Bear photography holidays

Finland
Our Finland bear watching photography holidays take you to the Wild Taiga region in the northeast, close to the border with Russia. There are about 1,500 European brown bears in Finland, and most of them are found in this area.

The brown bear is one of the largest carnivores in the world, but it’s naturally shy of humans. Your chances of success, however, are excellent, as you’ll be accompanied by expert guides who have useful connections to local communities. They know the best hides to use for a bear sighting, and also where to find other species from reindeer to elks, beavers, wolves, and even wolverines. You never know what you’re going to capture through your viewfinder in this richly biodiverse region.

Other tailor made bear photography holidays in this area are led by zoologists, highly knowledgeable about mammal conservation and behaviours. Not only do they have a 100% success rate but they will often find bears every night of the trip.

Alaska
Alaska is one of the best places in the world for photographing bears, purely because of the sheer numbers of them. Around 95 percent of the brown bears in the United States are found in the Alaskan wilderness, with a thriving population of them residing around Lake Clark, just over an hour south of Anchorage by air. Ample food supplies, and the fact they have never been hunted, makes the bears relatively relaxed around humans too, although you’ll find they remain stubbornly resistant to calls to ‘strike a pose’.

Brown bears are in fact grizzly bears that live close to the coast. In Lake Clark National Park they feed on everything from clams to edible plants and berries, to a healthy supply of salmon and even the occasional whale carcass washing up on the shore. Grizzlies are typically smaller and more solitary due to less-plentiful food sources that are further apart, yet they share the brown bear’s distinctive dish-shaped face, the large shoulder hump and of course the fearsome curved claws.