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by Leon Kolankiewicz
I just completed my week-long foray to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as part of the study of urban sprawl in the ecosystem that NumbersUSA is actively conducting. Sprawl permanently destroys and fragments crucial low-elevation habitat and large mammal migration corridors, thus harming wildlife in this world-renowned ecosystem.
Earlier in my career, I was a fisheries biologist and technician in Alaska, handling hundreds of thousands of Pacific salmonids (mostly coho salmon) in the isolated and vast wilderness areas where they hatched in the same cold streams to which they returned years later to spawn and die, completing the cycle of life. Just before departing their own lives, spawners imparted the gift of life to the next generation of their kind. Here in “The Last Frontier” I had the privilege of frequent and often uncomfortably close encounters with Alaska brown bears (aka grizzlies, Ursus arctos).
These bruins were keenly interested in the very same salmon resource that I was, but whereas I was studying and counting these anadromous fish for sustainable fishery management purposes, the bears were here to devour them – in one great link in the food chain. In fact, they relied heavily on calories and protein from salmon to build their fat reserves to survive the onset of lean winter months and hibernation.
Photo: Leon Kolankiewicz
Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Until a week ago, it had been about 40 years since I’d seen a grizzly bear in the wild. That changed the very day I visited Yellowstone National Park for the first time in my life. And for the first time ever I was greeted with the sight of a grizzly – three of them in fact (a mom and two cubs) – outside of Alaska.
My sighting of a grizzly mother (sow) and her two smallish cubs in tow took place close to the North Entrance of Yellowstone at Gardiner, Montana. They were a good quarter-mile away or more from the caravan of vehicles and transfixed, pointing humans with tripods, absurdly long camouflaged camera lenses, binoculars, and spotting scopes. This commotion was a far cry from my typical encounters with grizz in Alaska – where it was just me (sometimes with a single partner) and one or more bears – in remote regions where the population density of U. arctos heavily outnumbered that of H. sapiens.
But this experience was a bit of an epiphany for me: highlighting just how much the wildlife of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), especially “charismatic megafauna” like grizzly bears, mean to people in our contemporary, overpopulated world with so little left that is truly “wild”. The GYE is the only substantial ecosystem in the entire Lower 48 retaining its entire complement of wild critters that existed when Euro-Americans first arrived here centuries ago.
In fits and starts, the grizzly population has been slowly increasing and expanding here, moving down into Grand Teton National Park to the south for instance. It now numbers about a thousand in the GYE, up from just 136 in 1975, compared to tens of thousands in the much larger area of Alaska.
Photo: StevenPDeVries, Creative Commons
The three grizzlies I saw that first day in Yellowstone weren’t the only ones I was lucky to witness. Two days later, I saw another female with her own two chubby yearling cubs calmly foraging in another part of the park while a dozen vehicles and their mesmerized occupants gawked intently from150 yards away.
And down in the Grand Tetons, I came close to seeing a veritable celebrity – the iconic Grizzly 399, dubbed “The World’s Most Famous Bear.” 399 is a 400-lb, 28-year old female grizz that is documented to have produced 18 cubs, including her current one, a one-year old still foraging with her. 399 is the subject of a PBS Nature documentary, “Queen of the Tetons.”
A full-fledged “bear jam” was underway, and eager park visitors lined up on the roadside – armed not with guns but with lenses – hoping for even a glimpse of 399 and her cub as if she were Taylor Swift.
But the reality of the ever-present potential for things to go badly wrong in grizzly-human interactions also made itself painfully apparent just days before I arrived in the Grand Tetons. A grizzly badly mauled a hiker; according to the 35-year-old man from Massachusetts, who survived, manhandled and perhaps wiser, he was bushwhacking in dense forest when the bear attacked suddenly and without warning, biting him viciously in several places.
When it bit his hand, gripping a canister of bear spray (which he never even had a chance to use), the can exploded in the face of the bear. This irritating jolt of hot pepper in the eyes startled his attacker, drove it off, and perhaps saved the hiker’s life.
To its credit, National Park Service (NPS) officials announced that they would not pursue and destroy or relocate the bear. It “won’t be captured or killed because it may have been trying to protect a cub.” Grizzly bears weren’t always treated with such leniency. During the first half of the 20th century, NPS routinely killed bears and other predators – whether they had attacked humans or not – under the misguided and simplistic belief that they were eliminating nature’s killers.
Photo: StevenPDeVries, Creative Commons
Attitudes towards predators and carnivores have certainly evolved and improved over the years, not just among professional wildland and wildlife managers like the NPS and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but among the American public at large.
And nowhere was this on better display than among the hordes of park visitors at Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks lined up and blocking traffic so they could see the parks’ superstars with their own eyes. The relationship between humans and bears is a primordial one going back tens of thousands of years, and we all feel its pull. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem preserves and honors this ancient bond, and that is one of the reasons we must preserve it.
