Along Montana's Rocky Mountain Front
November Blog
This month: lots of news items - it's been a busy fall; and the season is spiraling toward winter and hibernation.
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November
A whole bunch of news items this month:
Two stories about a high rofile conflict incident; see my December blog for a very good Missoulian piece on this:
From the 11/27/07 Daily Inter Lake: Hip shot deters charging grizzly. It happened as fast Vic Workman as could say, “Whoa bear, whoa bear, whoa!” And with that, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks commissioner from Whitefish unleashed a hip shot at a large, charging grizzly bear with his .300 caliber short magnum rifle Sunday morning. From the 11/30/07 Helena IR: FWP commissioners talk about grizzly populations, delisting Days after one of its members was charged by a grizzly bear, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission agreed Thursday to discuss a resolution asking the federal government to provide funding needed to study whether the iconic animals should be removed from the list of endangered species. From the 11/11/07 Bozeman Chronicle: Hunting group intervenes in lawsuit over grizzly bear protection A federal judge has allowed a hunting group to intervene in a lawsuit in which conservation organizations are challenging a federal move to strip grizzly bears in the greater Yellowstone area of Endangered Species Act protections. This is interesting; but what's the logic? Seems to be Safari Club International's point is to move bears back to state management. But the ESA is, for better or for worse, federal law. It's the old state's rights argument. From the 11/11/07 Washington Post: The Brothers Wild
It is the mid-1960s - a warm, sunny day at Yellowstone National Park, where a 500-pound male grizzly bear known as No. 36 is slumped in a drug-induced haze. Even flattened by tranquilizers, the big bear dwarfs the four researchers in Western-style clothing who are racing the clock to pull every piece of data they can from him - weighing him, taking blood samples, checking his teeth. Extensive piece on the Craigheads in the Washington Post, beginning with their early research in Yellowstone which led to modern grizzly bear management science and practices of today. From the 11/8/07 Billings Gazette: Montana Outdoors: Hunters dealing with bolder bears - Advice from FWP not always applicable
If you're on a sight-seeing trip through the mountains while carrying your hunting rifle, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks' advice regarding grizzly bears is great. But if you ever hope to actually fill a tag with an elk or deer, the advice has some problems. Good advice from Don Laubach of Gardiner in the article; it would have been nice if FWP could have also been quoted as to education for hunters in grizzly country. Two stories about the mauling at the Great Bear Adventure park in Coram. From the 11/8/07 Hungry Horse News: Man bitten at bear park, again A 23-year-old male employee was mauled by a brown bear at the Great Bear Adventure Park on Friday afternoon (Nov. 2) in Coram. According to a broadcast report on KOFI radio, the man was identified as Brock Hopkins. A family member said he was recovering and "doing fine." "My son's been bit, my daughter's been bit. Lord knows how many times I've been bit. We've all been bit," he said at the time. "Anyone who works with large animals will have some type of bumps or bruises.". And from KPAX TV News: PETA requests USDA investigation into Coram bear attack
People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), has asked the USDA to launch a full investigation into the Great Bear Adventure Drive-through Park in Coram after a grizzly mauled an employee last week. My two cents: "My son's been bit, my daughter's been bit. Lord knows how many times I've been bit. We've all been bit." So, what are you doing wrong here? From NewWest.net: Grizzly Killed by Pickup: The Photos
Sometimes the weight of a news story isn’t fully felt until pictures ground the abstract. In this case, it’s pictures of a dead 700-pound grizzly bear, hit by a pickup truck on Highway 200 near Lincoln, Montana, about three weeks ago. Interesting that the Grizzly Bear Biologist Jamie Jonkel talks about the "not fun" aspects of managing bears. Bears don't exist on their own around humans anymore: there are conflicts outside of the well publicized hunting incidents that happen and have to be taken care of. Sorry to say, but conflict bears sometimes have to be removed from the population in order to make life more viable for the rest of the grizzlues, most of whom are "invisible" when it comes to human contact. And it's always good to see landowners who understand what it takes to live with bears. From the 11/3/07 Billings Gazette: Known bear deaths increase, but it's no crisis
It's been a deadly year for bears, especially the female grizzlies of the Yellowstone ecosystem. So far, nine adult female grizzlies have died, the most in 24 years of keeping records.... No crisis? And it's the highest mortality of females in 24 years? I think delisting in the Yellowstone Ecosystem will be reevaluated in the end; the mortality rates are just too high. From the 11/3/07 Great Falls Tribune: Groups work to increase the number of conservation easements in the state
A third of the plant species that exist in Montana grow on the Rocky Mountain Front because of its elevation and moisture variants. Grizzly bears still roam in the prairies, and wetlands still exist. That makes the Rocky Mountain Front pretty unique, said Dave Carr, the Nature Conservancy's Rocky Mountain Front program director. The Front is unique and many people - including me - want to see the sum of its parts preserved. Front residents have done huge work towards that end, but still, there are enourmous pressures on landowners who field phone calls offering huge money for their land, sight unseen. But, some people wonder if TNC and conservation easements are really the best deal for the Front, according to the responses to the article on the Great Falls Tribune comment section and refering to a series in the The Washington Post; also available is TNC's response. From the 11/1/07 Jackson Hole News and Guide: Grizzly sow deaths close to upper limit
