Owls Aren't Wise and Bats Aren't Blind (39 page)

Two years ago our daughter-in-law, Ellen, accompanied by our grandson, Davey, who was nine at the time, was driving up the road that leads to their house and ours. It’s a very rural, winding road that goes uphill through the woods, with sharp banks on both the downhill and uphill sides.

As the car rounded a corner, there, sitting in the middle of the road, was a bear with two cubs! As Ellen and Davey exclaimed in astonishment at the sight, Mama Bear rose to her feet and, accompanied by the cubs, ran up the bank on the upper side of the road and disappeared in a flash.

While Ellen and Davey were still talking excitedly about what they had just seen, a
third
cub suddenly popped over the edge of the bank on the lower side of the road and emerged into the road. Instead of finding Mama there, as it expected, the little cub found only a big, frightening piece of machinery. There was only one thing to do, and that was seek safety by climbing a tree. Up the nearest big tree went the cub, where it began to wail piteously for its mother. After two or three minutes of the cub’s outcry, Ellen wisely decided to leave, so that the mother could retrieve her errant cub. Sure enough, when Ellen and Davey drove back to the spot a few minutes later, the third cub was gone.

The most memorable of my own bear sightings took place on our land during the archery season for deer. I have a favorite tree stand that overlooks a rather open area with three apple trees often visited by deer. This happens to be the same tree stand from which I watched the porcupine plowing its way through the deep autumn leaves (see chapter 5).

It had rained earlier in the day, so I made little noise on the wet leaves as I approached the stand. Because I’ve occasionally arrived to find deer already feeding under the apple trees, I moved slowly and cautiously over a knoll that overlooks the area. There were no deer, but there was a black object under the nearest apple tree, about thirty-five yards away. My first thought was that it was a black Labrador, but I almost instantly rejected that idea in favor of a very large porcupine. Then it dawned on me that porcupines have very small, neat ears set close to the head, while this animal had large, rounded ears that protruded well above the head. It’s a
bear cub,
I thought in complete astonishment!

At about that time, the cub sat down—not on its haunches, but on its rump, hind legs stretched forward, exactly as small children do. The ground was strewn with yellow apples, and the cub reached out with its front paws to grasp one. Then, front paws together, it held the apple for a long moment as if contemplating its quality or anticipating the taste of it. Then it finally opened its mouth and ate the apple. This identical performance was repeated numerous times, with the cub each time holding an apple in its front paws and gazing at it for a few seconds before consuming it.

Fascinated as I was by this performance, I was also quite uneasy. If there was a cub, there was also likely to be a mother nearby, and I didn’t want to run afoul of her. I didn’t even have an arrow nocked on my bow—not that it would have done me much good, for, as deadly as a hunting arrow is, a charging bear would do me in before the arrow killed it.

No doubt it would have been the better part of wisdom for me to retreat very slowly over the knoll and leave the area, but I was so intrigued by this rare opportunity to observe a wild bear that I hated to depart. Instead, I glanced about surreptitiously and quite apprehensively. To my great relief, there was no large, furry, black object within sight, so I decided to remain.

After consuming a large number of apples, the cub just sat there for a minute or two, doing nothing. Then it got to its feet and began to walk straight toward me. Finally, just as I thought that it might walk right up to me, it turned sideways and sat down on its rump, hind legs extended just as before, only twenty-five feet from me! Seeing the cub at that distance was an incredible experience, although I must admit that I was growing more apprehensive by the moment concerning the mother’s whereabouts.

The cub sat there for no more than a minute, then rose unhurriedly. It took three or four steps back in the direction from which it had come, and then suddenly broke into a run. Although the woods were rather quiet because of the rain, it was nonetheless astonishing that the cub, which probably weighed about seventy pounds, could run at that pace and make scarcely a sound.

I wondered why the cub had left in such a hurry. Could it have smelled me? There was scarcely a breath of air moving, and even that was coming from the side, rather than from me to the cub. Still, the slightest eddy in the air current could have taken my scent to the cub. Could the mother have called to the cub? A bear’s hearing is far keener than a human’s, so the cub could well have responded to a call that I couldn’t detect. I’ll never know what actually caused it to run, but I’ll always have the memory of that amazing encounter with a bear.

