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.
As to post #18... After researching "wildlife of Bhutan" it appears that there are no brown bears living in that location. However, Asiatic black bears are not uncommon.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies by Douglas Chadwick - Copyright 2017 Patagonia
For more than a decade, my home was a log cabin in the Montana Rockies, off the grid and way off the clock. My to-do-list on many days looked like this: Chop firewood, Pump water, Go watch wildlife next door in Glacier National Park, Especially bears.
Before long, I had an adult bear in view at a lake. I dropped from the ridge to a lower band of ledges and set up a telescope. The animal was wading out from shore with only portions of its back and snout showing, furry alligator-style. This grizzly wasn't in the water to hunt for fish or for anything else, though. It wasn't there to drink its fill or to interact with another bear. It was just doing what any of us might while free-roaming the slopes on a hot afternoon - getting wet and keeping cool. Feeling fine. Every so often, the bear would stand to swipe at the surface or pound it with its paws to create a splash. At other times, Aqua-Grizz would submerge completely and then rise on its hind legs again to shake itself, whipping rings of water from its head and upper torso.
Returning to shore, the bear came upon a washed-up tree trunk. After rolling this around for a few moments, the grizzly lay on its back among the green sedges, wrestled the heavy length of wood atop its body, lifted it, and began juggling the thing with all four feet. Why? Well, why will a grown-up grizzly repeatedly slide down a tilted patch of snow? Why does one foraging in a meadow sometimes break into a wriggly, loose-limbed frolic, swinging its head and zigzagging this way and that? I think the better question - and also the answer - is: Why not? Imagine you own hundreds of pounds of muscle packed atop muscle, claws that measure three or four inches along the outside curve, and the ability to accelerate from zero to thirty-five miles per hour in seconds. What you want to do, you can do, no worries. You're a heavy-duty organic power generator with a fresh tank of fruit sugar fuel, and this log is just lying there waiting to be tossed around.
While science can't quite bring itself to say that grizzlies like to goof, the experts acknowledge that, young or old, these bears do devote an intriguing amount of time to play behavior. Exuberance is part of what defines them. So is a strongly developed sense of curiosity. Grizzlies are given to thoroughly investigating objects of interest, manipulating them with their mouth as well as with those broad, flexible paws, trying in their own way to learn more about how the world works. Its one of the main reasons I've always found in natural to relate to grizz - to imagine myself in their place as they move through a landscape, poking around. I also try never to forget that the same animals can instantly turn volcanic when upset.
01-19-2017, 07:37 PM( This post was last modified: 01-19-2017, 09:48 PM by brotherbear )
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies
My wife, Karen Reeves, spent several summers managing a hike-in chalet high in the Glacier Park backcountry. One year, a spell of rain wrapped the heights in heavy clouds, hiding the spectacular topography from sight for days. One of the guests, a woman with an infant child, grew more and more restless as the storm kept its shroud over the land. At last, she decided that, rain or no rain, view or no view, she and her husband were going to get out on the trail to a pass south of the chalet. The high point was barely a mile distant, but the route was steep. By the time the couple negotiated the pass and started through the alpine meadows beyond, their baby had grown hungry. Picking out a level spot, the woman sat, opened her jacket, and began to suckle the child amid veils of mist.
As the baby nursed, the parents took more notice of their surroundings. They became aware of an occasional break in the fog. Then out of the swirls stepped a grizzly. Coming from the opposite side of the pass, the bear was no more than forty or fifty yards away, well within the zone where a startled bear may reflexively attack. Not only was this a grizz, it was the kind said to be the one you least want to meet at close quarters: a mother with young. She had two cubs at her heels.
The bear noticed the people at almost the same time. She stopped walking, swiveled to check on her offspring, and turned back to stare directly at the parents and child again. After what must have felt like an awfully long pause, this grizzly made its move. She plonked down on her hindquarters, gathered the cubs up onto her lap, and began nursing them. Maybe it was the smell of the other mammal's milk that inspired her; maybe something else. I don't remember Karen relating how long the mothers sat there on the pass, not far from one another, nursing their babies. I only remember hearing that after the young were fed and content, the two females rose and went their separate ways.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
One way to define grizzlies would be a big, hairy, eye-popping opportunities to get your heart rate up and start thinking fast. But what are the animals truly like? All kinds of people seem to believe that they know. In reality, nobody does. And nobody will until we gain more insight into the species' complex suite of behaviors and learning abilities. That's not a criticism of our efforts. It's a tribute to a potent mammal that, like us, is able to operate on many levels and in many different environments. It's also an open-ended invitation to discovery.