Less than a year after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed protection for Greater Yellowstone grizzlies under the Endangered Species Act, federal scientists say female grizzly mortalities are approaching the threshold that could trigger a review. Was there a rush to delist? Mortality was always one of the problem points with USFWS's delisting proposal. Too many bears were dying then, and too many bears are dying now. Then, the annual numbers of deaths was averaged to make it look like the individual years' limits weren't being reached each year. Now, what will happen? The season is spiraling toward winter and hibernation It's November, and the days are shortening and we are spiraling down toward winter. The sun is rising one or two minutes later each day, and setting the same one or two minutes earlier, drawing in both corners of the day and squeezing us toward December and the winter solstice. This month alone, we'll loose and hour and a half of daylight. Chickadees have stocked up on seeds from the feeder, stowing them under the edges of bark. A flock of Canadian Geese have been honking in the next field over from my house, grazing the last of the grass and seeds and drinking the last of the water from the irrigation ditch. Some stay all year, moving to a few open ponds around the valley, but most have been tuning up for migration with practice flights, great loops around the valley a few times a day. And bears are moving into hibernation if they are not already denned up, keyed into the seasons. I walk Blue after dark most days, as I need the daylight for work. When the moon was full the first week of this month, it was bright enough to walk in the hills, bright enough to see my own shadow, and for Blue to spot deer on the hillsides who had begun to move away from our crunching in the grass and icy patches of snow. Other nights, between the quarter moon and the orange glow of the streetlights reaching into the hills, I can see just well enough to walk and not well enough to keep from stumbling into gopher holes. To really see the night sky, you need to be away from city glow. On the Front, the scattered light from Great Falls is diminished by the time it reaches the mountains, and you can watch the stars spin around from the dusty horizon of the eastern prairie to the sharp edge of the peaks like a rip in the sky. In the wilderness at night, the stars are really a dusty cloud of light, the Milky Way a river from horizon to peaks, and meteors are bright quick brushstrokes across it all. During winter in the wilderness, the moon and stars glow blue and almost bright as day on the snowpack. The slow clockwork passing of satellites and high jetliners are like children's toys. In the 8/20/07 issue of The New Yorker, David Owen has a great piece on the problem of the lack of dark skies titled The Dark Side: Making war on light pollution.
In Galileo’s time people assumed that the Milky Way must be some kind of continuous substance. It truly resembled a streak of spilled liquid—our word “galaxy” comes from the Greek for milk—and it was so bright that it cast shadows on the ground (as did Jupiter and Venus). Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name When you really see the stars, you can get the smallest feeling of why people first began to tell stories about the shapes and light they saw in the night sky. They recognized the slowly moving planets and the swing of the constellations through the seasons, like the shapes of two bears in their mind's eyes, swinging around the north star through the seasons. Who first recognized the absence of bears in the winter landscape and imagined the shape of a bear in the night sky, lowest in the winter, like it was moving toward a den, and highest in the spring, when bears were first seen again? Ursus Major and Minor, as we call them, are never out of view in the northern hemisphere, like the way bears were never out of mind to early peoples. Hibernation of the most interesting thing that happens in the fall. It's November, and the bears are going to sleep. Call it sleep, but it's not - it's an amazingly complex change in metabolism and behavior: heartbeats slow to ten beats a second, bears birth and nurse cubs while in hibernation, recycle urine and build muscle over the months in their dens. I've come across dens in the summer, high in the mountains, dug into the north sides of ridges, usually, where the snow pack stays longer. Dirt and rocks scattered down hill, a cool musty smell inside that makes me want to curl up and rest out of the sun. It's amazing to think there are hundreds of grizzlies hibernating, right now, back in the wilderness. Southwest of Augusta in the Scapegoat Wilderness, there's a peak called Bear Den Mountain. I wonder if the Falls Creek bear hibernated there? What brings hibernation? The change of daylight? The foods - both kind and quantity - that ripen in the fall? Bears are keyed into a clock we can't imagine, but I can't see a bear calling anything a clock. The cycles that run in the natural world are beyond any idea of clocks and time, any idea of late and early. The bear's clock must turn over in the long days of June, just when the days begin to get shorter and the hottest art of the summer is yet to come. Somehow in the spring, when it's warm enough and there will be winter killed carrion down in the valleys, the bears start to move around. Is hibernation is an evolutionary reaction to lack of available food and harsh climate conditions in winter? Research says so. Bears save immense amounts of energy while they hibernate, energy they would have to spend out looking for food in the winter, and more than likely not be able to replace. In other words, they wouldn't survive. Are hibernating animals more successful as a result, as science trains us to ask? Well, if hibernation allows them to not go extinct. Is hibernation some kind of evolutionary flaw, because it is an unusual method of survival? Maybe. But on the other hand, it's an evolutionary success, as it is a highly specialized metabolic and behavioral modification that allows bears to survive. Is there something that we can learn for our benefit? Washington State University's School of Veterinary Medicine has a program that studies grizzly bears and hibernation, and The Seattle Times has a good article.
