been foggy and drizzling all day long. This image was taken in evening twilight under similar shooting conditions as the last one. Since I used f/2.8 and focused on the mother, the cubs are not quite in sharp focus. Also, they are deep in the shadows in the woods - the exposure conditions here was very difficult.
Momma Bear With Cubs
The last opportunity we had to sight a bear also proved to be the best. This was partly because this bear stayed closer to the road, but even more so because it was just a little earlier (not quite as close to sunset) and the day had not been overcast. This time we encountered a large bear that I was able to photograph at much lower ISO due to the good light. This bear was photographed at ISO 320 (a setting that provides excellent image quality for large prints on the D300), also at f/2.8. The image below is probably about a 50% crop of the original image file and would probably make an outstanding 12 in x 18 in print (something I just might attempt when I get the opportunity.)
Black Bear, good light
I would like to point out that I do not recommend getting out of your car if you ever try to photograph bears like this. All of these images were taken from inside the vehicle. The prudence of this was evidences when I photographed the last bear (the image above). This animal crossed from the left side of the road to the right as I was photographing it. I tried to hide some behind the branches on the right side of the road, as can be seen in the image above, and then made motions of rushing our car as I was taking pictures. It tried this several times until I decided the better part of valor was to gun the vehicle to prevent it from damaging our car. The sound of the accelerating engine did send the animal scurrying off into the woods, but make no mistake: this animal was aggressive. The photograph above was taken from the drivers side of the car through the passenger’s side window. The bear was probably about 75 feet away.
Well, now that I’ve shown images of “fake” Shenandoah squirrels, I would like to come full circle. We DID see some real squirrels on our days of hiking at Shenandoah. Over eight days and 31 miles of hiking and hundreds of miles of driving along the Skyline Drive we saw TWO squirrels. One of them was a gray squirrel, the other may have been a red squirrel which we saw on a hike. It was gone too fast to be sure what type it was. The REAL squirrels were more shy than the deer and the bears!
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