In a remote and pitiless desert on the other side of the world from North America lives a bear that science understands only poorly so far and the general public isn't aware of at all. One of the scarcest creatures on the planet, it is a type of grizzly so extraordinary that its existence is hard to imagine even after you get to its homeland; in fact, especially after you get to its homeland. Traders, bandits, holy men, and warriors have passed through over the centuries, adding legends and layers of history. But they didn't stay, and this setting was never tamed. It still isn't. Not yet, although....
Oh, hell. Let's just go on so I can show you.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Gobi, in Mongolian, means "waterless place." Half a million square miles in size, the Great Gobi is one of the Earth's five largest deserts ( outside the frozen polar expanses receiving so little fresh precipitation that they, too, technically qualify as deserts ). The drylands stretch for a thousand miles east and west and as many as six hundred miles north and south, taking in the southern third of Mongolia and much of northern China. This is right at the center of the Asian land mass, so far from any ocean that clouds bearing moisture drop nearly all of it over other landscapes before they get here. Rainfall in the Gobi averages just four to six inches annually. Some years, parts of the countryside never see a drop. Temperatures can reach 122 degrees Fahrenheit in summer and sink to minus 40 in winter. If you imagine the result to be a vast realm of shifting sands, well, you shouldn't. The Gobi is mostly stone.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
What we wanted to find in these live traps were bears. Big, unruly, long-eared, bed-hair-shaggy, chocolate-colored, bronze, or golden Gobi grizzly bears. Ursus arctos, found across much of the Northern Hemisphere, is commonly called the brown bear or grizzly. Gobi bears are a unique variety or subspecies, Ursus arctos gobiensis. Mongolians call them mazaalai. Scientists weren't even able to confirm their existence until 1943, and not many details about their lives have been uncovered since. During the second half of the twentieth century, portions of the Gobi were hit by a combination of expanded livestock grazing and drought, both of which reduced the deserts already sparse vegetation. The bears lost half to two-thirds of their range, and their numbers fell sharply. Today, no more than three to four dozen individuals remain. Gobi grizzlies have become the rarest bears in the world. There are none in captivity. All the known survivors inhabit outlying ranges of the Gobi-Altai Mountains in southwestern Mongolia, keeping almost entirely to three of the tallest, most rugged portions of a reserve established there in 1976. This is the Great Gobi Strictly Protected Area-A. Called the GGSPA for short, and it covers roughly 18,000 square miles, an area slightly larger than Israel and Kuwait combined.
Since 2005, the Gobi Bear Project team of Mongolian biologists, GGSPA personnel, and lead scientist Harry Reynolds, an American bear expert who started this study in his mid-sixties, has been working together to catch and radio-collar mazaalai. They continue to do this for a month every spring between the time most bears emerge from hibernation and the start of searing temperatures that bring with them a risk of fatal heat stress for a captured animal.
01-20-2017, 11:58 PM( This post was last modified: 01-21-2017, 12:05 AM by brotherbear )
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Ten thousand years ago, the planet's human population was around 5 million. As of 1930, there were 400,000 times that many folks - about 2 billion. The total hit 3.5 billion by 1970. Between then and 2012, it doubled to 7 billion. During that forty-two-year interval, Earth's total population of vertebrate wildlife - fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals - fell by more than half, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature predicts that one of every four species of mammals will vanish in the near future. A third of all species presently known, and possibly more, may be gone by the end of the century.
