Peter Gros:
It's late summer in Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park, and an enormous female grizzly moves through the forest. She'll spend up to 20 hours a day in search of high energy foods like roots, grubs, grasses, and white bark pine nuts. At this time of year, she can pack on as much as three pounds a day in preparation for winter, but she's also doing something incredible for the ecosystem. And as she digs for food, her long claws aerate the soil and her scavenging returns nutrients to the ground. She also keeps deer and elk on the move, ensuring that they don't overgraze on shrubs and grasses. She's amazing to behold. It's hard to believe almost 100 years ago, grizzly like her had almost disappeared.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
From roughly 50,000 grizzly bears across 18 states, to fewer than a thousand found only in a handful of mountain strongholds. This is the story of how grizzlies came back, and the people who would never let them disappear. Today, I'm talking with Wes Larson, wildlife biologist, fellow bear expert, and the co-host of the Tooth and Claw Podcast.
Peter Gros:
Wes has spent his career in grizzly country, and he's one of the most compelling voices working to change how people think about this incredible animal. Welcome to Back from the Brink, from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I'm Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant. Each episode, we go deep on species that came to the brink of disappearing, and highlight the people who fought to bring them back.
Peter Gros:
The grizzly bear is one of the most recognizable animals in North America, but most people's idea of what a grizzly actually is and what it does, is wrong.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Wes Larson, welcome to Back from the Brink Podcast. I was just in Yellowstone a week ago on a really just great project and I was so close with them. They're so massive and yet kind of, I think, quietly dignified. And I believe that a lot of folks think that they know a lot about them and think that they understand them, but might actually be surprised when they figure out what a grizzly bear actually is or isn't. What does a grizzly bear look like and how might people get it confused with another bear species?
Wes Larson:
It is something that people often get confused, because this is a bear just like black bears and some of our other bear species that can have a lot of different variations when it comes to color and even body size. But as far as some general characteristics of grizzly bears, they're typically larger than their cousins, the black bears. They tend to be bigger. They have long straight claws that are evolved for digging rather than climbing. They often have a hump of muscle on their back that is used again for digging. It's evolved to help them dig up a lot of their different food sources.
And then in my opinion, the best way to kind of tell them apart from black bears is they have a different facial shape. Their face is a little bit more dish shaped and it has kind of this Roman nose that people always describe that and it's hard to really conceptualize it without just looking at hundreds of photos of grizzly bears and black bears. And I know you feel this way too probably, but once you have those two bears in your mind, it's on the spot, you can know which is which, mostly because of that facial shape.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Okay, I really, really, really want you to now talk about this digging. Because when people think of a grizzly bear, they think of a ferocious predator that is constantly on the hunt. But you brought up some really key things about their claws and you mentioned digging a couple of times. So why would a grizzly bear dig, Wes?
Wes Larson:
That perception of them being carnivores and predators, they are predators, but especially our interior grizzlies are going to be eating a lot of vegetation, a lot of roots. They dig for insects, they dig for ground squirrels. They eat a lot of stuff underground. And this is an animal that used to exist out in the Great Plains where they were constantly digging for their food and their preferences really changed throughout the year. This time of year, I know you were just in Yellowstone, there's all this new grass that's growing up, and the top of that grass is just really rich in nutrients. So you probably saw this, but when you're in Yellowstone this time of year, there's a lot of grizzly bears that are just out there grazing. They're just eating grass and digging up roots. And I think a lot of people have this vision of grizzly bears sitting there and eating salmon.
And there are bears that live in Alaska or wherever else in Russia that literally will just essentially live on the side of a salmon stream for months, because they have that plentiful, consistent food source. But our bears here in Yellowstone and Montana have to be a lot more creative in how they find food, and a lot of that is digging.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
That is exactly what I saw in Yellowstone last week. There was a bunch of folks, biologists included, parked up near a bison carcass just waiting for a grizzly bear to come and feed on the bison carcass. But lo and behold, a mile away, we're seeing this huge male grizzly bear, I mean, big 600, 700 pound animal eating roots and tubers and grasses, because they are emerging from hibernation and there's so much nutrients, like you said, in these grasses.
