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Humans and bears - Wild encounters
Humans and bears - Wild encounters
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Humans and bears - Wild encounters
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In some parts of the world, humans and bears are neighbours. Not good neighbours, though. Humans require ever more room at the cost of wild animals. It is to be expected the struggle for space will result in encounters and victims. Most encounters are never reported, but things change when there are victims.
In Canada and the USA, brown bears attack humans every now and then. When a collission can't be avoided, the damage usually is considerable. The reason is brown bears are large animals. Predatory attacks seem to be rare. Black bears are quite a bit smaller and not as aggressive, but they are not to be trifled with and quite many attacks have a predatory nature. In the north-east of the USA, black bears are larger than those in the north-west and Canada. The reason is no competition from brown bears. National Parks and reserves attract many visitors each year. In a smallish reserve in New Jersey (of all places), a group of five was suddenly confronted by a black bear. The animal started to follow the group and the members lost their nerve. They, if understood correctly, decided to split up. Each for himself, that is. At the meeting place a little later, only four showed up. The fifth member was found dead later. The bear was still close. He had killed the student and paid with his life as well. One reads about hikers followed by predators at times. Cougars, coyotes, wolves, tigers and black bears following hikers often do not hesitate to show themselves. The reasons are not well understood, but it could be territory is a good candidate. When you lose your nerve and run or split up, instincts are triggered and accidents happen. Here's the story about the incident in New Jersey (from the New York Times). There are more reports in more newspapers. If you read them as well, chances are you will be able to get to the full picture: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/nyregi....html?_r=1  (09-24-2014, 05:38 AM)'peter' Wrote: In some parts of the world, humans and bears are neighbours. Not good neighbours, though. Humans require ever more room at the cost of wild animals. It is to be expected the struggle for space will result in encounters and victims. Most encounters are never reported, but things change when there are victims. I saw the story on the local news last night here in Jersey. Was a bit surprised, as it don't happen often. Just last month I attended a wedding in north Jersey that was crashed by a family of black bears. These bears are apparently frequent visitors to the locale. It was an outdoor wedding hosted by the bride and groom. I had never seen bears in the wild, and was thrilled at the sight of them. They passed through peacefully, but sure made a big splash. 
Wild animals are getting less space due to dual behavior of human. Either country fail to protect them, if any how some country do this, they fail to increase their accommodation.
Wild animal not only need conservation but also lot of space if their population is increasing.
BEARS
Last week, a Disney movie about bears ('Bears') got a lot of attention. The link has an interview with the director (in English). Also watch the trailer: http://cultuur.eenvandaag.nl/tv-items/59...speelfilm_ A documentary in a thread about wild encounters? Yes. When they were working in the reserve, the crew was very close to and often surrounded by big brown bears. Nothing happened, because they had 'bear-whisperers' at all times. The outcome of interaction between wild animals and humans partly depends on knowledge. When you know about behaviour, it will have an effect. This is in particular important in reserves where animals have had no bad experiences. In others, however, animals have had bad experiences and then things can go wrong. 
Woman Attacked By Bear And Buried Alive To Be Eaten Later
 *This image is copyright of its original author by dinoray on 54 minutes ago1,672 1 11 Previous | NextIt is one thing to be a victim of a bear attack, but it's another thing to be a victim of a bear attack and then be buried alive by it so that it could eat you later. If it were me, I would just want to get mauled and eaten and get it over with. Actually, if it were me, I wouldn't even want to be attacked by a bear at all, but these unfortunate things happen. In fact, it all happened to Nataly Pasternak when she was walking with her dog and a friend in a forest in the far east Amur Region of Russia.  *This image is copyright of its original author Natalya Pasternak was found like this, under a pile of leaves made by the bear.Fortunately, the 55-year-old's friend managed to get away and go for help. When the rescuers and a wildlife specialist came, they were attacked, but managed to shoot the four-year-old female bear dead. Wildlife specialist Sergei Ivanov's description of the whole incident sounded like something from a Discovery Channel voiceover: "I walked softly. The predator at this time was guarding its prey and, not wanting to share it with competitors; it jumped out of the trees to the noise. I waited until it came closer and shot from six meters - four shots, with the fifth to the head.”  *This image is copyright of its original author The bear as shot after it attacked rescuers. Afterwards, they noticed a hand coming from the ground. It was Pasternak. She was covered in blood, but still alive and buried under a pile of leaves. Apparently, the bear buried her to save her as a meal for later. Yikes. There is some very graphic video of the aftermath here. Watch at your own risk:http://www.break.com/article/woman-attac...en-2858331 The link to the video of the rescuerers discovering her and her hand moving is above. Pretty crazy story
Meet Private Voytek, the Nazi fighting bear soldier (16 Photos & Video)image: [url]http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/67403a19b8ff2589cad1002324aaad88?s=50&d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D50&r=X[/url]
