An Unexpected Detour Through Fat Bear Week
I already knew about Fat Bear Week. But this year, Fat Bear Week got a whole lot more interesting.
I was scrolling on TikTok, as one does, while doing some dishes. I was keeping an ear out for Fat Bear Week news because, for some reason, this year everybody seemed interested in all the fat bears. Which makes me kind of happy, because yay for the bears!
And isn’t it wonderful that there’s an entire competition where all you have to do is get as fat as you possibly can? Not only is being fat encouraged, it’s celebrated. Not kind of celebrated. Really celebrated. People have favorites. There are brackets. We cheer for enormous bellies and big old furry behinds. What an excellent arrangement.
Anyway, we were getting really close to the Final Four, and I wanted to see what was going to happen with my favorite bear, Bucky. So, while I was scrolling and listening for brackets, this guy came up who was breaking down some bears and talking about bearish things. I wasn’t paying super close attention, just kind of listening in the background, but all of a sudden, I heard him say something about bears and seagulls and eating.
What?
Because what do you mean? What do you mean bears eating seagulls? That’s not what bears do! Bears eat fish. Bears eat berries. Bears eat honey, right? We’ve all read Winnie the Pooh. We know bears like honey. And if you remember Yogi Bear, because you’re of a certain generation like me, you know Yogi likes pic-a-nic baskets, right?
But I’d never heard of bears eating seagulls.
So naturally, I had to pause the dishes to figure out what was up with the bear eating the seagulls. And I found out from this man that there is a bear who eats seagulls who is actually named Gully. Because why not?
I knew about Fat Bear Week and my main man Bucky, but I didn’t know about Gully. I knew there were a lot of bears at Katmai, and I knew the basic principle, right?
Bear eat fish. Bear get fat. Fat bear good.
But Gully left me with lots of questions. First and most urgently: WHY ARE YOU CHASING SEAGULLS WHEN THERE ARE A MILLION FREAKING SALMON IN THIS RIVER?
That’s the question that ruined my evening. Or rather, made it better.
Because here’s the thing about the bears at Katmai. They have a lot of different ways of fishing, and some of them are very efficient. Take my main bear, Bucky.
Bucky sits right underneath Brooks Falls, and he just lets the salmon come to him. He has a unique spot, and he’s known for his fishing position. Sometimes the salmon leap over him. Sometimes they leap past his paws. Sometimes they leap directly into his mouth. Sometimes they fail to make it up over the falls and come falling back down straight onto his face.
Bucky has achieved what can only be described as DoorDash for bears.
And that makes sense to me, right? Bear get fat. Fat is good.
Bear 903 Gully? He does not make sense.
Because Gully chases seagulls. Not all the time, and not because there’s no salmon. There are SO MANY salmon.
And it’s not that Gully can’t fish, right? He’s a fat bear. He’s got a nice big round bear booty. He’s excellent at fishing. He knows how to catch salmon. He knows how to eat them. But he has persisted in going after these gulls.
And he doesn’t just take advantage of the opportunity. It’s not, “Oh, there’s a sick, defenseless gull.” No. He takes his whole bearness and goes charging into the flock. His whole fat bear booty. Every ounce of bearness he possesses, he puts into this. He does it with gusto and vigor.
Why? Is he bored? Did a gull insult his mother and make a yo-mama joke? We think his mother is Grazer, by the way. Not confirmed, but we think. Does he like the stringy meat? Is this some sort of bear vendetta? Did a gull poke at his face one day?
Because Bucky’s fat furry butt is sitting in the waterfall letting fish literally fall into his mouth, doing absolutely less than nothing. And meanwhile, Gully apparently wants to expend a ridiculous amount of energy chasing a stupid bird that probably gives him very little meat. For a bear that’s supposed to be getting as fat as he possibly can, it just doesn’t add up.
Did Grazer potentially drop him on his head too many times when he was a cub?
This bear is gloriously weird. I love it. I’m picturing it in my head, right? He zooms past and the other bears are like, “What on earth is this bear doing?” as they’re holding salmon and getting fatter.
But the more I looked into Gully, the more interesting this became. Because I wondered: do bears normally do this? My answer is no. I’m not a bear expert, though.
It turns out the bear experts were also surprised. In a 2024 Washington Post article, Ranger Naomi Boak described how people used to ask whether bears hunted birds, and the answer was pretty much no. Too much effort for too little reward, right?