Wes Larson:
Yeah. Yeah. And part of that too is at a bison carcass, there's a decent chance you run into another bear or a pack of wolves or something that's a risk that these bears have to accept. But if you're just grazing and digging up roots, there's plenty of that for everyone and there's not a lot of conflict or competition over that resource. So I think that's also part of the equation there, is a bison carcass is a scary place even for a grizzly bear.
Peter Gros:
It's hard to imagine what could bring down these huge resourceful animals, but the grizzlies decline wasn't an accident. Sadly, it was systematic. Bounties, poisons, habitat loss. By the time anybody started paying attention, the most powerful predator in North America had been pushed into just a few mountain corners. And then in Yellowstone, one of its last strongholds, something happened that nearly finished the job.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Let's focus on Yellowstone, Montana, this area. I think we can kind of really just acknowledge that at one point they were very abundant. We had tens of thousands of them, if not hundreds of thousands of them throughout North America, and they were thriving. And then with colonial settlement came extermination.
Wes Larson:
Yeah, I think that's a perfect tee up. So in the lower 48, their range used to be really extensive, all the way down into Northern Mexico, as far east as Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas. But with colonizing and with all these different things that happened, predator control, predator management programs, their range was vastly reduced. And in large part just due to people coming over here and killing bears. Ranchers that were afraid of them, just general fear of predators. And they were extirpated pretty quickly. And a lot of these bears were bears that lived out on the plains were pretty easy to see and kill and remove. And their strongholds really turned into these places where they were much harder to get at and their access wasn't... It was harder to find these bears. In the early 1900s, it was these direct campaigns to eliminate grizzly bears that resulted in us losing, I think, 98% of their former range and we're down to 2% in the lower 48.
But now the big threat that they're facing is just habitat loss. Hunting and they get surprised by grizzly bear and they shoot it. There are a lot of vehicle strikes that happen with this animal. There are conflict fatalities where a bear is being a little naughty or whatever, and the managers have to go remove that bear from the population. So there's other things that are facing them, but really habitat loss is the big one in our modern day. And that's the thing that we've been talking about is it really needs to be improved on for them to be connected.
Peter Gros:
Despite the early 20th century campaign to eliminate grizzlies, there were a few maneuvers at the time that made a critical difference.
Wes Larson:
Montana has the most bears right now in the lower 48, and part of that is because in the early 1900s and 1930s, some of the people that were making those decisions in Montana realized the importance of having grizzly bears in Montana. And they put an end to pursuit with dogs and baiting for grizzly bears, which were the two most effective ways to catch them and kill them. And that really slowed that decline down in Montana. And then in Wyoming in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, they were such a draw to the National Park and they were so important to that entire experience that while they're killing their wolves and their mountain lions and some of their other predators, they kind of gave their bears a bit of a break in Yellowstone. And that also allowed that to be another source population in the lower 48. So that in the mid 1900s were up until 1975, we're looking at around a thousand bears by the time they were protected by the Endangered Species Act in 1975, even less than a thousand in the lower 48.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Those are the numbers that I'm also familiar with. 700 to a thousand left, in a really divided population of people. Some saying like, "Well, good. We can live and work our land better without these bears around." And others saying, "Perhaps we took things too far or we shouldn't have exterminated them at all." And I'm glad you brought up Yellowstone National Park, which is a very, very, very old national park. In some ways, technically the first. And Yellowstone was a stronghold for grizzly bears, still is. But in the '70s, they had all of these garbage piles. And a lot of the bear viewing was at the garbage piles. But then folks woke up and realized that wasn't necessarily a great move.
