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Bears of the Himalayan Mountains
Bears of the Himalayan Mountains
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Bears of the Himalayan Mountains
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Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
I had seen a fair amount of sprouting wild onions as well as new clumps of low-growing Stipa gobicum grass during my walks. The bears grazed both these species, and all of us chopped up the wild onion to sprinkle on our dinner noodles. When newly sprouted, both types of plants are at their richest in carbohydrates and protein and hold the most liquid. According to Schaller, the moisture content of the onion shoots during spring is 86 percent; in the blades of the Stipa, 67 percent. The more the bears can find, the less often they have to trek to an oasis for water. If the summer rains prove generous, some onion and Stipa will continue sprouting and growing all season and into the fall. Another source of high-energy green food the bears grazed were the sprouts and lower stalks of the tall Phragmites reeds ( technically, a species of grass ) that flourish in beds at a number of the springs. Grasslike sedges grew from moist soil close to the water's edge, and I saw evidence of recent feeding on them. Brown bears round the Northern Hemisphere eat young sedges. So do most resident ungulates. The GGSPA oasis held so many kinds of fresh tracks that I couldn't be sure which animals had been grazing down the sedges, but the mazaalai surely took part.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
As the days warmed, I found the desert's ordinarily quiet surface becoming more and more animated by the scuttlings of toad-headed agama lizards three to six inches long, ground beetles, and other insects. I often noticed as many as half a dozen wingless grasshoppers within a few yards once I honed my search image for them a bit during strolls. Resembling pudgy flightless crickets, they walked slowly and were easy to catch. From a passing bear's point of view, it would be as though somebody had randomly scattered nougats with a protein content on par with red meat across the desert floor. To the bears' plant diet, I could now add some amount of the following animals: carabid and tenebrionid beetles, ants, and wingless grasshoppers. Schaller and Miji had identified lizards, gerbils, hamsters, jerboas, and other, unidentified rodents in mazaalai scat along with an assortment of remains scavenged from ungulate carcasses. Bit by bit, pawprint by digging crater by turd speckled with beetle shells or grasshopper legs, I was beginning to form a mental picture of real grizzly bears moving through Thirstland from one source of concentrated food to another. Were there enough such sources to be found from early spring through late fall? Amgaa summed up the answer simply and, I think, best. He wasn't speaking of a year or even a few years. He was talking about the long run when he said, "if the weather is good, the bears will survive. If the climate is changing so the weather is not good...."
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
After several slow days with no bear activity reported near the trap sites, Hunter Causey, the volunteer hydrologist, went out to set a PVC pipe with calibrated markings among the reeds of Shar Khuls to serve as a gauge of the water level in the oasis. In trying to drive the pipe into the ground, he was met by a solid field of underlying ice. His discovery pointed to the possibility that this Gobi permafrost layer, insulated by the reed's roots and a thick mat of decomposing stalks, might reliably deliver meltdown even through a severe spell of drought. When a small crew went with Hunter to install a PVC pipe gauge in the Tsagaan Tokhoi canyon where water collected, I hiked on far up the course of the wash. After bouldering through one narrow section, I reached a fork where the rock had eroded into hoodoos - odd spires and towering walls honeycombed with shallow caves. Gale-force gusts surging up this deeply cut reach of the canyon turned the hoodoos into giant wind instruments. The place shrieked and wailed and uttered prolonged, anguished moans, as if I'd stumbled into the Gorge of Lost Souls. And not necessarily on my home planet. A moon two-thirds full stood in the ribbon of daylight sky above the slot like a second, unearthly sun. In my imagination, the cave-pocked cliffsides were mutating into high-rise apartments of an alien culture.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
While the open desert wasn't familiar to me yet, it was a hundred times more familiar than this abode of eerie stone voices. I was now countless twists and turns and drops of the canyon away from the van. All at once I felt beyond alone, isolated from every trace of normalcy. I tried to laugh off the strange emotions welling up inside - until the sound of a cry behind me swelled so clearly and so close that I instinctively reached for my knlfe. It was only a sudden barrage of wind currents strumming a set of peculiar undercut curves in the wall. That had to be what it was. But I was becoming less and less sure of anything. I made a hasty U-turn and hiked back down the canyon. The night was another warm one. Cori caught about thirty bats. We breakfasted on marrow soup in the morning, and the day grew baking hot by noon. Once again, we were hanging out waiting for a report from Puji. The moto-ranger was overdue. Midafternoon had arrived by the time he rolled in to tell us that the Khotul Us trap had another bear in it. We arrived there around 5 pm. The mazaalai was a female. She already had a name: Borte, Genghis Khan's first and principal wife - the empress. The Queen of queens.