............ The existence of grizzlies in the Gobi Desert defies long odds to begin with. If the project proved able to help them rebound, that wouldn't change the world. But it would keep Gobi bears in it - and perhaps raise hope for other implausible-seeming efforts to provide fellow Earthlings with a future. I picture the team climbing a nearby peak to stand on the summit with middle fingers raised, flipping off the forces denaturing the only living planet we know.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
On the floor of the gorge, the bear's trail merged with the scat and tracks of wolves, black-tailed gazelles, wild camels, wild asses, and the region's wild cliff-dwelling goats with horns like knobby-scimitars - Siberian ibex. It was a reminder that the reserve was established to protect not just mazaalai but an entire community of desert fauna whose rich variety of big mammals had been a revelation ever since my first trip to the Gobi.
...........The remains of a black-tailed gazelle lay among the tamarisk stems at one side. More bones and scraps of hide were scattered in the powdery white alkali dust that forms around the evaporating edges of the Gobi's rare springs. On the scree slope just above, an ibex skull and horns rested facing the water hole as if placed there to keep watch.
At least two of the sets of bear tracks looked relatively fresh. A compact pile of scat among them consisted almost entirely of darkling beetle remains - further evidence, perhaps, of how Gobi bears adapt when a rainless spell, such as the desert had experienced for months now, suppresses early springtime plant growth.
...........We called a halt to our trek after coming upon the body of an ibex surrounded by torn-off tufts of its fur and bear droppings packed with more of the hairs.
This was the narrowest part of the canyon so far - a bottleneck ideal for ambush by a predator. In the movie running through my brain, it was wolves that had made the kill; their scat lay very close by. After them came gimlet-eyed ravens and vultures. Next, the bear, arriving at the gorge to slake its thirst, followed its nose to the carcass and chased off the birds to take its turn scavenging. In reality, the carcass was too dismembered to reveal how the animal died. The marrow in its leg bones, normally white and fatty, was red and runny, a sign of malnutrition. The ibex might have been easy prey, and the killer wasn't necessarily either wolves or bear. It could have been microscopic disease organisms. Or it could have been one of the snow leopards living among the Gobi's mountains, which include summits close to 9,000 feet high. These nocturnal hunters with a whisper-soft tread descend to many of the same oases used by the rest of the area's wildlife. Nor could we rule out the possibility that the ibex was brought down by a similar predator within the reserve: the Eurasian lynx. Weighing as much as sixty-five pounds, this larger cousin of the Canadian lynx is a successful ungulate predator as well as a hunter of smaller mammals and birds.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Then we reached the alkali flats - the series of takyrs. Conditions went from bad to stupid-bad to raging, blinding, Captain-we've-landed-on-the-wrong-planet! movie-bad. With the air coming at us like a reddish-brown landslide, swirling in the headlamps, crashing relentlessly against the front of the van, I remember the expression "It'll be a cold day in hell when..."
Now I knew what a cold day in hell must be like. Our inbound tracks were lost altogether. We tried to navigate instead by keeping a constant angle relative to the direction of the oncoming waves of dust. It reminded me of night voyages on boats trying to maintain a fixed bearing in a maelstrom at sea.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Ursus arctos, the brown, or grizzly bear, first arose in Central Asia between half a million and a million years ago. Some genetic evidence suggests that mazaalai are closely related to those ancestral Ursus arctos and may in fact be the oldest continuous line of grizzlies among the subspecies present today.
Some taxonomists have classified Gobi bears together with the Tibetan bear, also known as the blue bear, Ursus arctos pruinosus. The widespread range of the Himalayan brown bear, Ursus arctos isabellinus, includes north-western China's Tian Shan Mountains, which top out at 24,406 feet. Since eastern extensions of the Tian Shan Range approach Mongolia's Gobi-Altai Mountains where the last Gobi bears are found, this has led other experts to suspect that mazaalai might be a relict enclave of isabellinus.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
When geneticists analyzed samples of hair said to have come from Yetis, the famed Abominable Snowmen of the Himalayas, the fur turned out to belong to isabellinus. One reason early Gobi scientist-explorers were never able to vouch for the existence of bears in this desert is that the information they gathered from herders included confusing reports of another big, hairy, somewhat human-like-creature roaming the place. This was the Mongolians' version of the Yeti, or Bigfoot. They called it Alma.