Wes Larson:
In the decades leading up to 1970, they had these big open pit garbage dumps scattered throughout Yellowstone. There was four or five of them. And they had literal bleachers set up around these dumps. And people would gather every night and watch the bears come up and eat all this food waste. And it was a reliable way to see grizzly bears, they got huge and fat, and they were very happy bears where they didn't really have to compete and they just kind of sat there and they weren't very wild anymore. I mean, these were essentially just garbage dump bears. And that continued for a while. And the park kind of started realizing they were having a lot of conflicts every year with bears. They were having about 50 incidents every year of people being bitten or injured by bears, which was a lot. And they thought we need to do something about this.
So they slowly were kind of starting to make changes, planning to close dumps. And then in 1967 in Glacier National Park, two women were killed on the same night by two different grizzly bears. It's often referred to as the Night of the Grizzlies. We did a three-part series on it on Tooth and Claw. That incident echoed throughout the national park system. People really realized, okay, this is an animal that has some potential danger to it that we need to treat a little bit differently than we've been treating. And they quickly closed the dumps then. The last one closed in 1970. And we were left with these bears that were so used to human food and didn't really know where to go now that they didn't have access to these dumps. And in the following years, they had to either euthanize or relocate a lot of those bears.
And it was kind of this cleansing period in Yellowstone where unfortunately a lot of these bears that were totally food conditioned had to be removed from that population. And that left the wild bears, the ones that weren't food conditioned or totally habituated to people. And that's where all of our bears we currently have in Yellowstone stem from, was that population that was left after they changed that policy with the dumps.
Peter Gros:
Closing the dumps was a tricky move. The food conditioned bears had become dependent on them and the hard stop on that food source meant further population loss. But it also meant that people were taking notice. In the 1970s was the start of a significant push to bring grizzlies back.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
We're in the '70s. We have very few grizzly bears in Montana and in Yellowstone because of some of the policies that have been in place for decades. We have grizzly bears that are protected within the National Park. And then take us through the next several decades. There's some bad news going on, so how do things start to get a little bit better?
Wes Larson:
So in 75 was kind of the first big step forward for grizzly bears, and that's when they received protections under the Endangered Species Act. And then the next really great thing that happened was in 1983, the Inter-Agency Grizzly Bear Study Team was formed. And that consisted of people in the National Park Service and USGS, US Fish and Wildlife Service, that essentially decided they were going to combine this amazing pool of knowledge to figure out how to properly conserve this animal and give them the kind of things they need to spread across the West in ways that they used to. So they had six kind of recovery zones that they outlied, the greater Yellowstone ecosystem being one of them. And I was lucky enough to work when I was in Yellowstone under Carrie Gunther, who is the guy when it comes to Yellowstone grizzly bears. He's done more for them than anyone that I know of personally.
And a lot of those early days was just really hazing bears that were too habituated or food conditioned, moving bears that were problem bears, or getting rid of ones that had gone too far, and kind of cleaning out that population, making it wilder. And over time, those kind of processes and the ways that they hazed got better and better and better. And now in Yellowstone where they used to have like 50 conflicts a year that were injuries to humans, now they average one per year, which is a huge step in the right direction. We'd love it if there wasn't any, but they respond quickly to any bears that are food conditioned, they allow for some habituation, that's why people are able to do what you did last week, go up and see these bears in these meadows and get some incredible photos and experiences.
But the whole outlook kind of toward grizzly bears has changed, and that's allowed these strongholds to really grow. And now in Yellowstone, there's probably over a thousand grizzly bears just in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. And then the Northern Continental Divide or Glacier was kind of the hotspot. There's over a thousand there as well. And the goal now is that they connect those populations, that the bitterroots start having grizzly bears, that Selkirks have more, and that they connect all the way up into the Yukon and to some of these other populations in Canada.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
You're saying the magic word, Wes, and that is connection and connectivity. And this is not a simple thing. So many people can look at a map and see where the Yellowstone ecosystem is and see where the glacier ecosystem is, and say, "Okay, great. Well, yeah, I mean, I guess these two protected areas need to be connected so bears can just walk back and forth." But the corridors, the wildlife corridors that are necessary to connect these areas don't just exist. Or I should say maybe they do exist, but humans actually kind of get in the way by modifying landscapes for our own use. So can you tell us a little bit about the conservation initiatives that exist today that aim to create wildlife corridors to connect these two parts of the world?
