During a Bearfest slideshow, wildlife photographer and filmmaker Matthias Breiter shows a photo of the only bear which had ever expressly tried to kill him during his 25-year career. "If you just work with these animals, they just move on their way," he has otherwise found.
The symposium at last week's Bearfest was an opportunity for experts in bear-related research to share some of their knowledge about the different species, as well as highlight the work they have done in their different fields.
Lance Craighead of Montana's Craighead Institute has been a longtime supporter of Wrangell's annual festival, which celebrates the area's robust bear population.
Speaking last Wednesday, the environmental advocate sought to convey how people directly affect and often threaten bear populations. To start with, there has been a significant increase in the global population since 1924, jumping from 1.8 billion then to 7.5 billion today.
Cumulatively, people are altering water availability and climate, destroying habitat in the process to make room for settlement, agriculture and other development. Craighead pointed out that as the population continues to increase and expand its terrestrial usages, Craighead noted there becomes less space available for other species and the ecosystems they are part of.
Loss of these diverse ecosystems have a reciprocal impact, as humans lose piecemeal the "life support systems" of a functioning planet. From the air we breathe and the water we drink to the weather our crops depend upon, Craighead characterized the threat to these things as a public health issue rather than a moral imperative.
Rising sea levels and diminished arability are already causing problems abroad, which in turn triggers mass migration, he said. Even domestically, he pointed out the advent of new residents in Montana hoping to beat the oppressive heat of states further south.
These changes acutely impact bears, which are top-tier predators or "umbrella species," as he put it. "I see bears as the gardeners and stewards of a healthy ecosystem." In order to feed themselves on a diverse array of foods, the environments bears call home need to be robust and diverse and expansive.
Different strains affect different species of bears differently. For example, declining summertime Arctic ice coverage impacts polar bears, but the most important variable affecting North American brown bears are road systems. Accommodations to the Department of Transportation's building specifications has helped reduce this, with better fencing and animal under- or over-passes key.
Meanwhile, bears abroad face their own challenges. China's iconic giant panda population is now maintained entirely through captive breeding programs, due to loss of the species' bamboo habitat. Sun bears in Indonesia face their own habitat loss to logging, the sloth bear to expanding plantations, and the Asiatic black bear is often targeted for its bile and body parts. Its American counterpart is facing decline too in the south, where farming and silviculture reduces its range.
Bears in Alaska, particularly its populations of browns, remain one of the healthiest on the planet, Craighead reckons.
"Here in Wrangell at Anan we're like the poster child for how to coexist with bears," he commented. Which is what the theme of the 2017 Bearfest is about, coexistence.
Author Rick Bass shared an excerpt from his work on the populations of smaller grizzlies in his part of Montana in the Yaak Valley. By "smaller" he means around 90 pounds, though their number is also diminishing. They are largely vegan as a result, he explained, "little shadow bears."
His perspective on coexistence with these bears is by respecting their space, bringing attention to a proposed westward trail that would cut right through the Yaak. Better planning and a willingness to understand local environmental conditions for such projects can go a long way toward living and let live.
Another key part to improved coexistence is through less invasive research, upon which Kate Kendall elaborated in her presentation. While working with the U.S. Geological Survey in Montana's Glacier National Park, she helped spearhead the study of the grizzly bear population using cameras, hair samples and genetic tracking.
The species' southernmost expanse in North America is Yellowstone National Park, with an expanse of wildlife refuges up to Glacier National Park its primary redoubt in the Lower 48. Six separate populations are in the process of being recovered by the Fish and Wildlife Service, and less stressful, more discreet ways to track how well management methods are working have helped that process along.
Once the technology had caught up enough to make it tenable, her team began collecting hair samples from bears in order to catalogue and track individuals. A grid of lures and barbed-wire "hair traps" were first used in order to snag some samples, but new insights into bear behavior as captured on more portable video cameras helped yield more subtle methods. Bears habitually rub themselves up on trees as they go, Kendall explained, for communicative and social reasons. When they do so, they also leave behind samples of themselves, which are easy to collect.
Results were impressive: Over an eight-year period the team found the area brown bear population was larger than expected, and growing at a rate of five percent each year. The group's range had also been expanding, with new breeding populations separating off into different parts of the expanse.
Evolutionary biologist David Mindell delved further into the basics of bear DNA in his presentation, offering that another way to understand the creatures is to understand how they have evolved. The understanding of the development of life over time has itself been a process, with advances in thought through the 16th and 17th centuries leading to Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus' system of taxonomical organization. This understanding of animals in interconnected groups gave way to British naturalist Charles Darwin's theory on the mechanism of evolution in the mid-19th century, which has only sharpened in view since with the development of modern genomics.
Looking for similarities in shared nucleic acid sequences, Mindell explained scientists have been able to better understand divergences between species, such as with bears over the past 40,000,000 years. Interestingly, within populations like the polar and brown bears there have been gene flow and active hybridizations over periods of thousands of years, with amenable adaptations eventually leading to their genetic divergence about 1,000,000 years ago.
Cinematographer and author Matthias Breiter went further into observations of bear behavior during his various work projects over the past 25 years. One of the main obstacles to understanding bears, in his experience, is to project our own norms and social cues onto them.
"Part of it is that we recognize so much of our own behavior in bears – or at least we think so," he said.
By observing them in the field, Breiter drew a few interesting conclusions. Yawning, for instance, indicates a bear is responding to stress. One which appears to be relaxing on the ground with limbs spread wide is likely overheated, as its armpits are one of the few places it can really cool off from exposing.
Breiter noticed bears are very competitive animals, with competition beginning right at nursing. The way individual bears act toward each other as a result of this youthful sparring can often be linked to their success later on in life. For instance, a grizzly bear that is not assertive enough may find itself going hungry, but one which is overly so may end up getting killed in a fight it has provoked.
Bears project their social
cues onto people as well, he has found, seemingly assuming
that we have the same ability to smell and detect one another in the wild, as well as sharing
similar concepts of personal space. Knowing the difference between a curious or playful posture in bears or an aggressive one can be a life-saver, Breiter explained.
"It can be tough to recognize," he admitted. Generally a bear with its ears held back is gearing for a fight, as is holding its head down. On the other hand, when a bear stands in profile, it may be trying to disarm an altercation by showing how big or comparatively puny it is.
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