No one knows how long mazaalai have lived isolated from other types of grizzlies in Asia. It might not have taken very long for inbreeding within a relatively small population confined to an extreme environment to transform the bears of the Gobi into Ursus arctos something else. It's also possible that Gobi bears became different by remaining largely unchanged through time while grizzly bears elsewhere, able to wander and exchange genes more freely, evolved along different lines.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Taxonomy is the professional chore of assigning Latin names to lifeforms and trying to fit them into fixed categories, the better to organize our understanding of nature, even though the essence of life is change. No wonder the correct classification of creatures is a source of continuous debate. Whatever label Gobi bears eventually end up with won't alter their essence as a unique population of bruins with a unique way of life at the outermost edge of the outer edge of possibility for their kind. They are not huge, they are not white, and they don't inhabit the snowbound heights of the greatest mountains on Earth. But they are big and tousle-furred and call for a serious stretch of the imagination on our part.
The Himalayan brown bear qualifies as a Yeti you can prove you saw. Mazaalai may or may not have originally been connected to that subspecies. Call Gobi bears gobiensis, isabellinus, pruinosus, or improbabilis. It doesn't matter to me. They are my Yetis. They're my Bigfoot, my Mongolian Alma, my lost tribe of powerful hairy beings, rearing up to walk on two legs at times, roaming a landscape as remote and mysterious, demanding, and beautiful in its own way as the Himalayas. And although no one tracking down rumors of them managed to prove their existence to the world at large until almost the middle of the twentieth century, they are as real as warm breath and a beating heart. At the same time, they are in danger of not being real for much longer.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Knowing that the drug had rendered the bear unable to react but by no means unconscious, everyone made an effort to avoid making loud noises. Nevertheless, the crew's adrenaline level generated a steady rush of whispered conversations that proved impossible to damp down. Amgaa and Nyamaa got busy with a measuring tape and calipers, and Boyoko began jotting down the animal's overall length and girth, muzzle size, neck circumference, and so forth on a data sheet. I was intrigued by the animal's ears. Like those of the other Gobi bears I'd seen, they struck me as larger and longer than those of typical grizzlies. Tufts of hair sticking straight up from the top made them appear longer still, as if a dab of desert jackrabbit had somehow made its way into the gene pool.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
The bear was a female. Though missing a patch of fur along one shoulder and part of her neck, she showed no obvious signs of recent injury or infection. This Gobi bear, like others I'd seen up close after capture, showed an astonishing amount of wear on her teeth. If she were a North American grizzly, I'd have guessed her age at more than twenty years. By Harry's estimate, she was about six years old. As I ran my fingers over the blunt fangs and ground-down molars, she growled as she exhaled. The sound wasn't fierce; more of a bearish sigh. Who could say what this grizzly's mind was processing as she lay there helpless, unable to connect any messages from her nerves to the muscles that had always overpowered whatever stood in her way? She couldn't even blink, so we had squeezed lubricant drops into her eyes to prevent them from drying out and covered them to keep out the dust. When her blindfold slipped off, I bent down to readjust it and felt her breath moisten my skin. Her body gave off all kinds of fragrances - some musty, some sharp, others rich and gamely. The sum of them smelled sweet.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Once the crowd hovering over the bear had the measurements and samples it needed, I took a turn at her side and put my hands on her fur - that strange, shaggy, distinctive mazaalai coat that doesn't drape over the body so much as stick out in all directions, wildly mussed-looking. From the layer of light brown outer guard hairs, I worked my fingers down into the bear's second coat, consisting of fine, densely interwoven hairs. Unlike that of the North American grizzly, the mazaalai inner layer of fur is brilliant white, as if borrowed from a polar bear. It is also remarkably thick. I could feel the warmth trapped within. How a desert-dwelling bruin coped with summer's heat wearing this woolen underwear was hard to imagine, but then I couldn't imagine dealing with the unobstructed icy winds and bitter cold that grip this part of the world from fall through spring without extra insulation. Odko spied a camel tick crawling through the fur and nabbed it - not for science but simply because this bear's life might be a little more comfortable with one less tick on its hide. It was the least we could do to make up for all our pulling and probing.
Bears of the Himalayan Mountains
