Bears of the Himalayan Mountains

[brotherbear]

Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Looking at grizzlies is like seeing creatures underwater through a face mask. They tend to appear larger than they really are. The logical part of my brain was resisting that effect, trying to tell me that this grizz wasn't large at all, especially for a male. In reality, it was closer in size to a black bear than to a North American Ursus arctos. 
One of the male's most striking characteristics was his golden brown fur with a blaze of white on the shoulders and neck. The fact that this hair was sticking out all over the place made a strong impression, as did the other mazaalai characteristics that I would later come to understand as typical - the long ears, the thick snow-white underfur, the beat-down-to-stubs claws, and, especially, the blunted ends of the teeth. The degree of wear on them was startling to me, for this animal had the relatively short muzzle of a youngish bear. Harry affirmed that it actually was a very young adult, most likely six years old. 
Dark hairs along with blackish skin around the eyes gave this male the look of someone who needed to think about cutting back on the late-night partying. I didn't know if the dark circles were a common Gobi bear trait or an appearance temporarily emphasized by early shedding of fur around the eyes. I'd seen a couple of grizzlies in the Rockies with a similar look during the early summer shedding period. There were two ticks embedded in the male's eye rings. While we removed them, Harry commented that he had handled individuals with ticks crowded all around the eyes. Our male also had several scars on his head, some of which seemed to be old bite marks. He weighed exactly 100 kilograms ( 220 pounds ), an impressive size for a male Gobi bear his age, in Harry's opinion. For comparison, a six-year-old male grizzly in Montana might weigh 300 pounds or more. Reply