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Harry and the crew first caught Borte in 2006, when she was seven years old and weighed 163 pounds. Now, five years later, she weighed only 128 pounds. This was the smallest adult female grizzly I had ever seen. While my heart was going out to this tough, skinny little bear lying amid our boots and the stones and dust of Thirstland, Borte was apparently metabolizing her drug dose much faster than normal. Without warning, she suddenly raised her head high and staggered to her feet. This happened while Proctor was still straddling her, tightening the last bolt on the new radio collar around her neck, and the rest of the crew was all crowded around logging data or taking photos and video. One second, the Queen lay dead still, helpless and bedraggled, walled in by a huddle of humanity; the next, panicked people were dropping equipment on the ground and fleeing every direction while Borte whirled and swiped drunkenly at the air around her. She stumbled and went down again, but then struggled back to her feet to slowly wander in circles next to the box trap. After half an hour, she had regained enough muscle control to begin walking away down the canyon. Before Borte went very far, she neared the camera Joe had set up along the way - once again on a stake low to the ground. The last of the daylight was nearly gone now. When the camera was activated to record her approach, it not only clicked but also fired a flash. Startled, the bear bounded away. For a few yards. Then she halted, turned, came back, and demolished the camera, sinking her teeth deep into its mechanical body. Borte might have been the world's tiniest adult grizzly but, by God, she was still a grizzly bear.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
"The number I like best is 500," Harry said. "That's how many I've caught and collared since the last time I lost one during the process." Back when Harry worked with the Craigheads, the capture and sedation of free-roaming grizzlies was seat-of-the-pants science. Biologists learned what worked best under different conditions by a trail-and-error, "Run-for-it!" approach. They were experimenting with an assortment of veterinary drugs to find out which concoctions would work safely and effectively. Certain compounds were discovered to cause perilous side effects. Most needed to be administered at a precise dosage, which meant that the biologist had to estimate a target animal's weight quite closely. When the subject is a big, broad, toothy beast wearing a fur coat, it's extremely hard to keep perception from overruling reality. Upon seeing a 300-to-400-pound grizzly, the average person can be counted on to describe a bear weighing at least twice that much. Then there are the folks who would double that figure again, telling stories of running into a grizz that "musta weighed close to a ton." For even an expert to be off by a hundred pounds or more isn't unusual. .....There was a lot of bear to wash. The crew arranged a rope harness around the male and attached it to the lower hook of a weight scale. The upper hook was tied to a pole about five feet long. Two rangers, one at each end of the pole, lifted it into the air. A little way. Two more crew members grabbed on to help. It was still a struggle to get the bear high enough off the ground that his head and legs swung freely in the air. Others on the team crowded in to lend an arm. The scale only read up to 150 kilograms. That wasn't quite enough. The mass of our bear pulled the marker half an inch beyond the last number. Harry estimated the animal's weight at 155 to 160 kilograms - at least 350 pounds. The largest bear previously documented in the study was the male named Yokozuna, after the champion sumo-style wrestlers. This was the bear that helped dissuade Mongolian authorities from opening up part of the reserve to gold mining years earlier. 
Interesting Brotherbear. Could you, at the end of the series, do a summary about all individual bears (weights)?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...olia-gobi/
 *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author
Joe and I convinced National Geographic Magazine to send us together to accompany the Gobi Bear Project on the month-long spring expedition in 2011. When we first set out with the research team in late April that year, I had no intention of staying personally involved with the fieldwork after the journey ended. That plan was not successful. I returned to the Gobi as an unpaid volunteer to take part in the 2012 spring expedition - and in every subsequent spring expedition through 2015.... Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
http://www.bearbiology.com/fileadmin/tpl/Downloads/Grants/Final_Reports/REYNOLDS_2010_Gobi_Bear_Progress_Report_2005-May_2010.pdf
Gobi bears are small compared to most other members of the brown bear family; female adults weigh only 51‐78 kg and males only 96‐138 kg. Their fur is light brown in color, but with a noticeably darker head, belly and legs. Patches or natural collars of lighter fur is often present on the neck or shoulder of individuals are also a distinguishing characteristic (Anon 1988). Subspecies confirmation: The best data presently available, based on comparison of one set of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) samples of hair collected from Gobi bears in Mongolia with samples collected in Pakistan, ~1900 km southwest of the Mongolian distribution, and other distant locations in Europe and North America, indicates that Gobi bears belong to the subspecies Ursus arctos isabellinus (Miller et al. 2006; Galbreath et al. 2007; McCarthy et al. 2009). Hair from Gobi bears collected during our study and analyzed by Lisette Waits who conducted the genetic assessments of the previous studies also showed that Gobi bears belong to the subspecies Ursus arctos isabellinus. 