Scientists who have spent a great deal of time observing both wild and captive black bears tend to believe that they rank high on the animal intelligence scale. They’re frequently reluctant to say so, however, since intelligence—be it in animals or humans—is difficult to define and often highly controversial. However, if we assume as a working hypothesis that intelligence includes curiosity, the ability to solve problems, and quickness in adapting to new situations, black bears indeed seem to be very intelligent creatures.

For example, one scientist who closely studied captive black bears says that they manipulate various objects, such as blocks, chains, and other playthings, at about the same level as chimpanzees. This would seem to indicate a substantial degree of curiosity about their surroundings.

Bears can also be remarkably creative about figuring out how to get at food. One park biologist told me about the case of a tightrope-walking black bear. In order to keep bears out of their food, campers in the park suspended their edibles in containers hung from a quarter-inch cable strung between trees. Park personnel were polite but privately disbelieving when campers came to them and said that they had seen a bear tightrope-walking the cable in order to reach the food containers. Skepticism turned to belief, however, when the campers returned with photographs of the bear caught in the act! In yet another instance, biologists observed a small bear standing on the back of a large bear in order to reach a sack of food suspended from a cable.

Pennsylvania biologist Gary Alt, who is one of the leading authorities on black bears, has witnessed some rather astonishing performances on their part. He has done a great deal of work live-trapping bears to weigh, tag, and radio-collar them. A suitably large trap, made from a section of culvert, has a piece of bait suspended toward the rear of the trap. When a bear enters and seizes the bait, a raised, hinged gate is released; this falls, latches securely, and imprisons the bear. Alt has known some bears,
after being trapped
only once,
to return and stand with one hind foot raised while they take the bait, thereby preventing the falling gate from latching. Then the bears, bait and all, simply back out of the trap. If this isn’t intelligence, it’s at least remarkably rapid learning!

Alt also relates the astonishing tale of a 560-pound male bear that seemed to vanish into thin air. When Alt tracked this bear in the snow, he suddenly came to the end of its trail, with nothing around to climb or hide in. The first time this happened, he was understandably baffled by such an eerie sight, but he managed to solve the riddle after careful inspection of the tracks.

Without turning its hind feet, the bear twisted its body to the rear, jumped, and landed precisely in its own footsteps. Then, carefully stepping only in the tracks on its back trail, it traveled for a short distance before leaping off at right angles to the trail. Only by noticing that the tracks had claw marks at both ends was Alt able to figure out what the bear had done. What’s more, Alt tracked the bear twenty-six times in two days, and the bear repeated this amazing trick every single time, backtracking with exquisite care from fifty feet to two hundred yards before leaping sideways off the trail!

Although intelligence is an extraordinarily difficult and contentious subject, it would appear, based on these and similar incidents, that black bears exhibit a great deal of behavior that most people would regard as intelligent. In other words, the black bear probably
is
the brightest bear in the woods.

THE BROWN BEAR

Any consideration of North American brown bears must take into account the major differences between two very distinctive segments of this species— the inland grizzly and the coastal brown bear. Indeed, the differences between these two groups are sufficiently large that the two were long regarded as separate species. The coastal brown bear, a.k.a. the Alaskan brown bear or Kodiak bear, was listed as
Ursus middendorffi,
while the inland grizzly bear was
Ursus horribilis.
Now, however, most scientists agree that the inland grizzly and the coastal brownie are subspecies of the same species,
Ursus arctos.
Thus the brown bear is now
Ursus arctos middendorffi,
while the grizzly is
Ursus arctos horribilis.

Inland grizzlies inhabit parts of the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, most of Alaska, British Columbia, and part of Alberta. In the lower forty-eight states, where they’re an endangered species, the remaining grizzlies live mostly in and around two national parks, Glacier and Yellowstone.

