Brown BearPhotos, Pictures, Prints

View brown bear photos, license brown bear stock pictures, and buy stunning brown bear prints by award winning professional photographer Jon Cornforth. To license an image for editorial or commercial use, click on the License Image button and fill out the form. To purchase a fine art print, select your image size and presentation style before clicking on the Buy Print button.

Information about brown bears

The brown bear (Ursus arctos) is an omnivorous mammal of the family Ursidae. It’s populations live across much of northern Eurasia and North America. Variable in size, this species weighs between 220-1,500lbs (100-680kg). Because of this range, the largest subspecies, the Kodiak bear, is as big as the polar bear.

Photographers often shoot of brown bears on the Alaskan peninsula, at the Katmai National Park and McNeil River. Katmai contains the world’s largest protected brown bear population. This is estimated to number in excess of 2,000. Bears are especially likely to congregate at the Brooks Falls viewing platform when the salmon are spawning.

Meanwhile, coastal areas of the park, such as Hallo Bay, Kukak Bay and Chiniak, host the highest population densities year-round. This is due to the availability of clams and edible coastal sedge as well as salmon and other fish.

The vast majority of Katmai visitors come to Brooks Camp, one of the only developed areas of the park. Rangers at the park are extremely careful not to allow bears to obtain human food or get into confrontations with humans. As a result, bears in Katmai National Park are uniquely unafraid of and uninterested in humans, and will allow people to approach and photograph them much more closely than bears elsewhere.

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