51kg to 78 kg = 112 pounds to 172 pounds. 96kg to 138 kg = 212 pounds to 304 pounds.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Although this mazaalai proved to weigh only 155 pounds, it was a prize - a female Harry believed wasn't known to the Project: young, healthy, and in prime breeding condition with years of potential for making babies ahead. Her nipples were somewhat enlarged and roughened, suggesting that she had already produced cubs in an earlier year. We carried her outside the trap to collar her in the shade. She came out of the drug slowly and eventually staggered over to the nearby spring to lap at the water for a very long time, pausing in-between drinks to rest her head on the ground. Her muzzle sometimes drooped into the edge of the shallow flow that ran intermittently on the surface for a couple dozen feet. Having once darted an Alaskan grizzly from an aircraft and found the drugged animal dead where it had collapsed facedown and drowned in a shallow tundra puddle, Harry was growing uncomfortable with the current situation. "Odko," he said, "can you tell Ankhaa to drive the van closer? We need to get this bear up and moving." She passed along the message and Ankhaa motioned for everyone to get inside. The engine noise caused the female to raise her head from the pool. She struggled to get up on all fours, succeeded, and tried to charge at the incoming vehicle, staggering as she came. Ankhaa was smiling and shaking his head as he backed the rig away, happily defeated by a bear that weighed less than he.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
After a while I walked back toward the group. Well before I got there, I could hear the bear growling. That isn't always a sound you want to hear when you're close to a bear, but in this case it was a wonderful sign. Everybody in the team was soon up and walking around the animal, preparing to measure and collar it. This female was slightly younger than the first - seven years old at most. She weighed 145 pounds. From the smooth, unworn appearance of her teats, Harry could tell that she had not previously given birth. He said that this was not unusual for a grizzly inhabiting a harsh, marginal environment. Many in the Arctic were as old or older before they first breed. Our captive seemed to be in good physical condition and could be expected to begin producing young within the next year. Like the first female captured, this one made her way to the spring to drink as soon as she regained her footing. Interestingly, she then returned from the water to the trap and thoroughly investigated it, over and over, as if mystified and trying to put together what had happened. We waited next to the van about 150 feet away. Watching through binoculars, I thought the female's head looked oddly flattened on top. Harry agreed, saying that the hairs on the forehead sometimes become worn down or completely rubbed off during the winter months in a den. "Notice anything else?" he asked, keeping his voice barely above a whisper. Before I could answer, he did: "The claws. They're the longest I think I've seen on a Gobi bear. What's she been eating? It doesn't look as though she's been digging at all."
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
As if becoming aware for the first time that she had company, the bear began walking directly toward us. We jumped in the van and eased away. She kept coming, all 145 damn-the-consequences pounds of her. We drove farther down the wash, and she kept right after us. With its carrying rack, the top of the van was nearly eight feet off the ground and almost three times as long as she was. She was three feet high at the shoulder, still weak and stumbly, and intent on having it out with this giant metal contraption, never shying to one side or even pausing when its engine growled. How could she not be intimidated in the slightest? What internal fires cook up audacity of this order? But as far as our fierce little loopy female could tell, her plan was working. She had us in full retreat. A couple hundred yards down the wash, she decided at last to let us be. Tuning into a side-canyon, she disappeared behind a thicket of caragana and Zygophyllum. Good on you, Ms. Gobi Bear. We'll add yet another to the number of mazaalai born since the Project began and now thriving as an adult. Perhaps after Odko tests the DNA samples of your fur, to be sure you haven't been counted before, we'll be able to add yet one more reproductive-age female to the population's total. Thanks to you, we just raised the number of different Gobi bears collared in the study so far from thirteen to fourteen.
Batmunkh Mijiddor has written a scientific book about the bears. Although the book is written in Mongolian, Miji plans to have it translated into English at some point in time. According to him, on these Gobi expeditions fourteen bears have been captured and radio collared. All bears were captured during the spring months. Here is what I was able to put together from the book - Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.
Female ... 207 pounds ... 6 yrs old Female ... 163 pounds ... 7 yrs old .... name - Borte. Female ... 128 pounds ... 12 yrs old ... name - Borte. Female ... 115 pounds ... X ... name - Mother. Female ... 155 pounds Female ... 145 pounds ... 7 yrs old Male ... 231 pounds ... 8 yrs old Male ... 220 pounds ... 6 yrs old ... name - Altan. Male ... 304 pounds ... 12 yrs old Male ... 268 pounds ... 18 yrs old Male ... 350 pounds ... X ... name - Big Bawa. |
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