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John Waller is a Park Ranger and Wildlife Biologist at Glacier National Park. He has spent over 20-years at the park and has accomplished many incredible feats during his tenure with the National Park Service.
In this conversation, John and I go in-depth on grizzly bears and the carnivores that roam Glacier National Park. We cover grizzly behavior, share stories about John's incredible wildlife encounters, visitor and carnivore safety, plus a whole lot more.
Big thanks to John for joining me on the podcast! I think this is one of our most authentic conversations yet.
You can also watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ofojKsauwYg
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Safetravelspod.com
In this conversation, John and I go in-depth on grizzly bears and the carnivores that roam Glacier National Park. We cover grizzly behavior, share stories about John's incredible wildlife encounters, visitor and carnivore safety, plus a whole lot more.
Big thanks to John for joining me on the podcast! I think this is one of our most authentic conversations yet.
You can also watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ofojKsauwYg
______________
Follow us on social!
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/safetravelspod
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@safetravelspod
YouTube: youtube.com/@safetravelspod
Safetravelspod.com
Creators and Guests
Host
Joey Liberatore
What is Safe Travels?
Safe Travels explores National Parks and wild places through in-depth conversations with the people who know them best - park rangers, scientists, biologists, geologists, archaeologists, and conservationists.
Each episode goes beyond travel tips to uncover the science, history, wildlife, and conservation stories that bring these landscapes to life.
Hosted by Joey Liberatore, Safe Travels Pod turns expert insight into engaging, accessible conversations - helping listeners experience public lands with deeper understanding and appreciation.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for checking out the Safe Travels Podcast. My name is Joey. Today, I'm at Glacier National Park, I sat down with John Waller who is a wildlife biologist here at Glacier National Park. He is a carnivore expert, and in this conversation, we talked a whole lot about bears and the various carnivores that roam Glacier National Park.
Speaker 1:John, it's a honor to have you on. You've had a long journey here at Glacier National Park as a wildlife biologist and a carnivore expert. So thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're welcome. My pleasure.
Speaker 1:We talked a little bit off camera. You've had a whole life of recreating outdoors and exploring outside. You're originally from Maryland. What was your childhood like?
Speaker 2:Oh, I grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC and my dad was the curator of paleontology at the Smithsonian. So I got to travel around a lot with him when he was doing his work and later I got into scouting, I became Eagle Scout and went to summer camp and all that good stuff went to Philmont, kind of my introduction to the West and sort of hooked me at an early age. So as soon as I got out of high school, I headed West, studied wildlife biology at the University of Montana, got my bachelor's degree there. And then shortly after graduation, I got a seasonal job trapping bears, which I didn't know anything about at the time, but they they trained me. And that turned into a career.
Speaker 2:Basically, I went back to school for a master's degree studying grizzly bear ecology. Went back to work for the fish and game department for about ten years, and then went back to school for a doctorate working for the grizzly bear recovery program. And then I just happened to see a biologist job open at the park, and so I applied and got the job. So here I am two decades later.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. What, struck you particularly about wildlife and carnivores at a young age that made you think that you wanted to study this and be in this field for essentially your whole life?
Speaker 2:You know, it was really just the outdoor aspect of it that attracted me And I actually, I went to school, I I began studying forestry because I like being in the woods, but I quickly learned that forestry was all about trees and trees weren't near as interesting as the the animals that lived in the woods. So I changed my major to wildlife and and started down that path. And I there was nothing about carnivores or bears that was that really attracted me that that's what I wanted to do. It was really any wildlife I thought was interesting.
Speaker 1:It feels like this podcast between you and I was really meant to be because we have Lake McDonald behind us and this beautiful view but right as we were setting up, you saw a carnivore right behind our cameras and pointed out immediately, what did we see behind the cameras?
Speaker 2:That was a red fox. Yeah. They're not a uncommon animal around here. Unfortunately, people feed them so they can be pretty
Speaker 1:forward around people. We'll talk a lot about the carnivores here in Glacier National Park but you had mentioned that you're a lover of all animals, carnivores and all wildlife that's here but you have a particular interest and fondness of bears. Where did that interest come from?
Speaker 2:I I think it really grew, you know, when I started working for the fish and game department and trapping bears. Nothing really teaches you about wildlife like trapping because you're out there interacting with the animal, you know, you're they're challenging you. You have to know how they think and what they're gonna do because you're trying to get them to step into a trap. You know, so you're trying to get an animal to step into a spot that's this big. You really need to understand how they see the world and how they're gonna react in different scenarios.
Speaker 2:And then in the course of you know, it was a research project where we were trying to catch grizzly bears, but in the for every grizzly bear we'd catch, we'd probably catch 20 or 30 black bears. And so we got to handle a lot of bears and so you see each one, the nuances of their behavior and how they respond to you and to the world around them and then put radio collars on the grizzly bears and let them go and then you're tracking them through the woods and learning about what they do and how they live and so you really build a lot of, I'd say, empathy for the animal. You know, you see the challenges that they face, the the setbacks that they have and and I, you know, I'd hesitate to call it love, but, you know, you really you learn a lot about the animals you study.
Speaker 1:When we were talking off camera too, you had I had asked if they kind of feel like family to you and you gave a interesting answer on that, about becoming too close to the bear. Why do you why shouldn't we become too close to the bear emotionally in that way and where they kinda feel one with you?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So bears lead tough lives, you know. I mean, they basically live with their teeth and claw and it's not an easy path. And one thing they really don't need is close personal relationships with people. And I think it's not true the other way around.
Speaker 2:I think some people need close personal relationships with bears to fulfill some you know, something that's missing in their lives a lot of times, you know, and that it's not really a healthy thing because I think it erodes the respect that people should have for bears. They're not people. And I people are really pretty dangerous animals and having bears close to people is not good for bears. It often ends up with humans have a strong innate desire to feed, you know, whether it's your kids. I mean, I fed my kids so I guess that's good but, you know, people like to feed wildlife and when you feed a bear that can be disastrous for them.
Speaker 1:I do wanna talk about the downstream effects of what occurs when you do feed a bear but taking a step back, you talked about your early career was trapping the bears and unless, you know, even common practice today in some national parks, it's essential to be able to research these bears, collar them like you had mentioned. Does trapping, does it harm the bear in any way? And what is that process like? I I heard at Glacier, you guys brew your own type of formula to be able to lure the bear, to that trap. So what what is that process like?
Speaker 2:It it can be harmful to bears under certain circumstances. And that's why, you know, every research project that's undertaken, typically now there's review committees that review the the methodologies and make sure that they're what you need to do to get the results that you need or that you want. Since the development of DNA methodologies, I'd say that's a lot less trapping goes on now than there was thirty years ago. But sometimes you need to trap an animal, The main reason is to put a collar on them and the collar allows you to really follow them closely, their movement patterns, which you can't get from DNA for the most part. And you learn a lot from that.
Speaker 2:So every time we collar an animal, we really make an effort to get as much information out of that as you can, you know, to honor the animal. You know, I have seen projects where it almost, you know, it's like sport trapping, you know, people are just out to catch the bears and which and the worst thing is to see them collar animals and then run out of funding or something and just walk away from it. And that's really a shame and unethical in my view. You know, if you're gonna trap an animal, expose them to risk of injury and hang a electronic device around their neck, get you owe that animal your absolute best ability to make the most of that as you can.
