There is a world somewhere between reality and fiction. Although ignored by many, it is very real and so are those living in it. This forum is about the natural world. Here, wild animals will be heard and respected. The forum offers a glimpse into an unknown world as well as a room with a view on the present and the future. Anyone able to speak on behalf of those living in the emerald forest and the deep blue sea is invited to join.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
The claws told the same story of life in this environment as the teeth did. On a typical Ursus arctos, those nails would be three inches longer and tapered to a sharp point. But this bear's were cracked, chipped, and stubby, and less than half the usual length. They can keep growing back of course, but I wasn't expecting mazaalai claws to be long and sharp anymore, not on animals that spend a lifetime walking over stone and digging through gravel to get plant roots and burrowing rodents. An adult's teeth look as they do because they don't grow back even though the bear goes through the rest of its life unavoidably chewing on chunks of sand and mineral grit along with much of its food from the desert's floor. The foot pads that had carried this female across so many miles of sharply eroded stones and burning hot gravels were cracked and worn smooth in places, yet surprisingly soft and supple. The more I examined them, the closer I felt to her, because of the resemblance of the bottoms of her front feet to human palms and the way the elongated soles of her rear feet reminded me of my own.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Looking around, I saw that my window for close-up observation was about to close. The crew was preparing to hoist the female off the ground with a rope tied to a scale. We didn't have a lot of time to squander. It can take an hour and a half for an immobilized bear to get up. Then again, it can take as little as thirty minutes, depending on the individual animal's metabolism and the precision of the dosage it received. Whenever a grizzly starts coming out of its stupor, you don't want to be playing with its toes.
The scale gave a reading of 207 pounds, a heavy April weight for a young but sexually mature female mazaalai that had spent a long winter in a den living off her fat reserves. Enlarged nipples indicated that she had been nursing cubs. We saw no sign of the offspring. If two-year olds, they might have become independent of her early in the spring. If they were new cubs or yearlings, they had more likely perished. Then again, it was possible that the female had somehow hidden them away while she alone visited the trap. We'd been wondering how the drought that began the previous year might be affecting bears. Although it may have reduced this one's ability to provide enough milk to nourish her young, she seemed in good overall condition - solid with muscle, rather than bony.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
The normal collaring protocol calls for keeping a continuous watch over a bear coming out of the drug's effects until the animal regains enough strength and coordination to amble off. The reason we tucked the stirring but still-groggy female into her makeshift blanket and left her to wake up alone is that Puji had come hurrying back on his motorcycle from checking trap site number three - Tsagaan Burgas ( White Willow ). We had a bear in the box there, too.
When Harry had told me to get my lazy ass out of bed because we had bears to collar, he only knew about the one at Tsagaan Tokhoi. No one imagined that we really did have bears - plural - to deal with, or that we would, within the space of a few hours, match our yearly average of two successful captures.
01-23-2017, 03:31 PM( This post was last modified: 01-23-2017, 08:43 PM by brotherbear )
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
With Odko translating, Puji said, "I didn't get a good look into the trap because I didn't want to bother the bear, but I think that it is a small one." He was wrong. It was a male, maybe eight years old, taller and a good foot longer than the female. By the time we arrived, he had torn away part of the metal ventilation grate welded onto one side of the box. He carried 231 pounds on a rangy frame, and that was his low, post-hibernation weight. His general condition, like the female's appeared good. The double-layered coat he wore was luxuriantly thick. We found a number of ticks burrowed into it and a recent scar running down one side of his head. Nobody, it seems, gets by completely unscathed in the Gobi. And yet this pitiless environment had produced two large, beautiful mammals contoured with belts of powerful muscles and wrapped in plush fur. Two lives that, if granted the usual span for their kind, would continue for fifteen to twenty years. Or longer.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies - Douglas Chadwick - 2017.
Growing up in the American West, I was fascinated by nature and never-tamed places. That didn't change as I got older. I majored in biology during college and did my graduate field research on the social behavior and ecology of mountain goats. Under heavy pressure from sport hunting combined with the expansion of road networks ever farther into the backcountry, the goats were in widespread decline. Grizzlies, whose numbers had fallen to perhaps fewer than 700 south of Canada by the 1970s, needed protection even more urgently. I carried out some small-scale surveys and follow-up lobbying that played a minor role in getting the bears listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Next, I went to work as a seasonal biologist for the National Park Service, studying the mountain goats along the continental divide in Glacier Park. In my spare time, I hiked to my favorite settings for watching grizzlies, because... I'm not sure why. I feared these great, humbling, electrifying master mammals; I admired them for their blend of power and playfulness directed by an obvious intelligence. I think I sought out their presense in part because it made me so fully alive, from the oldest compartments of my glands and senses and brain to the newest. Grizzlies can absolutely rip and tear stuff apart, but for me they made the world feel more whole.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
A handsome man in his fifties, Miji showed up freshly scrubbed and wearing a suit jacket. He sat in sharp contrast to our gang of rumpled travelers, but I knew from Harry that this man speaking to us in a soft voice with a direct gaze was as capable in the field and as passionate about Gobi bears as anybody in the room.