Wes Larson:
So a famous one is Yellowstone to Yukon, which is a nonprofit that is doing exactly what you just said. They're trying to create safe corridors in between these populations all the way through this western part of their range up into the Yukon. But then each of these different agencies and organizations, places like Vital Ground here in Montana, or the US Fish and Wildlife Service, they're all doing what they can with each of these different populations to make sure they're healthy enough to where these grizzlies are going to naturally just spread out from a population and repopulate these areas that they used to exist in. And that's happening in Yellowstone. It's happening in Glacier too, where some of these biologists think that they're kind of at capacity, carrying capacity for grizzly bears. And because of that, these new individuals are going to spread out into places where there aren't already bears. We're seeing bears out in the plains again, we're seeing them in exciting places, and I do think it's a conservation success story and it's one that a lot of people should be really proud of.
Peter Gros:
Bears pushing to the plains for the first time in a century. That expansion doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens on working land. And some of the most surprising partners in grizzly recovery have been the ranchers.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
What I noticed in my work in Eastern Montana was that there are so many different, very large cattle ranches. So the landscape is just dotted and fragmented by cattle ranches. And a lot of the corridors that grizzly bears might take just to move wherever they're moving actually go right through cattle ranches. And although that might sound like a problem, I was able to meet and interact with so many cattle ranchers who actually believe in and have adopted wildlife-friendly ranching techniques and welcome grizzly bears on their ranch, sometimes even engaging in ecotourism themselves on their own properties. And I'm curious, what have you seen regarding some cattle ranchers actually being able to support conservation?
Wes Larson:
There definitely are different types of ranchers out there. There's ones that are very antagonistic toward grizzly bears, but then there's ones like you're talking about that understand that part of the deal of living in Montana and living in grizzly bear country is that there might be bears sometimes. You might lose some animals to them, they might be passing through. But one example I think of is up in Tom Minor Basin, there's a ranch all the way kind of at the end of the basin, which you probably know of and have visited, where some of their feed that they were using for these cattles had caraway root in it. And as it spread through their fields, they started growing caraway and they weren't necessarily, I believe, trying to grow it, but the bears keyed in on this and this was a great source of food for them.
And now in the fall, I've been out there where I've seen 13 grizzly bears out in the field at once, which is just incredible. And that ranch has learned to coexist with those bears. They've learned where to move their cattle, they have these range riders that are in charge of protecting the cattle from bears. They use dogs, they use fences, they use all these different tools that work really well to allow the bears to exist on the same landscape as their animals and not only exist, but thrive. And so I think it's this really interesting case study that shows that it is possible. And like you were mentioning, if we do have people that are invested like that, then it does create these corridors that allow the bears to pass through and move and spread out more effectively. And I do think that is a beautiful example of how it can be done.
Peter Gros:
The recovery is real, but what comes next is still being decided. It's important to be careful about how we look at it.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I think we can agree that grizzly bears in some parts of North America were on the brink of extinction at one point and they no longer are. However, we still have a lot of North America that is devoid of grizzly bears. There are parts of the West that still don't have a single one, that used to have many, many, many thousands of them. And so I'm curious what you think we might start to see when it comes to grizzly bear conservation into the future, and what you would like to see.
Wes Larson:
I think what I would like to see and what we might see could be different, and I think that's just part of the climate that we're living in currently when it comes to wildlife management in the West. Like the kind of reality check that unfortunately this has been a heavily politicized thing out here, much the way that wolf reintroduction and conservation has been politicized. And I'm talking about both sides here because there have been some really good conservation plans laid out for de-listing grizzly bears that everyone was kind of on board for, and they got shut down. And now the people that are pushing for de-listing are people that want to aggressively hunt grizzly bears. And the pendulum is kind of swinging too far in either direction in my opinion. And people, including myself, are really nervous to celebrate this win and say, "Hey, we have restored grizzly bears to healthy levels to where they can be de-listed.