Speaker 1:Other times where specific bears are or carnivores or any wildlife is targeted or is it always when it comes to trapping kind of luck of the draw on which bear you get?
Speaker 2:Depends why you're trapping. If it's research trapping, typically it's more luck of the draw sort of random, you know, who happens to walk into your trap. If it's we call
Speaker 1:it management trapping, so in that case you're targeting a specific problem bear or a bear that for some reason has done something where he needs to be captured. What about the the homemade lure that Glacier National Park has in order to attract bears to these traps?
Speaker 2:Well, I can't take credit for the formula but it's been developed. It's it's a mixture of cattle blood and fish guts and fermented for a special amount of time that makes it very odiferous.
Speaker 1:And bears take a liking to the the smells that it emits?
Speaker 2:It carries a long way, it's really it's kinda clingy. If you work with it a while, it gets into your clothes and stuff and other people don't like it so much, I found out.
Speaker 1:National parks, are pristine and they're amazing places and Glacier is actually a great example of this. It's the first park that really developed a road that was one of the main attractions of the park to drive on going to the Sun Road, to drive to drive up to Logan Pass and see Heaven's Peak, but roads and human interaction create complications with carnivores and bears as as you had mentioned. What's that almost like ecology like between carnivores, bears, and roads and the dangers that these roads pose to these animals that are used to just roaming freely? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, mean it's Well, here's bear, here's car. That probably doesn't come over the radio very well, but face yeah. I mean, infrastructure, automobiles are pose a great risk to bears and really all wildlife. You know, the Sun Road was built, you know, thinking back, you know, when it was conceived in the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2:People didn't weren't thinking of cars as risks to wildlife. Know, there were some early observers that did note that there were a lot of dead animals along the road and that's when cars didn't go much over 25 miles an hour, you know. So I mean this has been coming for a long time but the Sun Road was built at a time when people didn't really recognize the risk that cars pose to wildlife and if we had to do it all over again today, this road never would have been But at that time, the car was sort of a new thing and it was a great way for the average American to tour the country and see places that they may not otherwise may never have had the opportunity to see. So, you know, in that time and in that context, it was a great great thing. You know, the road's an engineering marvel.
Speaker 2:It wasn't easy to build that road over the mountain. But I'm sure it it definitely has had an impact on the park's fauna, you know, we've and flora. You know, we have probably a thousand animals a year hit by cars on the road. But that said, I mean we I'm not aware of any animals that have disappeared from the park due to roads. People driving the road typically go pretty slow and certainly try to avoid hitting animals.
Speaker 2:There's a certain amount of displacement for the animals that that can learn to avoid the roads do so. But you know, we still see lots of animals along the roads so I I guess I'd say that what's happened here hasn't been a a tremendous impairment to the wildlife resource in the park.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of the angle I was thinking is with the amount of bears and other wildlife you have collared, if you're able to track movements specifically around roads, if you're able to identify if they're able to identify what a road is now based on years, decades of habits and displacement like you had mentioned, if you notice any particular movements around roads that would signify that they know exactly what they're crossing or what they're identifying.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting because we've we've never really done any close studies of wildlife movement in relation to the Sun Road. We've been doing that on Highway 2 along the south boundary of the park so we know quite a bit about how that highway affects wildlife movements but they're very different roads. Highway 2 is a high speed interstate highway and the going to Sun Road is not. That's what I did my PhD dissertation on was grizzly bear, How Highway 2 affected grizzly bear movements along the south boundary of the park.
Speaker 2:And so I learned that, you know, the bears have learned to adapt to the volume of traffic on the road, you know, they just cross in the middle of the night and when they do cross, they they run, basically. Mhmm. But we haven't done that same level of research on the to go into Sun Road but we are gonna be doing that soon.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Hopefully. A tidbit into the future. Yeah. This is an interesting time I think at Glacier because this is when the bears start coming out of hibernation and there's already been a number of bears spotted in the park, in fact, right near where we're sitting and all the way up to the lodge at Lake McDonald.
Speaker 1:Is this a special time for you to start seeing the bears and, other wildlife start coming out of hibernation and are you always curious to see who comes out with, with, little babies?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's exciting exciting time. It's, kinda harbinger of the season to come. In fact, just this weekend, we've got a little bear that lives right up there in that mountain named Calypso who just came out of her den.
Speaker 2:So I'll be curious to see if she has little cubs this year. But, yeah, it it's a neat a neat thing, you know, it just bears are so cool. You know, the cubs are born in the den in February and so the cubs have been in the den with mom all winter, never seen the outside world and they're coming out. You just see the awe on their face.
Speaker 1:I was gonna say, I wonder what that's like for them to be able to see, come out of their den and see this landscape and be able to learn from from their mom during the summer of what life is like here in Glacier. Yeah. I bet it's pretty spectacular. Is there a bear here that has a long standing history of producing cubs on an annual basis that you follow?
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's quite a few. You know, we don't make we don't go to great lengths to keep one bear collared for long periods of time. It's more, it's just kinda lucky. Part of the whole process of researching the bears and collaring bears is that you, you're trying to get a random sample of the population and so the bigger the more bears, different bears you have collared, the more representative that sample is of the bigger population.
Speaker 2:We try and keep about a half a dozen bears collared in the park out of a population of, oh, don't know, 300 grizzlies. So it it's important to spread that sample out. But that said, there are some bears that have been collared for a number of years in a row and it's so it's neat to see multiple generations of cubs come out and see how they do.
Speaker 1:So when you decide to uncoller a bear, do they go through that same trapping process for you to then remove that collar?
Speaker 2:No. The technology's amazing now. You know, it used to be that way but well, not early on we put and we still put cotton building in the space or the collar so it'll eventually rot and fall off of its own accord. But we actually have programmable releases where you can plug in the time and date that you want the collar to release. Wow.
Speaker 2:It'll do it. And they also have them where you can do it manually, line of sight. So, you know, if you see the bear up on a hillside and it looks like a good place to go pick up that collar, you push a button and collar drops off.
Speaker 1:Wow. That is really cool. So when you do set the time and date and the collar falls off then it's your job then to go and track down that collar and retrieve it? Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's funny because the you know, we I was lucky enough to be involved with the very first GPS collars to go out and help develop these breakaway devices. And so during the previous study, we ordered a bunch of these collars with the breakaway device on them. They had a little clock inside so you could program the date and time that you wanted to drop off. And that date and time came and none of these collars were dropping off.
Speaker 2:And we were like, what's going on? And we were working with the manufacturer trying to figure out what was going on and what the problem was it turned out is that well, you probably know this, grizzly bears are covered with hair and that hair builds up a static charge. And that collar rubbing on the hair built up enough static electricity that it short circuited the the clock in the little Wow. Breakaway device. So who would have thought?
Speaker 2:That's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's talk about some of the biodiversity here specifically in Glacier National Park. We've talked a lot about bears, we're gonna go back to bears shortly, but what are some of the other carnivores we just mentioned we saw? A red fox behind the cameras. What are some of the other prominent carnivores that are here in this park?
Speaker 2:This is a carnivore rich environment, I guess you'd say. You know, we've got about 20 different species of carnivore from the least weasel right on up to the wolves and grizzly bears, the apex predators. You know, we've got number of different species of cats, you know, lynx, bobcats, mountain lions, and the canids, the foxes and wolves and coyotes. And so it it's a fun place to be.
