Brown Bear Directory

[brotherbear]

~Grizzly Years by Doug Peacock.Moving cautiously, I climbed down to study the bear prints. The rear pads were more than ten inches long on hard ground; the left track was asymmetrical and toed in. I checked more tracks to confirm the pattern. It's him alright, I had thought so - the Bitter Creek Griz, my favorite Yellowstone bear.I first got to know this unusual bear in 1977 and have seen him almost every year since. Even back then, he was a huge grizzly with a grayish muzzle - probably a survivor of the purges of the early seventies, when almost a hundred grizzlies were known killed or removed from the Yellowstone ecosystem in a single two-year period. He also appeared to be an effective predator, killing yearling bison and an occasional moose. His pigeon-toed spoor, perhaps the result of an old injury, was distinctive.I followed the prints out onto the crusted snow. The grizzly tracks followed my snowshoe trail for nearly a hundred yards, then veered off to the right in a tight circle to an icy depression behind a large deadfall ten feet off my trail. More tracks led away.The story was clear: last night the Bitter Creek Griz had backtracked me, then circled around and bedded, waiting for me behind a log ten feet from where I would walk. Had I gone farther into the timber that night he would have been right there. The icy bed told me he lay in wait a long time.This was the second time this had happened to me - a grizzly setting up what looked like a deliberate ambush. I do not know what it means. Maybe it is only curiosity. Still, there were moments  when I imagined a malevolent intelligence lurking behind that log.Stalking or ambushing humans during the day is exceedingly rare although not unknown in the literature of grizzly lore. There was one report from British Columbia that during the winter of 1970, a Doig River Indian tracked a grizzly that circled back behind a mossy hummock and killed and partially devoured him. So I don't know what to think. I do not think every grizzly lying in ambush intends to do me harm, but I do not think the bears are joking either.This kind of unsettling behavior by grizzly bears resists easy categorization. It is one of the things that attracted me to them in the first place. Living with grizzlies is an eternal freshness: you can never be sure exactly what you are dealing with, and your curiosity transcends bafflement because you are bargaining with an animal who can kill and eat you. 
 ~The Bitter Creek Grizzly was the only bear I knew of in Yellowstone that regularly killed moose and bison. He attacked younger animals - ambushed them from nearby timber, then dragged them back into the trees, sometimes covering the carcasses with dirt and sticks. I had seen this too many times to believe that these animals had all conveniently died during the winter. His was not the usual pattern of predation for grizzlies. In 1977, when I first crossed paths with the Bitter Creek Griz, a biologist had found another grizzly who had passed up many carcasses for live elk: The bear liked to kill what he ate. A few bears learn to kill healthy adult elk during all seasons, and cow-struck bulls during the rut were especially stupid and approachable. Yellowstone grizzlies also prey on elk calves, as they do caribou calves in Alaska, and moose calves in both places. Adult moose were generally a match for a grizzly except when snows were deep and lightly crusted: grizzlies can walk lightly over a thin crust, distributing their weight evenly on their plantigrade feet, and they glide over the top of deep drifts in which moose wallow. I thought that grizzly predation was not as common here as it had been a decade or more ago. The predatory segment of the population had probably been killed off selectively, and continues to be culled as they were born into it, because predatory bears are bolder and more visible. The Bitter Creek Griz was a holdover from the days when bears could afford to be bold and aggressive. Which served, as it always had, an important ecological function vital to survival of the species. Reply