Photo Of The Week: A Huge Wildlife Preflight Complication

When Brian headed out to his 180, this is what he saw: a couple of brown bears lounging right behind the floats, when they had plenty of beach elsewhere to park their keisters on!

The photographer pilot had to, in his words, shoo them off, though he had to do that without tossing anything at them, as that's against park rules. And the biggest obstacle wasn't two bears coming at him, but two bears way too lazy to move their big bods down the beach. Eventually, Boe convinced them to head off. He only discovered after that they'd done minor damage to the rubber stoppers on his floats. A cheap fix compared to the damage bears are capable of doing.

All of this happened, as chance would have it, during Fat Bear Week, the super popular online contest to pick the fattest/cutest bear among the 16 nominated bears. Perhaps these guys were miffed at not getting their moment in the spotlight and figured a clever way to make that happen. And we were only too happy to help them.

Thanks for sharing the great shot, Brian!