In the Northern Rockies, grizzly bears are on the move

https://www.hcn.org/articles/bears-in-the-northern-rockies-grizzly-bears-are-on-the-move

by gmays • 3 years ago

42 31 3 years ago

dogman1447• 3 years ago

I live in the expansion zone for grizzlies they’re discussing.

The article covers some facts well. The bears are expanding range and interacting with humans more often.

I cannot recall specifics, but there are some valid arguments across multiple stakeholders and incentives for removing them from the endangered species list and allowing more hunting.

When I hike out here, I have bear spray and a 10mm. Grizzlies are dangerous animals, you can surprise them in odd areas and distances, and it’s fairly windy in many of the risk areas which impacts spray.

That said, the article felt a bit disingenuous in how it described the bears as a vicious mankiller.

Standard knowledge is 90% of the interactions are when you surprise a grizzly bear. The odds further lower that you’d surprise a bear leading to an interaction vs seeing the bear over a valley. If it happens, play dead on your stomach. They’ll swipe at you and walk away. *edit, should say the odds of getting to this are even more low, as they’ll usually huff/puff, and then “bluff charge”, and then worst case it could get to an attack to “end the threat” but not “eat you.” You can get hurt badly this way, but not a man-eater attack by no means. The other 10% are when they hunt after you, and then I yes I carry a 10mm and hike with a dog. But the odds of getting that far vs bear spray working are low too.

If the author is making a narrative around nature as to get people to read about mature, I can def respect that. But bears shouldn’t be feared beyond a healthy fear/respect border, especially if further interaction is likely.

This is a good resource to learn about bears from NOLS in Wyoming:

https://youtu.be/1KWSJ3piSfM

type0• 3 years ago

My grandma used to pick raspberries in the woods as a child, sometimes a brown bear would show up to eat the berries, it would stay on their spot and didn't try to scare people away. Unless you disturb them during hibernation or come between the mom and her cubs they're fairly peaceful.

COGlory5• 3 years ago

I had an encounter with a grizzly just north of West Yellowstone last fall. We had a huge snow storm on opening weekend and I was trying to find friends who had made camp in the Snowcrest range, and were severely snowed in. After a few days they decided to walk out and sent me a message over the satelleite phone where to meet them. They then left the satelleite phone at the camp with others, and headed to the meetup point.

The meetup point was ~12 miles off the main dirt road, and I got permanently stuck about 10 miles in. I got out and hiked the rest of the distance through a couple feet of snow, along a creek bed with a large draw on my other side. Once I got to the spot, I waited for them, but they didn't show up. After two hours, I turned back (to get somewhere with signal if possible) and after about 1/4 mile, realized there were large bear tracks criss-crossed all over my tracks.

I put my head on a swivel and after about a half mile, finally spotted the large brown bear, up on the draw (now to my left). It was about 200 yards behind me. It was cautiously following me, and we proceeded this way for probably another quarter mile. I was still at least a mile from my vehicle, and there were no humans around for who knows how far, let alone mobile considering how much snow we got.

At that point, the bear started coming down the draw, and my nervousness turned into all out panic. I was shaking like a leaf and lost my nerve. I gave it a warning shot with my .357 and thankfully, it decided I was scary enough to not be worth the curiosity. The .357 has a 1.8" barrel and is unfathomably loud, so despite not being a great bear gun, it did the trick there. I do have a 10mm, but I had sent it up to hunting camp with my friends.

My personal unscientific take, largelt biased from that experience is that we should kill 5-10 of the most human adapted bears every year, and not leave it to chance that they will ignore us.

The article portrayed what's going on with livestock ranching, hunting, and tourism quite well, but it left out the fact that these bears are just getting less afraid of humans in general as interaction increases. It would be wise to select against that if we can.

dogman1447• 3 years ago

That’s a great story, sounds intense. Even with out the bear that’s dicey getting stuck in snow in the backcountry.

I hike with a gun for basically those scenarios. I stay fresh with a range but it seems that warning shots are mostly as far as it goes. There is a bad story of a hunting guide getting killed near an elk carcass though, either Dubois or Cody area I can’t recall. So it can def go south if they’re looking at you more deliberately. Glad you made it!

Thanks for sharing! I’m on that side less often, more the Absarokas.

hutzlibu3• 3 years ago

"but it left out the fact that these bears are just getting less afraid of humans in general as interaction increases."

Isn't it also possible, that the interactions are increasing, because simply more people (without a clue) are going into bear territory?

Otherwise yes, the bears should not forget to avoid humans.

AlbertCory• 3 years ago

I've been a few feet away from the Kodiak subspecies (Ursus arctos middendorff). It was a grizzly-watching trip conducted by licensed guides, who carried a rifle. I don't actually know how comparable these are to the Lower 48 bears -- my impression is that on Kodiak there is so much salmon and so few people that the bears are less aggressive:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/mXMHAjDyQNDjFqjw8

What you said about playing dead does resonate: I remember one episode where about five of us were sitting very still, and the bear was nosing around about five feet from us. I don't think it was at all curious about us. In other cases, the guides would just raise their hands and shout at the bears and scare them away.

