Bear country

I've got to get caught up on the rest of the story of our first bird, and our second bird and third bird too. But a bear interlude first...I spent most of yesterday bushwhacking by myself through the back woods, off trail, of Emma Matilda Lake, which is pretty serious grizzly country. In the last five years Jackson Hole has been recolonized by grizzlies. It's a new enough development that the locals seem almost paralyzed by bear paranoia - many people won't even hike any more, and many of the old-timers in the area will no longer visit their favorite upcountry fishing spots. The park is a bit late on the uptake getting ready for this - they don't even have bear boxes (bear-proof containers to put your food in) in the campsites yet.

And yes, there have been a few attacks. But almost all my fieldwork has been in grizzly country (in northern Alaska), and what I notice about the accounts of the attacks here in Jackson Hole is that they all involved a female with cubs being taken by surprise by a silent, lone human. Given the tiny number of attacks, compared to the thousands and thousands of tourists in the area, and (by logical extension) the thousands and thousands of times that grizzlies must have seen people and NOT attacked them, it seems to me that the grizzlies of Jackson Hole must be what I think of as "sensible bears". A sensible bear is one that will always do its utmost to avoid humans, given a halfway decent chance to detect the human first.

Most of the bears around my old field site at Toolik, Alaska, were also sensible bears - yeah, well, except for that one time that crazy aggressive grizz came through the camp when we had all the Russian ecologists visiting, but that's another story. Anyway, I am enough used to the concept that I just take the usual precautions and don't worry about it. The usual precautions are: wear a jangly bear bell on your backpack, and sing songs and talk loudly to yourself (which I do all the time anyway, so it's just business as usual for me). Basically you're hoping that (a) the bear will hear you coming, and (b) it is a sensible bear that will then decide to go the other way.

I should have been carrying pepper spray, too, but Jamie had the pepper spray - we thought originally that we'd be travelling together, but of course we ended up hiking miles away from each other, and ironically I ended up doing the grizz area with no pepper spray, while Jamie, with the pepper spray, was down south more in black bear country.

So anyway, we did see several black bears, but no grizz. I saw plenty of bear scat, but couldn't tell whether it was black or grizz. Several times I heard something or other moving away from me - a loud CRACK as something stepped on a branch, a "Hmppph" of something sighing, a sudden shaking of branches in a clump of bushes nearby. It seemed very Stephen King sometimes, standing there alone in the eerily silent, dark, beautiful woods, wondering what huge Thing had just passed me by. Elk, moose, or bear? Impossible to tell. Once I definitely saw the rack of a bull elk gliding through the forest. The other times, I don't know what it was.

And if you're wondering how to tell a grizz from a black:
Q. How do you tell a grizzly bear from a black bear?
A. Climb up a tree. If it climbs up after you and kills you, it's a black bear. If it knocks the tree over and kills you, it's a grizzly bear.

Q. How do you tell grizzly bear scat from black bear scat?
A. The grizzly bear scat has little bells in it, and it smells of pepper.