Speaker 1:What's the hierarchy between all these various carnivores?
Speaker 2:Depends who you ask. You know, you ask a wolf, they're the top top dog. Ask a bear, it's like, no. The bear's the top. It that's kind of a context dependent question, you know, because they all have their own little niches that they specialize in and are good at exploiting.
Speaker 2:Animals like like bears and wolverines tend to be more generalist, you know, that they travel big distances and can exploit a lot of different food resources or you take an animal like a Canada lynx that is pretty much a snowshoe hair specialist, you know, that's their their bread and butter.
Speaker 1:That's so interesting. Do any of the carnivores work together? I know we're talking a little bit before this of a video of a a wolf and a bear almost playing together. Looked like they were having fun and potentially even working together to find food resources. Is that something that actually happens here?
Speaker 2:Not I have not observed. I've I have observed them playing. I think young animals can get lonely and, you know, love to play and will play with anybody that's willing to play. You know, one time I saw a young bull elk chasing Canada geese around on a beach, you know, just you could tell he was just playing. I don't know if the geese were that happy about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, are really, like I told you before, animals have secret lives and it's a good day when you're lucky enough to get a peek into what those lives are really like.
Speaker 1:I was gonna say, you peel back the curtain a little bit? What are those secret lives that you've observed?
Speaker 2:Oh gosh. It's just one of the most amazing things that's when we started wolverine research in the park and we were able to collar wolverine and and see the extent to their movements. That was an amazing thing. We saw one of the male wolverines just amazing animal. He summited Mount Cleveland, the tallest peak in the park in February.
Speaker 2:It's about 5,000 vertical feet in ninety minutes. Wow. Just right up the top and right down the other side, you know, just like holy cow, what in the world was he? What was motivating him? And I I can't answer that question but it was amazing to see see him do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah and I I think you know, in the field of wildlife biology and the technology of radio collaring is really probably in my mind one of the most significant things we've learned about animals' secret lives is their capacity for movement. It used to be we sort of thought of animals as not really going that far and through radio collaring we've learned that they have amazing abilities to travel and disperse. When I was in college, a fellow biologist over on the East Side of the park, a fish and game biologist, was doing an elk study and he put a radio collar on a young bull elk. And back in those days, this was before satellite, so anytime you put a collar out, you had to go up in an airplane and relocate the collar from an airplane, you know, with your headphones and listen for the beeps and zoom in on it. And and so he would do that to locate his collared elk but one disappeared, he could never find it and he figured it died somewhere.
Speaker 2:You know, that happens. They just disappear off the face of the earth and you never really know. But then three years later, he got a call from the fish and game department in Missouri that elk had been hit by a car in Missouri. Wow. And they returned the collar to him.
Speaker 2:You know, hundreds and hundreds of miles away, and I think that elk just hit the Missouri River and followed it east. And so you'd hear stories about that occasionally. Another famous one is the one of the first wolves radio collared in the park in the I guess it was in the nineteen eighties. She traveled way north up into Canada and then way south. I mean, was just this tremendous movement that nobody really expected and we've seen that with Wolverine, you know, Wolverine traveling from, you know, from Yellowstone down into Colorado and then over to North Dakota and just phenomenal.
Speaker 2:You know, at first you just kinda, well, that's an interesting movement, you know, that's a one off but then those reports over time have just been accumulating and so you're realizing that that's not that as unusual as what we used to believe. So it's amazing how animals can move through what's become a human dominated environment.
Speaker 1:Do you think that with all this movement, do you think that animals also get a kick out of exploring and seeing places and just adventure? Like, when you see the Wolverine story of it summoning Mount Cleveland and then coming right back down, almost feels like a like a human just looking to summon the peak and explore. Do you think that's true?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Especially younger animals, there's this thing called dispersal, that's when the young leave the family and set out on their own and you know, I did it. Made my life a long way from where I was raised and animals do the same thing and it's pretty much all animals do that at some level.
Speaker 1:What age does dispersal typically happen with carnivores?
Speaker 2:Usually, it's the time animals reach sexual maturity. It tends to be a lot of species are term male dominated dispersal where it's the males that tend to roam farther than females. Like, my little sister lives not far from where we grew up, but I'm thousands of miles away so there you go. And so, it's certainly true with bears and wolves, know, it's the males tend to be the the explorers and
Speaker 1:I love the way you frame things of that these animals almost have like human like qualities in terms of all their behaviors. It's I think we sometimes we search deep into things trying to find answers, but it seems like your mindset is the answer isn't always far away if you equate it to humans and how we live our lives. It's almost parallel. Yeah. It's funny you say
Speaker 2:that because I was kinda contradicting myself because earlier on I was talking about how people shouldn't, you know, think of animals as humans or
Speaker 1:try to
Speaker 2:develop close relationships with wild animals And and I I do believe that's true, but it's also there's a lot more commonality between us than a lot of times what we like to think Yeah. Too. And, you know, it's it's funny because there was a time when animals were not or wildlife wasn't even viewed as sentient beings, you know, which always struck me as really strange. Because anybody that's owned a pet, you know, whether it's a dog or a cat or a horse or a cow, learns to understand have a relationship with them and understand how they act and that they have feelings and but but to not apply that to wildlife all seemed kinda strange.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is there a a specific animal out here, a bear or any other animal that you've seen on occasion a number of times and it's seen you where you feel like there's almost a comfortability? I know there's three ninety nine out of Grand Teton, people had many stories, rangers had many stories of three ninety nine being able to recognize people, and have a comfortability around them because of experiences. Have you had any of those sort of experiences with wildlife here?
Speaker 2:Oh, I don't know. That's that's the part where I guess I get a little nervous because you're trying to put something on an animal that really you don't have any clue. I mean, you might feel, you know, radio tracking animals is a great example. You know, I I collared dozens of grizzly bears in the in the South Fork of the flathead and I'd fly them three times a week. I'd be up in an airplane and then I'd be on the ground backtracking them, seeing what they're doing and but then when you run into them in the woods at close quarters and you look them in the eye, it becomes immediately clear to you that you have no idea what they're thinking.
Speaker 2:You have no idea how they see you and you probably you don't really know what they're gonna do next, you know? And so it's a great reminder that we might feel like we see these animals often but we really do not have a relationship with them and are basically clueless about what their lives really like. You know, at three ninety nine, I mean, most of the time most of three ninety nine's life was spent outside the view of people. And she was a very visible animal. You know, people got lots of pictures and video of her and but really most of her, if you just look at minute by minute across the span of her life, most of it was out of view of people.
Speaker 2:And I don't know. Three ninety nine is a tough one for me. Know? She was a ambassador bear. She never applied for that job.
Speaker 2:You know, she she was just a bear doing what she felt she needed to do to survive. And unfortunately, it was a set of really dangerous behaviors and for three ninety nine, it was deterministic how she was gonna end. She wasn't gonna die of old age. Because like I said, people are dangerous and it, you know, she's either gonna get shot or run over and it turned out to be the latter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And like you mentioned, she was an ambassador bear and I think for a lot of people, thankfully brought attention to these concerns of bears. Unfortunately, the result that eventually led to her fate, is upsetting and sad. And I remember you and I talked about this a couple of months ago, and you had the same answer of that her her life and how it was gonna come to an end was predetermined based on these behaviors.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, it's, I think it's really important to have these conversations of being good stewards of the land and being good stewards with wildlife, but also, yeah, to a certain extent, over glorifying a specific a specific bear or a specific species could lead to stuff like this when people glorify them so much that we put ourselves almost in their face all the time to get that picture and to give them recognition and then, yeah, we see what happens with three ninety nine, which is really sad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think for most animals, I think what they need most is for people to leave them alone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But thankfully, there's
Speaker 2:Which is a little bit, what's the word, hypocritical for a biologist to say because I'm always messing with them, right?