"The anatomy of a grizzly bear is close to that of a human," says Dr. Lynne Nelson. "If we can learn how the heart recovers from hibernation, then we may unlock secrets that will help human patients suffering from heart disease." And one hormone produced during hibernation is already being tested to slow decay and lengthen the shelf life of organs harvested for transplant. UW has been raising and training cubs to be good research subjects: teaching them not to bite (they strictly enforce a "no bite" policy) from the very beginning, be comfortable with researchers entering their (artificial) dens during hibernation (they induce hibernation by gradually cutting back on the amount the bears are fed), and to move into a metal crate for exams and blood draws. Researchers plan to continue the four year study, or until the bears get too big to cooperate. (Wonder when that will be?). What about us? People slow down in the fall, and most of us aren't even aware of what is happening. I know I slow down. I think it's good. We all need some time off, to put it in some kind of modern words. I don't see people in the world suddenly going into hibernation, but what would happen if people semi-hibernated? Would we slow down and think more? Everyone needs some downtime, time to contemplate and consider. Would we consume less, buy less, be happy with less? Would we start fewer wars because we'd be less cranky because we got enough sleep? Why not follow the animals and the sun and stars? Everything else in the natural world runs in cycles - why not us? There are many different versions of the saying that goes something like this: "Bears are wiser than men because men don't know how to live all winter without eating anything." If we semi-hibernated, we'd be reacting to the natural world like we should, something we may have the visual and physiological clues for but have learned to ignore. Things are 24/7/365, as they say. And I don't see us going back; we're stuck on fast forward. Bears don't sleep all the way through the winter. All bears move around in their dens, and at least poke their head outside for a look, getting their blood moving for a few hours or a day each month. Their heartbeat and respiration goes up near normal, though they are still very sluggish. It's unusual, but not unheard of to see a grizzly moving around outside their dens a bit in the winter. Chuck Jonkel tells stories of going into grizzly dens to check on hibernating bears, to radio collar them, and check their condition for an idea of how they might do in the spring. The bears would stir, knowing that he was there, but were too sluggish to do anything about it. Around Missoula, some black bears never hibernate - there's too much food available, according to Jamie Jonkel, the Wildlife Management Specialist for the area. They still pack in thousands of calories a day in the fall like every other bear readying for hibernation. Which is easy, or once was, when a bear could climb in the dumpster behind a fast-food place; now it's apples and plums and dog food, if they can find it. But then some Missoula bears continue for the winter, and become very healthy, so to speak. Fat and happy, some would say; and prone to get in conflicts because of food. When Missoula bears do hibernate, sometimes they simply "den up" under logs and leaves and in hollow trees. I haven't yet, but some people around town have come across in the back reaches of the city parks in the Rattlesnake Valley faint fogs of breath rising from simple dirt and leaf dens . Sometimes bears wake up when they'd rather sleep. A few years back, a serious January thaw and a good snow pack sent high water through Rattlesnake Creek culverts under the Interstate, and in those culverts were hibernating black bears, sacked out, I assume, on the concrete above the usual high water mark. They got a rude awakening in the cold water, and then started roaming the lower Rattlesnake, looking for - and finding - food, like dog food and suburban trash. They stayed awake the rest of the winter. There are stories of bears on the Front who never hibernate, mostly big old males who live in a small range all their own and feed on deer and elk carrion and calves. They do well, one landowner tells me, and while the bears will hunker down during a big blow, they stay awake all winter. These grizzlies are on private ranches and are protected in a way by those landowners. Maybe they are too old to hibernate? Maybe their biological clock tells them hibernation will be too much stress, and they have to stay awake and feed. Bears sometimes die during hibernation, while old males are the grizzlies that mostly get in conflicts in the spring, out of their dens first, looking for easy food. It's difficult to think of spring in November, but it's inevitable, like the turning of the Milky Way. By the end of next month, the days will already be geting longer. October: Scapegoat and the Teton
≈ November ≈ December: The Bear Who Stole the Chinook If you like what you have read, consider a tax-deductible contribution to me
for a tire fund for my truck, as I've punched out three good radials on the back roads on the Front so far.
There has been a rash of grizzly attacks on hunters, grizzly shootings and a lot of close encounters with grizzlies and black bears this year that never made the headlines. Incidents have spanned the western half of the state from Gardiner to the Bitterroot to the Rocky Mountain Front.
If the limit is exceeded in two consecutive years, that would trigger a large-scalereview of how grizzlies are being managed in and around Yellowstone National Park that could lead to placing them back on the endangered-species list.
The Front is one area of the state that the Nature Conservancy has identified as biologically unique and intact, and therefore has made it a priority to protect it....The number of acres in Montana in conservation easements held by state and local agencies grew 88 percent between 2000 and 2005, according to the Land Trust Alliance, a national umbrella group for about 1,700 land trusts across the country.