On the other hand, I watched a nature TV show, also shot on Kodiak, where the guy noticed one bear that was giving him the stink-eye. Occasionally one will take a dislike to you and you don't want to stick around.

_a_a_a_• 3 years ago

I have [...] a 10mm

Is that a gun in your pocket or are you pleased to see me but underwhelmingly endowed?

More seriously, I assume that's the bore of a gun. Coming from a nation without guns (or bears), I don't know what that says about it. Clarification welcome.

mindcrime2• 3 years ago

There are a few different methods for denoting ammunition, but mostly you'll see sizes expressed in mm's, or decimal portions of an inch. Decimal portions of mm's show up as well, in things like "7.62x51" rounds, etc.

Often (usually) there will be qualifiers (often the brand name of the first manufacturer of a given round, or the inventor of it). Qualifiers like "Auto", "Magnum", "NATO", etc are also common and have specific meanings.

Colloquially in the US, "10mm" corresponds to "10mm Auto"[1] which is a moderately popular handgun cartridge. 10mm rounds are towards the larger / more powerful end of the popular range for handguns, but are still far from what most people would consider "packing for bear". Guns chambered for larger and more powerful rounds are available, but as with everything there are tradeoffs. With 10mm you sacrifice some "stopping power" (a simplistic calculation would be speed in feet-per-second times the mass of the projectile) per-shot, but can probably carry more total rounds, than something larger like, say, .44 Magnum[2] or .454 Casull[3]. So one weighs "would I be better off with n shots with x stopping power, or n-s shots with x*q stopping power, for some number of fewer shots s, and some additional power (as a ratio) q"?

Other factors that come into play are cost, recoil, weight of the weapon itself (besides the cartridges), etc. Anyway, net-net, for people who live in bear country, from what I've seen, 10mm is often seen as a good compromise for bear protection. But I'm sure plenty of people prefer the .44 Magnum, the .454 Casull, or even something like .50AE[4].

We have bears where I live, but they're not common-place in this part of the state, and they're mostly black bears, and while they certainly can be dangerous, black bears are the smallest bear species that is common in North America. And at least around here, they still seem to be fairly "human shy" even when encountered. So on the occasions when I carry a pistol in the outdoors, I just go with the same 9mm I carry everywhere else. TBH, I'm not really thinking about bear protection much in those cases... I'm mostly carrying for protection from my fellow humans. shrug

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10mm_Auto

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.44_Magnum

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.454_Casull

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.50_Action_Express

icouldntresist3• 3 years ago

I'd use a 10mm in cougar country and get a .454 for griz TBH.

/$.02

dogman1447• 3 years ago

* guns aren’t fun, they’re a tool, do your research and don’t screw around with safety

Ya I was leaning to a s&w .44 initially. Generally I think there’s a school of thought of handcannon and 1-2 shots vs more rounds off and good enough load. Reports of encounters where the handgun mattered tend to vary b/t .357, .44, 10mm bear load, etc.

But, there’s a guy in an Alaska on YouTube who did a comparison of all the usual rd/weapon combos suggested, 10mm bear load + Glock 20 (what I use) did the best. I was comfortable with Glocks already so that’d wrapped it.

tony_cannistra3• 3 years ago

A good overview of the modern grizzly story. Especially good to see an article focused on the complexity of restoring large, culturally important predators to the landscape. It's a real minefield of federal regulations, Native American rights, hunters, agricultural communities, and more. I appreciate the detail this article chooses to use.

autoexec3• 3 years ago

Nathan Keane is an early riser. On most mornings, he’d let the dogs out to run around the yard at around 7:30. Then he’d make a pot of coffee and enjoy a few quiet minutes to himself before the kids woke up...On the day I met him, he wore a plaid shirt that pulled tightly across his chest and a camouflaged ball cap with his TV show’s logo on it...Bradley went south to Casper, Wyoming, for college, where she studied agribusiness. At 22, a car accident forced her to return home to Montana, where, while recuperating, she met her husband..

Why are articles so often filled with a bunch of totally irrelevant details. Is it supposed to be for our benefit as readers or is it just fun for the writer, like the literary equivalent of a wanky guitar solo?

tony_cannistra3• 3 years ago

I like these details. Not all stories have need to have people in them. But good stories do.

autoexec3• 3 years ago

I can understand wanting to tell a story about people and how something impacts them. It was perfectly fine to include those people's stories in the piece. I clicked on the article expecting to read about people's encounters with bears. That doesn't mean I needed to know about their dog's bathroom routine, or how many daughters they have. What is that even telling me? How can I make use of that information? What conclusions am I supposed to draw from it? Since you liked it, how was it helpful or entertaining for you? I genuinely don't understand it.

I can understand providing useful context, even setting a scene or providing a little color, but when it's totally off-topic and entirely irrelevant why include it? It feels like pointless filler, like something someone does to disguise a lack of actual content, but this article is already full of good information and was otherwise well written. It's not a problem with this one author or their editor either. Since I see it so often I figure there must be a reason behind it.

In the Northern Rockies, grizzly bears are on the move

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