Bear aware

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

By Jake Nichols

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-What do you do when you come face to face with the most powerful creature you will ever encounter in the Rocky Mountain wild? Could your actions determine whether your story is printed on the front page or the obituaries?

Roughly 600 grizzly bears roam the area known as the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, most of them within the park’s 2.3 million acres. Some have made their way to Montana and to points south into the northern reaches of Grand Teton National Park (GTNP) and the surrounding Bridger-Teton National Forest (BTNF). Yet even with another 675 black bears in the area, your chances of tangling with one in the wild are remote.

“Bear encounters are fairly rare and usually end up with the bear running the other way,” said Eric Shorma, former Nuisance Bear Coordinator for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

Like most of the men and women who work with bears in bear country, Shorma himself has been charged twice by a grizzly bear. He avoided harm using his pepper spray and in both instances, the charges were bluffs.
Still, statistics show that one person, on average, is killed by a grizzly bear every year in North America.

What are the odds?
Ursus arctos horribilis, as it is known in Latin, is the grizzly bear. Horrible with a capital ‘H’ if you come between her and her cubs or between him and his elk kill. The grizzly is intelligent and perhaps even compassionate - it is an animal capable of destroying a human being with a single swat, yet it allows mauling victims to live in more than 90 percent of the cases of human contact.

Grizzly’s cousins are the Brown and Kodiak bear of the Canadian West and Alaska. Their coats are usually silver-tipped or grizzled in appearance. The face profile is dished, and the ears are short and rounded. The hump at the shoulders is distinct and massive when compared to the rump of the animal.

Black bear are generally smaller than the grizzly. They are not always black in color and can be cinnamon, blonde, or brown. The snout is ‘Roman’ and the ears pointed. There is no predominant hump at the shoulders.

Territorial behavior distinguishes the grizzly from the black bear. Griz confrontations usually involve the bruin teaching the intruder the rules of the forest and are meant to minimize harm to the bear, its cubs or its territory, rather than to find a meal.
Black bear confrontations also rarely elicit aggressive behavior on the part of the bruin but may involve more unpredictable behavior, including curiosity and possible predacious inklings. How you – as a hiker, biker, or camper – react in a confrontation with either species could save your life.

Nearly every victim of a grizzly bear attack will tell you two things: The speed of the animal was unimaginable and, despite damage inflicted by the bear, even when savage and permanent, the victim wishes the bear no harm and harbors no grudge toward the animal.

“I wouldn’t hurt the bear because I’m in her territory,” Wally Cash, an attack victim, told the Casper Star-Tribune in September 2004. “She was afraid for her babies.” The 66-year-old Gillette man was nearly torn to pieces by a grizzly while elk hunting the Pilgrim Creek area near Moran like he had done without incident for 44 years.

But on that date in 2004, he ignored the signs. He admitted sighting numerous black and grizzly bears in the area. He saw tracks of grizzly cubs in the snow just before he topped a ridge quietly on his hands and knees. He never saw the sow. And then, she was on him. He felt no pain, but the damage was extensive. Hunting buddies radioed for help, and Cash was on his way to Idaho Falls in less than an hour, humbled but alive.

Could the bear have finished Cash? Easily. Could Cash have ordered the bear hunted down? With a phone call.

Why then, when the top of the food chain and the king of the forest meet, wrestle, and spill blood, does the ordeal usually resolve with no fatalities? Bear experts will tell you the grizzly is only moved to aggression when surprised or when defending food or offspring. Conflicts for these bears are a last resort.

Maybe she’s bluffing
“All [grizzly bear] attacks fall into two classic scenarios: Mothers protecting their cubs, or young males staking out their turf,” explained bear biologist Mark Boyce.
Sow grizzlies are known to have zero tolerance for human presence when they are with cubs. After three years, the sow cuts the cubs loose.

These sub-adults are often harassed into the poorest feeding areas by larger males and often will seek food from campsites, garbage dumps and bird feeders, Boyce said. They are continually picked on by their brethren while lacking territory of their own. Spring is the worst time to meet up with these teenage terrors.

“Sub-adult males leave their mother and their home range and disperse in the spring, looking to colonize new areas,” Chuck Schwartz said. Schwartz is the Grizzly Bear Study Team Leader, an interagency bear relocation unit.

Adult male grizzlies will also guard a cached kill with extreme force. Spotting an elk or deer carcass that has been partially covered with dirt or leaves is usually your first sign that a bear encounter is headed your way.

Chris Nethery was deer hunting in the North Fork of Spread Creek a decade ago when he stepped over deadfall and into a cached elk kill. Nethery said he remembers the moment he realized he had met the griz that would change his life. He and a partner hadn’t seen a thing all day. The two hunters were making their way back to camp at dusk, joking about the hunt. Then, there she was.

“I knew what I had stepped into,” Nethery admitted. “She had her [tail] backed into a bunch of willows, maybe 40 feet away. She was doing the head bob and snapping her teeth and grunting at us.”