We don't want to do that because we're worried about how aggressively they might be managed after that point, with some of the decisions that are being made by these state governments." So that's kind of the big talking point surrounding grizzly bear conservation right now in the West, is when they're going to be de-listed and what those management programs are going to look like once that happens. And I'm hoping, what I'm hoping for is cooler heads, people that are going off of science and that are making smart decisions based on surplus animals when that happens. Now, as far as the rest of that, what I hope happens, I would love to see grizzly bears back in California. I'd love to see them back in the Cascades where they're planning reintroduction programs. I live in the Bitterroot mountains in Montana. I'm right at the southern edge of the Northern Continental Divide population, but they could easily move into these mountains here that I live in.
And I would love to see that as well. I would love to see grizzly bears in places where they belong, where they were extirpated by us, where they've been so important to the indigenous peoples in those areas. That's my hope is to see that happen. Worldwide, this bear's doing fine. They're least concerned worldwide. But in the lower 48, they are still protected and there is still a lot of work that needs to be done for them.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I'd love to hear you share what people can do to support grizzly bears or in grizzly bear conservation. There are so many people who are listening to this podcast who have never seen one in real life, but they really want to know what kind of actions they can take to be a part of solutions for grizzlies.
Wes Larson:
There's this whole spectrum. I think what you just said, if you have the opportunity to go see one, if you can make it to Yellowstone or Glacier or one of these places where you have a chance of seeing a grizzly bear, I definitely encourage that, because I think forming that connection with this animal, whether it's in the wild or in a zoo, you form a bond and it makes you care more about them. And you just start to make choices that are going to be beneficial to wildlife. And I think that is the first step. And then a big conservation tool that I'm always praising and that I think everyone should be aware of, is if you're in grizzly bear country, you should carry bear spray. And the reason bear spray is so important as a conservation tool is it can get you out of really bad situations with grizzly bears.
But the most important part of it, in my opinion, is that the bear also gets to leave that encounter and it gets to leave alive. And it's taught a valuable lesson about approaching people. And for me, that's why I see it as a great conservation tool and one that anyone recreating in grizzly bear country should have. So that's my next piece of advice. And then I think top level, there are some great organizations out there that work directly with grizzly bear conservation. I'm on the board for the Grizzly Bear Foundation, which is based out of Canada. They do some amazing work in Canada with Grizzly Bear Recovery. Vital Ground here in Montana does some incredible work. Swan Valley Connections is another one. There's some really good nonprofits out there that are doing great work with connectivity, with education, with conflict prevention, and they are always in need of funding.
So if you have any extra cash, those are great places to put it. I just think people should care about these animals because A, every animal has this fundamental right to exist. But then also this is an animal that's very important to us culturally and I think spiritually. Personally, I don't want to see every wild space in the US turn into a park, something that feels very safe to recreate in and that you don't have to feel that feeling that I was talking about earlier, that primal kind of connection to nature where you have to pay attention to your surroundings and you have to be connected at a different level. I think that feeling's really important. And I think we lose that when we lose an animal like a grizzly bear. And that's part of the human condition that we're losing.
There's a reason that people are interested in grizzly bears and tigers and lions and great white sharks and these different animals that all bring that feeling to their respective ecosystems. They loom so large because they are so important to us as people. And I don't want to live in a world that doesn't have grizzly bears.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
If this episode especially activated you, follow or subscribe, leave us a review, and send it to a friend, maybe someone who loves bears as much as me and Wes do, or enjoys the Yellowstone ecosystem and seeing all of the native wildlife. I'm Dr. Ray Wynn Grant, and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 4:
The Back from the Brink Podcast is sponsored by Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, hosted by Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, narrated by Peter Gros. Executive producers are Jen Wulf and Jenny VanSoelen, podcast production by Lower Street Media.