Speaker 1:But I was gonna say, but there's a certain specialty group of humans like yourself who care so deeply about the bears and care so deeply about carnivores that you've dedicated your whole life to researching them and to be able to put yourself in a chair like this to talk about why we shouldn't have put ourselves in their face and the things that we need to do to protect them. To a certain extent, it is important because like you said, if if there aren't people like you, then there's gonna be people all over the place that are in the face of bears or in the face of whatever animal, you name it, but you're able to give us that knowledge and education on on why we shouldn't do that. So I don't think it's hypocritical. I think I think you're doing really important work to help people be able to enjoy the wildlife from afar knowing the risks of of getting too close and harming them.
Speaker 2:Thank you for that.
Speaker 1:Well, let's talk about some of those downstream effects, we touched on it a little bit, but I I find this process of feeding a bear or interacting with a bear and habitualizing them to human behavior, being dangerous, why is that dangerous for a bear to get food from a human being?
Speaker 2:Well it's because because bears are very smart and I like I mentioned earlier, they have tough lives, you know. I mean, they live in a food, at least here is a food limited environment and so they're very calorie driven. Bears by nature are just always hungry and getting a handout from a person is a very easy way to get calories and bears can learn that behavior really, really quickly. Well I'll give you an example. In the park, there's a road that right over here called the Camas Road and it was one of the places that had green grass before the fires.
Speaker 2:It was a stretch of green grass along each side of the road where bears could come out and eat dandelions and grass early in the spring. And so people from town would come out in the evenings and drive that drive that road looking for bears. Yeah. And the bears would be there. And invariably, somebody would toss the bear a cookie or something out of the window of the car.
Speaker 2:Right? And so the bears, you know, at first might have been a little bit like, oh, what was that? But then pretty soon, it's like that came out of that car. And they can put that together very very quickly and they learn that, you know, they panhandle on the road and if they hang out there, somebody else will come and throw them a sandwich. And then pretty soon, you know, cars stop and then the bear's climbing in the back of the pickup looking for stuff.
Speaker 2:And then the next thing you know, the bears you know, so you got cars along the road. What's the difference between that and cars parked in a campground? It's cars. So then the bears show up in the campground which is loaded with food. So it the bears learn to go into a place where there's lots of people, lots of cars, and lots of food and then starts really causing a lot of property damage and occasionally becomes a safety risk.
Speaker 2:Another behavior I've seen bears learn is it's called I call it mugging where bear's walking down a trail and he comes around a corner and there's a hiker coming towards him and the hiker panics and I don't know where people learn this. I think maybe at one time our agencies recommended this as something to do, but you take your pack off and throw it at him to distract the bear while you escape because the bear is certainly gonna kill you if you don't. Right? And so the bear opens the pack, and there's Reese's peanut butter cups in there. And, you know, for that bear, it's like, oh, wow.
Speaker 2:That person, when I surprised him, he disgorged food. So then the bear makes it a habit of approaching people, trying to get them to throw food at them and that can be successful. But that's a bad deal too because eventually it's like, well you're not taking your pack off, I'm gonna take that pack off you. So then the bear becomes a threat to human safety. And in all those scenarios, the bears typically, you know, either relocated or killed.
Speaker 2:So it's not good for bears. So we tried it very hard to stop that where it starts. So we don't allow bears to panhandle along the roads. We don't allow or try not to allow bear jams to develop, and this is what happened to three ninety nine. She just got really comfortable being along the roadside and for her, it may not have even been for food.
Speaker 2:For her, it could have been safety from other bears that perhaps weren't so comfortable around people. But either way, it it's a behavior we try and keep from happening. So whenever we find bears along roadsides or in developed areas, we chase them out and just put a stop to it before it can even start. And we've been really successful doing that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The downstream effects are are sad on the end result for bears when they become too habituated with humans and are searching for food. But when you share those stories, I just can't help but think how intelligent they are and how they quickly pick up behaviors and not just bears, but carnivores in general. I've heard so many stories of coyotes doing the same thing, panhandling on the side of the road, they'll act dead and people will get out of their vehicle and then they'll not be dead anymore and and surprise people that way. So this innate intelligence that these animals have, do you think we take it for granted?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I don't think people appreciate it, how how really smart they are. And again, that's going back to my trapping background. I mean, I could tell you lots of stories about trying to catch specific bears and and the things they did to evade capture made you think there's no way I'll ever be able to catch this bear. In fact, you feel lucky he's not trapping for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They they are very, very smart, and it's can be stunning. Well, I'll tell you another story about a a grizzly bear, a young female, that we had radio collared, caught her in a research trap, put a radio collar on her where we could keep close tabs on her. And one year spring, she came out and she started going down into the campground. And we'd chase her out, but she started showing up more frequently and then one day got into some food.
Speaker 2:And so then it became a kind of an all hands on deck effort to try and keep her out of the campground. And she was radio collared so we could track her, keep tabs on her pretty closely. But that one incident in the campground where she got food, she just pulled out all the stops and went all in for the food. And even though we could track her, she she just came on totally uncorked to where people would have be having a picnic area right on the boat dock. And she'd come charging in.
Speaker 2:Woah. I'm a grizzly. Rock for your lives. You know? And people would and she'd eat their food.
Speaker 2:And, you know, we had to destroy her. And it was really sad, know, just a young bear. But it was I mean, that happened over the course of about two weeks. Wow. And we couldn't stop it.
Speaker 2:Which was really disappointing because I I was pretty confident that we could because we could track her so closely. But, you know, she evaded us and got into stuff and it was a a real shame. And so it just highlights to me. I mean, that in my job so I am a bear manager. Big part of my job is trying to keep that stuff from happening.
Speaker 2:And the biggest challenge in my job is to just keep food and garbage out of away from bears. I mean, you say you know, to hear me say that, doesn't that sound simple? I mean, how hard can that be? Right? Just lazy government employee?
Speaker 2:I mean, how hard can it be? And it's just it's mind boggling how how good people are at letting bears get into their food and garbage. I mean, it's just a never ending challenge. I
Speaker 1:can tell when you're telling that story that stories like that kinda pain your heart. Do you do you feel a heavy weight when situations like that happen and you have to put a bear down?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. You know, they're beautiful animals that they're a threatened species, you know. So especially females are pretty important to the population. And, you know, it wasn't her fault. You know, she was just doing what she needed to get the calories that she needed.
Speaker 2:And, you know, unfortunately, she learned that she could get them from people. And you know, we've had better success with other bears, you know, where we have been able to intercede and teach them to not seek food from people. But for whatever reason, this bear, I don't know if she was just extra precocious or or what, but boy, she just went all in very quickly.
Speaker 1:You've mentioned a couple of times, bears are just trying to get calories, you know, on a day to day life cycle for them. They're traveling around this park digging up bulbs and berries and eating whatever they can. Why do they need so many calories? Does it have to do with hibernation, potentially bringing cubs, into the world in the next year. Why are they always scavenging for so many calories?