And then along came Gully.
By the summer of 2020, Gully was already spending time at Brooks River and fishing like an ordinary bear. But in October, people noticed something definitely less ordinary: he was at the lower river charging into flocks of gulls, catching them, and eating them. During one of the largest salmon runs ever observed at Brooks River.
So once again, I’d like to point out: plenty of fish. Not in the sea, but in the river.
Then in August 2021, a visitor reportedly caught him on video eating a gull. And in 2024, people were still talking about his gull-catching. Then, on October 1, 2026, bearcam viewers reportedly spotted him eating a gull again. This was not one strange afternoon back in 2020.
This bear has been turning up in gull-related reports for years.
Where did he get this idea from?
Because we know bears learn from their mothers, right? Dad’s like, “Hey, peace out, see you never.” Mom raises the cubs. They also learn from experience and from watching other bears. They’re not all doing the same thing. But we don’t have evidence of another Brooks River bear teaching Gully this particular trick.
Did he see another bear do it somewhere? Did he just try it one day and think, “Oh, this works”? Was it a trial-and-error thing? Or was he just an innovator? Does he think he’s discovered the next great evolutionary thing in bear cuisine and nobody else has caught up to his genius?
So, I’m imagining Gully as this slightly eccentric, sort of weird, kind of lunatic loner bear, charging through the salmon buffet to hunt gulls while the other bears look on like, “You friggin’ weirdo.”
But then I learned something new about Gully.
Gully doesn’t just chase seagulls. You know what else he does? He steals. He is a thief. And you know who he steals food from?
Eagles.
This is a bird-obsessed bear. But there’s something interesting about the way he does it. In 2023, bearcam viewers recorded Gully observing bald eagles around the cutbank and stealing their fish. More than once.
Now hold on. Because that got me thinking a whole other thing.
Remember Yogi Bear and his pic-a-nic baskets? Maybe Gully has more in common with Yogi than I actually thought. Except instead of stealing lunches from unsuspecting campers, he’s robbing bald eagles blind.
And stealing someone else’s lunch takes a certain amount of observation and timing, right? Hunting gulls is one thing. But observing an eagle, noticing what it’s caught, and taking advantage of its work? That’s different. That’s a bear that’s paying attention.
What if Gully isn’t just a crazy weirdo? What if he’s unusually observant? What if he’s open to trying things other bears overlook? Maybe he’s noticing opportunities and thinking, “Well, why not?” Maybe Gully isn’t making crazy, ridiculous decisions. Maybe he’s actually onto something.
And then another point occurred to me.
GULLY’S STILL FAT.
He’s not some scrawny, desperate bear chasing seagulls because he’s starving to death and can’t catch a salmon and nobody will share with him. He’s eating salmon. He’s getting fat. He’s doing the bear job. He’s got a big furry butt.
Maybe I’ve been kind of unfairly judging him and his extracurricular activities. Because, I mean, who says everything a bear does has to be the most efficient activity? Probably not the bears.
Maybe he’s curious. Maybe he’s looking for an opportunity. Maybe he just likes chasing things that fly. Maybe he thinks seagulls are fun to chase.
Maybe the birds are a side quest.
OMG. Gully has side quests. HE’S GOING ON AN ADVENTURE!
Not literally. I can’t know what’s going on in his little bear brain. But I can’t help imagining that this is kind of fun, right? He did the thing. Completed the job. Am fat. Eat salmon. Be bear.
And every once in a while, maybe he decides there’s something else he should investigate. A seagull. An eagle with a fish. A new opportunity. Lord knows what he gets up to when we can’t see him. The cameras only catch so much, right?
I started this whole thing wondering what on earth is wrong with this bear. Why is he chasing seagulls when there’s plenty of salmon and all he has to do is what Bucky does and sit there and get fat?
Now I’m wondering: is he actually pretty smart? Or is he just really having a good time?
I don’t know. But I’m kind of interested to find out. I want to see what happens next. What does Gully get up to on the next season of Katmai Bears?
A Note for the Curious
If you’d like to meet Gully, Bucky, and the other bears of Katmai, you can find them on Explore.org’s live bearcams. Fair warning: you may find yourself developing favorite bears, too.
For more about Gully’s unusual habits, see Explore.org’s bear profiles and the Katmai Bearcams Wiki.
Featured photograph: NPS / C. Cravatta, September 8, 2024. Public domain.
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