The ‘head bob’ is a weave of the head and a shifting of the weight on the front feet often observed by victims just before things get physical. The ‘teeth snap,’ referred to by Nethery, is actually a popping of the jaw. These signs, along with huffing, moaning, grunting or growling, are signs you are too close and the bear is extremely agitated or anxious and is deciding what to do next.

What Nethery’s bear did next was charge. Bluff charges are typical, but Nethery wasn’t that lucky.

“Usually, you can tell when they give you a bluff charge,” Nethery said. “Their ears are up and they come at you with their palms up, swinging their feet out as they hit the ground. They kind of blow themselves up and their fur gets big. That’s a warning. When they’re coming at you with a bluff, they don’t dig in.”
Shorma seconded these bluff charge characteristics.

“If the bear does charge, a general rule is if the bear has his head up and ears up and is kind of bounding – generally that’s a bluff charge and it will stop short or run past. If the bear has its head down and it’s running as fast as it can and the hair is up on its neck, and the ears are pinned back, that’s when it’s most likely a real charge,” Shorma said.

That’s exactly what Nethery was seeing from the advancing sow.
“She came head down, palms down,” he said. “She got surprised, and she was pissed.”
Bears don’t like surprises. Nethery was carrying a .270 caliber deer-hunting rifle, a .44 double-action revolver and pepper spray. He had an eye-blink to pick one. “I always reach for the spray first, but there was no time for a bear spray shot,” Nethery said. “I didn’t have time for nothing. I grabbed my pistol.”

Park and forest rangers do not condone the use of firearms in grizzly bear encounters.
Nonetheless, the .44 magnum remains the choice of most firearm owners who venture into bear country. Vic Talmo, owner of Teton Arms stocks extra .44s during the summer season just for bear wary hunters and hikers.

“I hope you never have to use it,” Talmo tells every customer after the sale. He likes to carry pepper spray himself but supplements it with a handgun. “You need a big bullet and a lot of luck,” he said.

...And a lot of nerve. Nethery is ex-military, expert with a firearm and deadly accurate at the range. He threw a 320-grain bullet, 1,800 feet per second, at his charging grizzly and missed.

“Skilled with a gun is one thing. Skilled with a gun under pressure is an entirely different thing,” Nethery said. “I saw the round explode right in front of her feet, but she kept on coming. So I dropped to one knee, raised the sight a little bit and fired twice more.” The sow dropped dead instantly. Only then did Nethery allow himself to fall apart.

“I didn’t start shaking uncontrollably until after it happened,” Nethery remembered. “The ‘pucker factor’ was high. I sat down for a good 10 minutes and smoked three or four cigarettes.”

Nethery said he hated like hell to have to kill that bear. He had been charged before and used pepper spray. There was just no time.

“It was me or her. I didn’t really have a choice,” he said with regret. “I don’t like to kill bears. I think it’s the last resort to kill a bear. But when it comes to animal versus human, I’m not going to give my life for an animal.”
A few outdoorsmen still subscribe to the old code of the West known as the ‘three S’s:’ shoot, shovel and shut up. Despite recent evidence supporting pepper spray and its effectiveness, these folks feel more confident when fully strapped.

The Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee recommends bear deterrent. In a case study conducted by the Montana Border Grizzly Project, pepper sprays stopped and turned away every bear tested, which included six grizzlies and nearly 60 black bears.

Human factors
“While hiking near Bradley Lake, I suddenly came upon a black bear sow and two cubs,” Garry Lineback recalled. “The cubs immediately ran away. The sow, which I would estimate at weighing about 300 pounds, growled and ran toward me. She stopped about 10 feet away, lowered her head, and began to swing it from side to side.” She was nervous and she was thinking. Lineback fired a blast of his UDAP in the sow’s face and made his getaway.

Recently, ideal weather has made for better white pine bark forage and grizzly-human conflicts may be on the decline. Emerging griz have already been spotted in area national parks, including the highly photogenic grizzly No. 399. Despite becoming habituated to humans, the famous sow and her three cubs have kept out of trouble. Last fall, the bear family made a habit of following hunters to dine on gut piles left behind. Some viewed the actions as a recipe for disaster, but Mary Gibson Scott, the superintendent at Grand Teton National Park, refused to bow under the pressure to close hunt areas. Scott insisted No. 399 was simply exhibiting normal bear behavior.

Habituated black bears in backyards, however, have been numerous in recent years. Wyoming Game and Fish Department killed nine black bears and relocated more than 25 last year after responding to approximately 175 incidents. Officials cite poor bear-proof practices by subdivision homeowners as the reason for a spike in human and black bear encounters.

Every bear specialist in the valley echoes the same plea: Please keep a clean camp (and a clean yard). With more and more natural habitat taken from the bear as well as increased backcountry use, conflicts will be unavoidable. And it’s true: a fed bear is a dead bear or a dead human. Bears live in a world we humans only play in, and that world has rules we all need to learn.

Courtesy photo
Are you savvy enough for grizzly country?

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