Speaker 2:It's all the above. You know, winter denning can last up to six months, and they can't eat. There's nothing to eat at that time of year. So they need to put on enough fat, enough reserves to get them through an extended period without eating or drinking for that matter. It's really pretty amazing.
Speaker 2:And having cubs, I mean, that's an extra energetic demand on them that they have to if a female doesn't get to be about 20% body fat, she won't have cubs. So they have to go into the den in pretty good body condition. So they're highly motivated to do that. But, you know, bears are coming out of the den right now. I mean, look around.
Speaker 2:What do you see to eat? Not a whole lot. Not a whole lot. I mean, the trees aren't even leafed out. There's not a lot on the ground.
Speaker 2:So bears, when they come out of the den at this time of year, they they lose weight right until the into July just because the calories are so sparse here. So, yeah, like you said, they're digging up grubs and roots and whatever they can find. But really, they don't start adding weight until the berry season, usually around the July 1. Big one is huckleberries, but I'll describe this place as a berry economy. I mean, we've got probably a dozen different species of fruiting shrubs here that bears can take advantage of.
Speaker 2:And and they do, and they really go after it. So that's when they can start putting on weight. Some bears are more predacious than others. Sometimes you see them up in the cliffs hunting mountain goats and things like that, but they're more the exception than the rule. For the average bear in the park, their diet's 90% vegetation.
Speaker 2:That's what they really focus on. Bears are are not particularly efficient predators, know, they're not real fast or swift, you know, like a wolf or a mountain lion. They're very opportunistic. I mean, they make people look very slow and cumbersome but relative to other predators, they're they're not particularly good at it. So meat tends to make up a lower percentage of their diet.
Speaker 2:There are places in the world where they have access to more protein rich diets like in Alaska, you know, bears on the salmon streams, you know, they can get to be a ton. Bears can really they're interesting because they can grow as big as the food supply will let them. And occasionally well, like on the East side of the mountains where there's a lot of deer and elk and some livestock over there that the bears get into or have access to. Sometimes they're just boneyards, you know, where ranchers will throw their dead cows. The bears will come in and scavenge off of them.
Speaker 2:But it's not uncommon to see a thousand pound grizzlies over on the East side. Wow. On the West side of the divide here, 600 pounds is about a maximum size for a male grizzly.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned the first couple of months coming out of hibernation can be difficult to find food sources, so do mothers have to ration for their cubs and prioritize their cubs getting food sources while the mother's kinda losing weight or are they able to find enough to provide for whatever cubs they have with them?
Speaker 2:No. She she eats because when the cubs come out, you know, they're lack they're nursing, so she has to eat enough to sustain the lactation for her. So no, mom doesn't typically ration for the cubs, cubs have to make it on their own.
Speaker 1:What's the dynamic then with, male grizzlies and male bears and the mother then? Obviously, the mother comes out with the cubs. Does the mother have any other interactions with potentially other other males after, the cub is is birthed?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bears are are very social animals. I think people sometimes view them as kind of solitary, grouchy animals, you know, they disdain each other's company, but that's not the case. They really they interact with one another. Big adult males can be a threat to cubs.
Speaker 2:They will kill cubs on occasion. They they call it male infanticide where the a lot of times it's hypothesized that a male will kill a a cubs from a female if they're not his cubs Mhmm. In order to bring her back into Asterisk so he has a breeding opportunity and can spread his genes instead of that other guy over there. But, yeah, they you know, I've seen, like, sows with cubs traveling with, offspring from previous litters, hanging out together. And even females and males, I mean, if you get a concentrated food source, in particular, they can be really social.
Speaker 2:Again, like those Alaskan salmon streams, you've probably seen pictures of huge congregations of bears all together happily eating salmon. So a lot of it has to do with resource competition too. A lot of those things that might lead to aggressive or antagonistic behaviors break down when there's an abundant food supply.
Speaker 1:How about the the cubs once they get older and they move away from the mother, like we talked about earlier, do those cubs then, or the offsprings, do they interact back with the mother later on? Mhmm. Will they recognize them back out in in the wild and interact?
Speaker 2:Yeah. A male will come around like if it's a grizzly bear, she'll kick her cubs. Generally, their cubs are dispersed at about two. But the males will start coming around, and the kids are kinda like, I don't wanna be around this guy, you know, so they'll kinda melt into the background. And mom will breed with the male, and then after a while, he'll move away and then the cubs will come back to mom.
Speaker 2:And that can go I've seen the cubs follow mom like a day behind or two days behind. You know, back when I was tracking bears from the air, you'd have a radio collared sow and then one of her offspring from a few years ago would just like totally follow her through the woods but a day behind her.
Speaker 1:Wow. If if mom is in a conflict, will the cubs or the offspring come and help if they know mom is in some conflict with another male or another grizzly bear? Are they supportive of
Speaker 2:the mother in that way? Generally not. They're usually, you know, they're they mature slowly so they're not really big enough or bad enough to really defend mom. Is that what you're
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or if or if they get to the point of maturity and they've dispersed from mother and, know, mother is a 15, 20 year old grizzly and the offspring is now eight or nine.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Will they come to the mother's defense or recognize the mother is in conflict?
Speaker 2:I haven't seen that happen. I guess I couldn't say that that it hasn't, but if you think about what you'd need to know Yeah. Know if that was happening, it'd be a tough tough one to figure out. But certainly males, you know, when they're breeding with females and they're consorting with the females will definitely be protective of the females. That's a dangerous time to be.
Speaker 2:It's one of the dangerous situations in trapping and get in, you know, if you catch a female and the male's there, you might have to go through him to get to her Interesting. Kind of
Speaker 1:you mentioned that male grizzlies can be a threat to cubs. Is it the same for other species? Are wolves threats to cubs, or any other carnivores that are are threatening to them?
Speaker 2:In different ways, wolves are much more territorial than bears are. So, you know, within a pack, the cubs are safe with their pack members but they're definitely at risk of being killed by wolves from other packs for sure. Mountain lions are also very territorial. Cub mountain lions are potentially at at risk. But again, they
Speaker 1:are really territorial. So a female mountain lion with her cubs is relatively unlikely to encounter another male. You're a wildlife biologist as I mentioned earlier in the podcast. So what's the biology of a carnivore? What makes the carnivore unique compared to other species of wildlife in the park like ruminants and, you know, very other various other types of species that are here?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Carnivores, I mean, they've gone paleo, so they typically eat meat. Right? Not ex like I said, you know, bears, although they're considered carnivores, are more omnivorous as are wolverines. It's amazing the amount of huckleberries foxes eat.
Speaker 2:So, you know, they carnivores are meat eaters but they eat a lot of other things too. But I guess what maybe what you're getting at is that they their digestive system is short. I mean, it's designed for digesting high protein foods, you know, so it's a relatively quick digestive system. Whereas, you know, the ungulates, the ruminants, you know, they have four chambered stomachs, you know, where it's all fermented and a much slower digestive system but they can break down much much less nutritious food into something they can use, you know, woody brush, you know, they can eat that and make nutrients out of it or calories out of it where if you were or I were to eat that, it wouldn't do much for us.