In between his other responsibilities at this remote outpost, Miji had been making forays to gather information about mazaalai for three decades. More often than not, he was the only biologist in the world paying any real attention to Gobi bears. He also made a special effort to survey wild Bactrian camels. Only about 800 of these double-humped giants ( Camelus ferus ) were left on Earth. Some roamed China's portion of the Gobi. "But the majority of the species now relies mainly on habitats within this reserve," he said, with Odko translating. "This is a stronghold for khulan ( wild ass ) too - maybe 800 to 1,000. About 600 argali, 500 ibex. And maybe a 1,000 black-tailed gazelles."
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.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Inspecting the bear, directing the crew's measurements and drawing blood samples, constantly checking the animal's breathing, pulse, and temperature, Harry was in his zone, genuinely cool now. He'd morphed into a stone-cold grizz pro, the man who had captured and collared more than 1,700 Ursus arctos in North America. Harry once had a drugged grizzly revive enough to turn its head and sink its teeth into his leg; he then stood in place, stifled the urge to howl, which risked further reviving the bear, and waited several minutes until the animal finally relaxed its jaws. Proctor, normally one of the more exuberant humans ever invented, was ice too, having handled hundreds of North American grizzlies himself. Watching the Reynolds-Proctor duo move through the process was tremendously reassuring. If we were going to subject the world's rarest bears to the impositions of science, it had to be done with all the calm and care and experience I was seeing.
01-24-2017, 11:11 PM( This post was last modified: 01-24-2017, 11:50 PM by brotherbear )
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
On the ride home, I asked more about Altan's bed-hair look. Why would a desert-dwelling grizzly end up having fur at least as thick as that of a grizzly roaming the Arctic? "Winters are long here." Proctor answered, "and temperatures sink far below zero. Without deep soil to tunnel into for a den, these bears have little choice but to find a shallow cave and sleep partly exposed." In other words, mazaalai can't dig a bear-size burrow because every mountainside in the GGSPA is pretty much all stone. They can't find a hollow tree to crawl into either, there being no forests other than the rare oasis poplar grove.
If you watch coastal salmon-feasting grizzlies in late fall, you'll see their butts jiggling like jelly as they walk. Those animals go into their winter dens with a body fat ratio of close to 50 percent. Rocky Mountain grizzlies that have been gobbling berries through the late summer and early fall might be 17 to 25 percent fat before denning. Nobody has measured this quality for Gobi bears, but it would be at the low end of the scale. Smaller and leaner than grizzlies in more generous settings, Gobi bears have less body mass to retain heat. An extra thick double layer of air-trapping fur has to do the job of providing insulation in lieu of flesh and fat. A mazaalai can add to the cushion between itself and the floor of a cave den by carrying in vegetation. Most grizzlies gather some plant material in for their winter beds: conifer boughs, beargrass, heather, and the like. The few reports of possible Gobi bear winter beds describe collections of dry branches and twigs; not the most comfortable sleeping mat, perhaps, but it sounded better than freezing rock.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Counting backward from the ages of the bears he had collared, Harry calculated that at least nine had been born between 1999 and 2009. Our recent capture of big, healthy, six-year-old Altan brought the number to ten. Thus, the Project had put two major sources of anxiety to rest for the moment: The mazaalai continued to meet and mingle genes. And they were still making babies that survived to become young adults, replacing members of the population lost to old age or other causes of death.
Ursus arctos gobiensus showed no obvious sign of giving in. Its numbers appeared to have stayed more or less constant for the past four decades. Thus, the main reason for the biologists, for the Mongolian government, and for anybody who cared about these creatures had become this: What will it take to help the world's rarest bears increase enough to spread outward, reoccupy former range, and gain a firm grip on the future instead of just tenaciously hanging on in their shrunken home?