Temperament is a good place to begin with these two-bears-in-one. Grizzlies are properly regarded as our most dangerous North American bear.
Ursus horribilis
it was named, Latin for “horrible bear,” and its present subspecies name retains this view of the grizzly. Indeed, there’s good reason for such an appalling name; there have been a great many recorded incidents of grizzly attacks on humans, with more than a few resulting in human fatalities. Grizzlies are highly protective of what they regard as their personal space, which can be very large in some cases. With that attitude, combined with a very short fuse, grizzlies should be considered extremely hazardous and strictly avoided.

Several years ago an experienced outdoor photographer was killed while taking a movie of a grizzly from what would seem to have been a prudent distance. When the bear suddenly charged, the photographer kept his camera running, and a major sporting magazine later showed horrifying still frames of the event, as the bear covered the distance to the photographer in a matter of seconds. The bear filled the last frames, as I recall, horrifyingly close. Tragically, those were the final pictures ever taken by the unlucky photographer.

In a more recent example, three hikers were mauled by a female grizzly with her cub. The first two unexpectedly happened upon the bears, and the mother immediately attacked them. One of the injured hikers staggered back along the trail to seek help from a park ranger. When he encountered another hiker, that person continued forward to help the injured person left behind. The bears were still in the vicinity, and the female attacked and mauled the would-be rescuer. Fortunately, all three hikers survived, although they suffered serious injuries.

These events should serve as a warning to others that they should stay as far as possible from grizzlies. At the same time, however, it’s easy to exaggerate the dangers posed by grizzlies. The actual number of grizzly attacks on humans annually is extremely low, especially now that the Park Service has altered its policies on things such as storage and removal of garbage at campgrounds. To put the matter of grizzly attacks in perspective, a hundred or more people die annually from reaction to bee stings, to say nothing of the many thousands who fall victim to that great predator, the automobile. Grizzlies should be treated with the utmost caution and avoided wherever possible, but the chances that a reasonably cautious person will be attacked by one of these great predators is extremely small, even in prime grizzly habitat.

In contrast, coastal brown bears have a considerably more relaxed attitude toward people. That most emphatically doesn’t mean that they’re safe to approach closely, but these huge bears are far less likely than grizzlies to charge people at a distance. There are sites in Alaska, closely monitored to prevent people from straying too close, where the public can observe and photograph enormous brownies fishing for salmon. These sites are located at distances from the bears that would be far too short to contemplate with inland grizzlies.

While black bears are adept at climbing trees, brown bears, whether inland grizzly or coastal brownie, lack that ability. Thus trees, if available, can sometimes offer safety from bear attacks, and more than one person has survived a grizzly attack by seeking refuge in a tree.

Size also sharply differentiates the two divisions of the brown bear population. On average, grizzlies are substantially larger than black bears, but much smaller than coastal brownies: adult grizzlies weigh from three hundred to nine hundred pounds or more, but some of the giant coastal brown bears exceed 1,500 pounds.

This major difference in size is attributed in large measure to diet: while grizzlies eat substantially more meat than black bears, coastal brown bears have a far more meat-rich diet than either. Grizzlies prey on deer fawns and elk calves, and also dig a variety of small rodents out of the ground. At times, they also fatten on huge hatches of army cutworm moths, which swarm under rocks, or devour large groups of ladybird beetles. Still, grizzlies lack a steady supply of meat.

Coastal brown bears, on the other hand, have access to most of the same food sources available to the inland grizzly, plus several other incredibly rich supplies of meat. In particular, there’s the annual spawning run of salmon, but the ocean also casts up such savories as dead or injured seals and whales. In sum, the coastal brownies have access to an abundance undreamed of by grizzlies.

Brown bears, like black bears, usually give birth to two or three cubs in a litter, but, unlike black bears, they only breed every third year, so that the cubs remain with their mother for two and a half years. The cubs are born in a den, which in the case of most grizzlies is at a rather high altitude—six thousand to seven thousand feet. Often the bears create dens by digging into steep slopes. They also excavate beneath huge logs or utilize caves if they’re available. Coastal brown bears, for obvious reasons, den at much lower altitudes, but their denning sites and habits are otherwise like those of grizzlies.