Speaker 1:That's exactly the point I was trying to get at and is there anything jaw structure wise that's different for a carnivore or with their teeth than that of a a ruminant?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Their dentition, know, is sort of the chicken and the egg thing I guess but you know, it reflects the life that they live so bears, for example, because they're omnivorous, if you look at their their teeth, you know, they've got a lot of kinda like ours, you know, we've got these broad flat molars that are designed for crushing vegetation. Mountain lions don't have that. They just have carnassial teeth, know, they're like shears and they don't eat a lot of vegetation. That's they're a obligate meat eater and if a mountain lion's not getting fresh meat, he's probably gonna die.
Speaker 1:What meat do they go for in this park?
Speaker 2:White tailed deer is their their main food, but they certainly can go for elk and rabbits, porcupines, but yeah, white tailed deer is probably the the number one.
Speaker 1:I assume then based on what you said earlier in the podcast that the mountain lions, are they more on the eastern side of the park where livestock is more abundant and deers are more abundant or are they kind of dispersed throughout
Speaker 2:entire park? Dispersed over the whole park. Yeah. You find them from pretty low elevation areas up into the high country, up into the alpine.
Speaker 1:Wow. I are they from a hunting perspective and their intelligence and hunting and being elusive and climbing, are they the best hunter in the park?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean that's again, that's context specific. They're an ambush predator and so they make their living by hiding out in the brush and being really stealthy. How many mountain lions have you seen?
Speaker 1:Zero. They've probably seen me, I'm gonna guess. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I I I've spent my whole my whole career out here and I've probably seen maybe a dozen. Wow. You know, in my whole career because that's their that's their gig, right? They they don't get seen. I was like, my son became a wildlife biologist too and he went off to study tigers in Russia.
Speaker 2:Before he left, told him, said, Scott, if you see a tiger in the wild, it's too late. But that's an awesome predator, you know. I mean, imagine a mountain lion weighing five or 600 pounds. I mean, that's
Speaker 1:wow.
Speaker 2:But yeah, so that's how they that's how they hunt, how they kill, they hide in the brush and when something wanders by carelessly, they can jump 20 feet from a standstill and bite down on the back of the neck and it's game over. Whereas wolves on the other hand are not not super good hiders or, you know, they're not they don't ambush animals. They're a coursing predator primarily. So they're built for running. If you've ever seen a wolf, what strikes you is how much leg they have.
Speaker 2:I mean, they're almost as tall as a white tail and they can run and run and run and they can chase an animal to earth.
Speaker 1:I'm curious about their intelligence and and working together in a pack and how social they are, as a as a species for them to hunt. You mentioned they're fast and they can outrun, different species but is a big part of their hunting how well they can work together as a pack?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah. Because typically they're hunting big prey. I mean, imagine, I mean, you could just see them sitting around and see a moose moose walk by, know, a thousand pound ungulates like, let's go kill that with our faces. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And off they go and you know, one of one working alone is not gonna have too much success and probably get killed but you get a bunch of them together they can dart in and grab a hunk and back away while the other one runs in, much more effective.
Speaker 1:You don't hear too many stories about carnivores or predators in parks affecting humans when they visit a park like Glacier or really any park. There are stories and there's so many stories every year but it's not compared to the amount of visitation that takes place here on an annual basis, it's not something that you hear but is there a predator in the park or a carnivore that is most likely to have an encounter with a human that's not favorable?
Speaker 2:For us, it's bears and it's for a number of reasons. It's it's partly the way bears are using the terrain, you know, like I just told you, you know, the mountain lions are hiding looking for white tails to go by, the wolves are out chasing stuff and so in in that context, they're just less likely to be where a lot of people are or to run into people whereas bears, you know, they're in the berry patches, they're on side hills digging and so they tend to be overlap the trail systems, bears use our trail systems a lot. We have quite a few bears, it's great bear habitat, you know, between black bears and grizzly bears, there's probably a thousand bears in the park. And then you put in 3,000,000 visitors a year and mix them all together, you know, what's gonna happen? It used to be glacier had a reputation for where people went to be mauled by bears, you know, I mean, because they were fairly frequent.
Speaker 2:But since, I'd say since the nineties, the late nineteen nineties, we really started paying more attention to this process of food conditioning and habituation and like I was mentioning earlier, keeping them away from roadsides and out of developed areas, basically teaching bears boundaries. You know, we certainly work real hard to teach people boundaries, things you should and shouldn't do. But we also try and teach bears that too. And I think it's been really successful. I mean, our bear caused human injury rate has just gone like this over the preceding several decades, you know.
Speaker 2:It's just it's amazing to see to where now well, just last year we had an employee, a trail crew member get bitten by a grizzly bear and it was the first injury of a park employee by a bear in forty years. Wow. So we feel like we've done a good job at at teaching ourselves and teaching the public how to avoid those sorts of encounters.
Speaker 1:You mentioned black bears and grizzly bears, you've been kinda heavily focused on grizzly bears so far, but what's the difference between a black bear and a grizzly bear from a features, a physical feature perspective and then do they have different mindsets and and personalities than each other?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I kinda think of black bears being like honeybees and grizzly bears being like yellowjackets. Neither one of them is a particular threat, you know, unless you step on them. And then, you know, you step on yellowjackets, you're gonna get stung. Same thing with grizzly bears, you know, if you push them too hard, there's a good chance you might get bitten.
Speaker 2:And, you know, it's just natural defensive behavior. Grizzly bears are much more easier to get mad than black bears. Black bears are typically a pretty timid animal. Whereas and grizzly bears are really good at avoiding people too. But, you know, if you do surprise one, they may act aggressively.
Speaker 2:And it's not because they're out to kill you, you know, I think we were talking earlier, you know, grizzlies have this reputation as mindless killers, know, and they're just out to eat you. And that's not it at all, they're just they have a bigger personal space. And, you know, if if you get into their space or surprise them, they're more easily offended. And so their response to you might be one of offense. You know, and they're not gonna disembowel you and eat your heart, you know, it's they're gonna knock you down and bite you and do what they feel like they need to do to neutralize what they perceive as a threat.
Speaker 2:That's why playing dead works. You know, if you just put your face into the earth, cover the back of your neck and just lay there and take it, the bear's not gonna give you much because you're not aggravating him or acting like a threat. You know, whereas if you turn around and grab it by the face, you know, and punch it, it's kinda like sticking your head in a wood chipper, you know, it's not gonna go well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about the effectiveness of, bear spray? It's amazing tool.
Speaker 2:I was fortunate enough to see that product develop over quite a few years and it's proven itself over and over. It's If you've ever been exposed to it, you know how nasty it is. And it affects anything with mucous membranes. So yeah, it's and it's because it's non lethal. You know, dead bears don't teach other bears anything.
Speaker 2:So by using it on a bear, the bear learns that, like, oh, maybe I shouldn't have charged at this person and and maybe next time it will just go the other way instead of attacking.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. So you you just said that bears don't teach other bears anything. So are you saying when a bear gets sprayed that they have the ability to then teach other bears what that tool is and to stay away from humans then?
Speaker 2:You bet. Wow. They absolutely do. That's fascinating. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's why skunks aren't the biggest menu item on a bear's diet.
Speaker 1:How about physical characteristics between those two bears? I know grizzly bear has that distinct hump on their back, black bears typically have larger, wider back legs and shorter claws and it's because they do different things, right? Grizzly bears dig and black bears climb. What other features are there that are different between those two bears?