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Before I could understand what might be done to help Gobi bears recover, I needed to understand what allowed them to live in this desert to begin with. When I'd buried my hands in Altan's fur ( Altan means golden ) while it moved up and down with each breath, it was almost as if I subconsciously craved the added layer of proof that mazaalai truly exist. Receiving it through my fingertips was a privilege, and Altan was as real as could be, but I still had no feel for the realities of these animal's daily lives. What kind of routes were they following through the mountain labyrinths and over the sprawling gravel plains? Where were they able to scrounge enough calories and protein from this stonescape to stay nourished? My intuition was insisting that this species and this environment simply weren't a fit. The only way I knew to change that was to hike the place - to take one step at a time with my eyes wide open and keep walking and looking until I began to glimpse how the Great Gobi might grow a grizzly bear.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Wherever I wandered alone on foot, I found myself under the spell of two sensations aroused and amplified by the desert. The first was one of absolute exposure - to the sun and eternal blue sky; to vast, uncluttered vistas of Earth's bare skin and bones impinging from all sides; to sharp stones underfoot, pushes and probes of the wind; to more stars than I had ever seen. Outside my tent or the ger, there was no place to hide from any of it - no overhanging branches, no organic tangles, no corner or cubby to nestle into except maybe somewhere against a rock face.
The second sensation was of the desert's profound stillness. Nothing moved out there save the occasional dust devil or wisp of a cloud. There was never a jet contrail marking the sky, for no commercial airlines flew routes over the empty spaces of Central Asia. The absence of motion was matched with an absence of sound. If you make a point of listening to the Gobi wind, you can nearly always hear it whisper something. But it surges and susurrations become the kind of white noise you cease to pay attention to. And when the wind that has been blowing you around suddenly idles, the depth of the silence will practically knock you to your knees.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
And then, fast as a shooting star, the silhouette of a saker falcon cuts a line through the sky and disappears behind a peak. Perhaps twenty minutes later, a single raven call comes echoing down one of the side-canyons. The rest is stillness again, the Gobi's all-encompassing, unchanging views and the sound of no sound. Ir was a while before I fully grasped why this stasis wasn't broken by big wildlife more often. Wherever I turned, my gaze took in such a broad span and I could see so far into it, I anticipated finding a band of wild asses, perhaps a line of wild camels, or at least a lone gazelle if I scanned the panorama carefully through binoculars. Nope. The only animals I could count on seeing were the pied wagtails that hopped around base camp picking up insects and scraps. Only once in a while did I manage to view large mammals. It was usually at a distance, and most often because I was tipped off by long streamers of dust rising from the ground where they were on the move. Many and many a square mile was required to sustain a single animal through the changing seasons and years and cycles of drought in this desiccated domain. If the numbers that I had heard listed for hoofed wildlife in the GGSPA sounded high, it was because the reserve is colossal. To hike so far and come upon so few to watch wasn't disappointing; it was the Gobi. I took it as inspiration for walking farther and looking harder.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
As far as anyone yet knows, mazaalai don't own unique adaptations for desert environments. They are basically built like other grizzlies. Starving camels will turn to chew on the flesh, skin, and bones of carcasses. Mazaalai can do that. But they can't subsist on the toughest, saltiest, prickliest vegetation around, and they can't drink fifteen to thirty gallons of water in a quarter of an hour, walk away, and keep going without another sip for weeks. Camels, of course, are expert at both. They digest the rough forage by fermenting it in vat-like, multichambered stomachs with the help of microbes. Troops of bacteria, protozoans, and fungi combine to transform raw plant cellulose and lignin ( woody fibers ) into usable starches and sugars, proteins, fatty acids, vitamins, and other essential nutrients.
The gazelles, argali, and ibex possess the same kind of ruminant guts loaded with helpful microbes. Like desert bighorns in North America, the argali sheep are able to tolerate significant dehydration of their body tissues. Gerbils and most of the other Gobi Desert rodents hardly need to drink at all. They generate water from the way they metabolize seeds, buds, and other food, and they excrete very little liquid in their concentrated urine.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Bears, though omnivorous, operate with a carnivore's anatomy, which includes a relatively small stomach and short, straight intestinal tract. This is a digestive system designed for animals whose diet consists chiefly of meat and other animal tissues - concentrated energy food that doesn't require a lot of processing. To obtain a similar level of nutrition from a largely vegetarian diet, Gobi bears can't just compensate by eating more plant bulk. They have to high-grade what's available, seeking out the richest parts of the most palatable species.
Bears of the Himalayan Mountains