Speaker 2:Boy, you just hit a lot of them there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I had bad question. Always a bad question when I answer it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So bear black bears are a creature of the forest. You know, they evolved in forested areas, and so they're very adept at climbing trees and the structure of their claws, you know, really helps them climb trees. Whereas grizzly bears evolved on post glacial plains, sort of open environments, and they're they have long claws and that big shoulder muscle is for digging. Know, You we call them nature's rototiller because they're just always digging up bulbs and corms and roots of plants and that's what their body's designed to do.
Speaker 2:They can still climb trees just fine but they're grizzly bears, they don't have to, right? Mhmm. So they've got amazing noses, you know, they can smell things from many many miles away. In fact, there was a physiologist that showed me he dissected the grizzly skull and the nose, the air is act when they breathe in through their nose, that air actually goes right over the brain with all those receptors. Wow.
Speaker 2:And I suspect that a bear sees the world through its nose in a similar way that a bat sees the world through its ears. They can actually build a mental image, of their surroundings through scent. Wow. And I they've people have said they've got a nose a thousand times better than a bloodhound and I from what I've seen, I believe it. I mean, I've seen bears go to attractants, you know, we used to have these big grain spills on the railroad where they'd you know, hundreds of thousands of pounds of corn, it would start to ferment and they'd bury it but it would still smell.
Speaker 2:I'd see bears coming from twenty, thirty miles away, they could smell that. Wow. Which is pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is. How about, I'm always interested in just how connected everything is together, bears, Lake McDonald, these mountains, glaciers, it's all connected in one form or another. Kind of an interesting way that bears are connected and all carnivores and all wildlife in the park are connected is through their scat and what they eat and how those seeds can sprout new trees over time, just based on the the diet of an animal. And what other ways are these animals connected with the environment and how they behave, what they eat, what they do?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's the the fun part of ecology is the science is it's the study of how things are connected And it's Every day, I learn more about how things are connected and it's it's amazing. You we were talking about the salmon streams in Alaska and the bears that feed on them, know, and how that's that's a major mechanism for the movement of marine, nutrients into terrestrial ecosystems. Just that volume of fish being transported by bears and their scat out into the into the forest. Fisheries biologist just told me this past weekend, I I had no idea of this about a it's a it's a mussel.
Speaker 2:It's called the pearly mussel and it lives in cold, clear mountain streams. But part of its life cycle is the cutthroat trout. It actually releases its spawn into cutthroat trout who carry the larval fish in their gill plates. Wow. And then actually release them.
Speaker 2:It doesn't harm the fish, it's a totally mutualistic relationship. But where we've lost cutthroat trout populations through overfishing or sedimentation of streams, we've also lost those mussels. And I think it's only been the last decade that people figured that out. But this is an example of how things are connected in ways that we can't even begin to understand.
Speaker 1:Has, climate changed the ecology at all with the carnivores in the park?
Speaker 2:You know, we're not that we've been able to see, and I think it's because carnivores are top down or, you know, apex predators are pretty high on the food chain. At least not with bears, we haven't seen it, but it's not to say that it couldn't have an effect. I mean, it's certainly it's already having an effect on, you know, things like fire frequency that are tremendously impactful on how wildlife are distributed and what food supplies are available. There's a possibility that in some places it could benefit bears just because there's the shrub response, you know, berries could be better. But we've also seen places where it may be not so good where, you know, like the trout in Yellowstone or the whitebark pine, things like that have have disappeared.
Speaker 2:But bears are so adaptable, you know, they can exploit so many different food sources that I suspect that bears will be okay. There's been a lot of worry about wolverine. Wolverine seem to be really tied to late late spring snowpack which we're seeing diminish over their range. But again, we just don't know if it's really gonna hurt them or not.
Speaker 1:Is there a concern that milder winters with the spring being warmer or warming quicker in the year could force bears out of hibernation earlier than they're used to?
Speaker 2:That's certainly been something that's come up and we've looked for that but we haven't seen that yet. And part of it could be because, you know, where grizzly bears live are sort of these, you know, high elevation places with lots of snow where climate change is not gonna have any meaningful impact for quite a long time here. Is there
Speaker 1:any story that you can think of in this park that you think about often or just like a an interesting tidbit of something that you've experienced here that I I'm just fascinated by your perspective on on wildlife and the connection that they have to us in terms of intelligence and human characteristics, but any interaction in your twenty plus years in this park that you think about often or an animal you've encountered?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've got a lot of bear stories. I've got the wolverine stories. You'll have to to purchase my book to read
Speaker 1:about those.
Speaker 2:Do you have a book?
Speaker 1:No. Okay. That was it sounds like you could easily make one, though.
Speaker 2:It's on my to do list. But yeah, I mean, some of them have been kinda heart wrenching, you know, where you've seen bears die for things that really aren't their fault. You know, like I related some of the stories, I mean, they're just amazing what animals are capable of, their capacity to learn. I think any wildlife biologist eventually ends up with a lot of those kind of stories. It's one of the nice things about this career path is that it gives you those insights into things that you may never have paid attention to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What would you, say to listeners and viewers about maybe reshaping or reframing their perspective on bears if they're afraid to come to a park like this because there's bears here or, you know, people who look at them as, you know, just as a species that might, you know, disrespect them by intimidating them or by being in their space, how can we change our perspective to appreciate them more and and be able to relate to them more?
Speaker 2:I I guess for those people that are afraid to come to the park because of bears, I don't know that there's anything I could say to dissuade that. I'd say don't come. Fair. You know, it's if you're not gonna have a good time, if you're looking over your shoulder constantly, you know, bears are not you know, your odds of being attacked by a bear in the park are much lower than getting killed in a car wreck on your way here by orders of magnitude. And so it comes down to comfort level of what what you're comfortable with in your world.
Speaker 2:And it's habituation. I mean, there's no reason you shouldn't be scared to death to get in an automobile and drive it 60 miles an hour down the road with cars coming at you at the same speed. That's just freaking nuts, right? And then to do that and to get out here and worry about bears, it's just not reality. That said, I mean, it it could happen that a bear could bite you.
Speaker 2:It's unlikely, especially if you've educated yourself on how to behave around bears. You know, don't feed them. Don't give them their space. Everybody comes to Glacier wants to see a bear at a distance. And that's great, you know, do it.
Speaker 2:Watch them with the binoculars and enjoy the experience. It's something you'll probably remember the rest of your life. But you know, don't try and get close, don't be foolish, respect them. Yeah, enjoy it, it's an amazing place. I don't know if that helped or not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely. And I I think, what about them just as beings with us of being able just to appreciate them and you have so many stories, like, I was just thinking about the story that you you told, I think before we turn on the cameras of recently a young male having to be relocated because of his interactions with turkeys. And you had mentioned that young males are no different than young males of the human species that they're curious, they try things, they have don't have learned behaviors and they're yeah. The way you described it just made them feel like humans and I think that's a a funny story. So if you don't mind sharing that and just like, yeah, how young males are are just curious beings just like we are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Young males for most species are risk takers and engage in risky behaviors and I I think you and I probably did and, you know, young wolves and young lions and young bears are the same way, you know. I mean, they're just that's just part of life. Think it's something that mammals share in common. You know, if you look, I don't know if you've read Doug Chadwick's book, Four Fifths a Grizzly.
Speaker 1:You know what's funny is Scott Nedermeyer who's a former NHL hockey player, he lives up in Cranbrook not too far from here. He talks a lot about that book in an episode I did with him not too long ago about how good it is and I I have purchased it but I have not yet read it.
Speaker 2:Well, mean the whole point is we're really not that far apart. We've got a lot more in common than what we'll admit to. So yeah, bears are interesting. And and it's an interesting time for bears too because we're in this area in particular, you know, grizzly bears have a pretty limited distribution in the Lower 48 states. You know, it's Glacier and Yellowstone and Idaho and moist.
Speaker 2:You know, so just these spots where we still have grizzlies. Here in this ecosystem, the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem and the Yellowstone ecosystem, grizzly bears are doing really well. And so we're getting more and more of them at the same time as we're seeing rapidly increasing human population. You know, the area's been going crazy, you know, people moving in and building places in bear habitat. And so we're getting a lot more interaction between bears and and people.
Speaker 2:But people now have a different relationship to nature than what people used to have. You know, it used to be, you know, farmers and ranchers and people with a more utilitarian mindset that really wouldn't tolerate grizzly bears to where now, you know, you get a lot of remote workers and, you know, people in the tech sector and medical sector and all this other stuff, you know, where people aren't, you know, relying on their cows to provide their income, you know. They have this external source of income and so they have a much more naturalistic view perhaps or philosophical view of having bears around. So that's good for the bears, but it also presents a lot of opportunities for bears to get into stuff. Know, so now a bear can go into Kalispell instead of getting shot immediately.
Speaker 2:He can like hang out there and and then all of a sudden he's getting into trouble, you know, breaking into sheds and chicken coops and so we're seeing conflicts with bears that in the start of my career, I never thought we'd have. You know, like bears grazing in alfalfa fields under the center pivot and ripping doors off of green bins and things like that that seemed to have been impossible not too long ago. Yeah. So it's an interesting time to see how this all plays out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fascinating. When you see a story like what's going on with the North Cascades area about them approving a project to reintroduce the grizzly bear back into that region, a region where they're native beings, Does that excite you? Are you excited to see how that project unfolds?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I am. I the and not just bears, the biggest threat to any species and particularly threatened and endangered species is having a a big population broken into little pieces. You know, grizzly bears used to be distributed across most of the Western United States. And then through patterns of human settlement over the centuries, those populations are broken up into these little subpopulations and one by one, they just go extinct.
Speaker 2:They get too you know, they either all get killed or their population's just too small for it to sustain itself. And I think that's what we've seen happen in the Cascades, know. It's just so much pressure that it just couldn't persist. Know, we saw that in Colorado. I think the last grizzly bear was killed in 1979 in Colorado and it was one bear that had been hanging out there by itself for who knows how long.
Speaker 2:Kinda sad really. But the way to to counteract that extinction progress process is to establish new populations in places where they have gone gone extinct, you know, like the Cascades and they put a lot of bears over in the Cabinet Yak to try and bolster that bolster that population. They've talked about putting bears in the Bitterroot. So I think they'll probably get there on their own eventually. But if you really, for recovery to be meaningful at a continental scale, you need to have bears in more places.
Speaker 1:Well, as we begin to wind this down, I do wanna ask why this landscape behind us, why Glacier National Park is the perfect landscape for a carnivore to exist, a bear to exist. Why does this provide so much for them to to be able
Speaker 2:to thrive? It's big. You know, we've got over a million acres of really good habitat. You know, if so you can see a lot of it's pretty steep then, you know, there's a lot of, elevational diversity. So bears are elevational migrants.
Speaker 2:They'll follow that melting snow up in the spring and take advantage of, those resources that become available as the snow melts, you know, from the bottoms up right up high into the alpine. In the fall, they'll go up and feed on army cutwear moss in the talus slopes way up in the alpine. And those moss migrate off the Great Plains and they go into these alpine areas and they go down into the talus where it's cool. Just a neat ecological thing that we're just starting to really learn about. In fact, a graduate student of mine just this past year documented the first occurrence of that in the Canadian Rockies.
Speaker 2:Wow. Which is kinda blows me away that nobody ever thought to go look for that until 2024. Really? But yeah, the glacier's big and so there's a lot of room and glacier's been a source population for a lot of, threatened and endangered species like wolverine, you know, grizzly bears, wolves, know, glaciers kinda where they were able to hang on and then as protections expanded outside the park, able to move out and recolonize places where they hadn't been in a long time.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. What would you estimate we actually know about bears and carnivores?
Speaker 2:In ounces?
Speaker 1:In terms of like, obviously we don't know the whole picture with them but how much more do you think we have to study with them or do you think we'll never fully understand them?
Speaker 2:It's a process of learning. I I think maybe a better question is do we need to do we know what we need to know to help these animals live? I mean, we'll never know everything about them and and what makes grizzly bears or carnivores carnivores will undoubtedly change through time too. So it's sort of a moving target. But I I think for bears in a lot of context, we know what we need to know to have them survive.
Speaker 2:I think we do for wolves. Probably less so for the big cats, wolverine. Like Canada lynx and wolverine, boy they're especially wolverine, we just know just a thimble full of what we should know about that animal. I mean, don't even know whether they're relying on late spring snowpack or not. I mean, it it seems to be important but then there's other evidence that suggests maybe not so much.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, we we just don't know.
Speaker 1:Well, you're right. That that was a better question so thank you for that. Last question for you is is there anything else you wanna talk about or bring up when it comes to bears, your interactions, encouragement for people to recreate responsibly or any other story that you have on your chest that you wanna release?
Speaker 2:Keep bears away from your food and garbage. So that that's a huge one, you know. If you don't leave your cooler in the back of your pickup, lock it in the cab. Don't bury your food scraps in your fire pit. Pack it out.
Speaker 2:Just basic things like that. Don't offer them food. If a bear is hanging around your campground or approaches you, just stand up and make your presence be known and say, go away. Don't throw your food at it and run. A lot of it's common sense but for me anyway, but for people coming from more urban environments, it's probably not really common sense.
Speaker 2:It's something that you need to be taught. And so take advantage of those opportunities to learn that stuff before you visit. Don't don't surprise bears. You know, don't sneak up on them or if you're in a place where you can't see down the trail, if it's windy or brushy, hey, oh, make some noise. Let them know you're there, and they'll get out of your way.
Speaker 2:That's all it takes. Park employee that got injured last year, they got complacent and they were going through a really brushy snow covered area and, you know, parted the brush and there's a grizzly cub right in front of him. And, you know, he he got bitten. You know, he's okay, but that could have been avoided if they'd made some noise.
Speaker 1:Well, could talk to you forever, very easily, but I know you have important work to get back to and I've had a blast having this conversation and I think people are gonna learn a whole lot and like I said earlier, your work is extremely important and I thank you for that and I admire your love for these animals and your dedication for getting to understand them on a level where you can protect and potentially save them from the threats that are are facing them. So thank you for everything that you do.
Speaker 2:Alright. Well, thank you. I appreciate that and thanks for making the trip out to to visit us and enjoying this amazing place.
Speaker 1:Thanks for checking out this edition of the Safe Travels Podcast. I really hope you enjoyed it. John is incredible and his work is so important, and I really hope his love for the wildlife here at Glacier National Park came through on this episode. So if you like this type of content, it would mean a lot to me if you liked, commented, and subscribed. And until next time, safe travels.