 *This image is copyright of its original author BY BEN 2 HOURS AGO IN: ANIMALS, AWESOME, OH SHIT image: http://sumome-140a.kxcdn.com/static/211e...ite-60.png *This image is copyright of its original author 306image: http://sumome-140a.kxcdn.com/static/211e...ite-60.png *This image is copyright of its original author image: http://sumome-140a.kxcdn.com/static/211e...ite-60.png *This image is copyright of its original author 1image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=400 *This image is copyright of its original author Wojtek (Voytek) was a bear cub found in Iran in 1942 and adopted by soldiers of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps.2image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=695 *This image is copyright of its original author Soldiers fed him with condensed milk from an emptied vodka bottle. The bear was subsequently fed with fruit, marmalade, honey and syrup, and often rewarded with beer, which became his favorite drink. He also enjoyed smoking and eating cigarettes.3image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=330 *This image is copyright of its original author Over the long journey from Iran to Palestine, the bear quickly became the unofficial mascot of the 22nd company. The bear would sit around the campfire with the men, eating, drinking, and sleeping in the tents with the rest of the soldiers.4image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=428 *This image is copyright of its original author He enjoyed wrestling (obviously, no one stood any type of chance) and was taught to salute when greeted.5image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=355 *This image is copyright of its original author When the motorized convoy was on the move, Voytek sat in the passenger seat of one of the jeeps, hanging his head out of the window and shocking people walking on the streets.6image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=337 *This image is copyright of its original author The problem, however, was that British High Command did not allow any pets or animals in their camp, so the Polish Army formally enlisted Voytek into their ranks.7image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=399 *This image is copyright of its original author He was given the rank of Private, assigned a serial number, and from that point on was included in all official unit rosters.The soldiers of the 22nd loved having him around…8image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=432 *This image is copyright of its original author 9image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=319 *This image is copyright of its original author 10image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=759 *This image is copyright of its original author 11image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=397 *This image is copyright of its original author The Poles’ Finest Hour of the war came in the battle for Monte Cassino. The campaign was proving to be on of the bloodiest battles of the Western Front, and the Poles were brought in to make the final push to capture the fortress. The Germans were deeply entrenched in the hilltop monastery, and three previous Allied assaults on the position had all been unsuccessful.12image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=408 *This image is copyright of its original author During the fighting, Voytek actually hand carried boxes of ammunition (on his hind legs), some weighing in at over 100 pounds, from supply trucks to artillery positions on the front lines.Voytek worked tirelessly, day and night, bringing supplies to his friends who were bravely battling the Nazis. He never rested, never dropped an artillery shell and never showed any fear despite his position being under constant fire and heavy shelling.13image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=507 *This image is copyright of its original author His actions were so inspiring to his fellow soldiers that after the battle the official insignia of the 22nd Artillery was changed to a picture of Voytek carrying an armful of howitzer ammunition.14image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=768 *This image is copyright of its original author Voytek lived out the rest of his days in the Edinburgh Zoo. He always perked up when he heard the Polish language spoken by zoo guests, and during his life there he was always being visited by his old friends from the Polish Army – they would sneak beers to him, and some would jump into the bear enclosure and wrestle with him for old time’s sake.15image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=918 *This image is copyright of its original author He passed away in 1963, at the age of 22.16image: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/201...=600&h=401 *This image is copyright of its original author Voytek was a hero of World War II, and there are statues of him and plaques memorializing his brave service in Poland, Edinburgh, the Imperial War Museum in London, and the Canadian War Museum.Check out a quick documentary about Voytek RIGHT HERE.Read more at http://thechive.com/2015/05/19/meet-priv...Oj27qdF.99 
The story of Wojtek is one of the most moving I´ve ver heard. Huge thanks for sharing.
The bears of Katmai by Matthias Breiter.
Unlike myself, the large female, weighing about 550 pounds, appears to feel no discomfort whatsoever in my presence. So it comes to be that the distorted image of an animal only vaguely resembling a bear haunts many. Often, the only aspect that does not conflict with reality is the physical appearance. The rest is a wild mixture of half truths strongly spiced with imagination. Bears are only bears, not teddies, but not monsters either.
The California Grizzly - bear in mind - from the collections of the Bancroft Library:
California's grizzlies weren't able to survive long enough for science to dispel the power of the bear stories and grizzly myths. Advances in biology came too late, and the eradication of the bears was too swift. Early scholars usually relied upon the testimony of explorers, mountain men, trappers, and Indians for information about bears, and because few scientists observed the great bears directly, that knowledge was borrowed and passed along, causing the dissemination of erroneous, subjective, anthropocentric anecdotes. most of the early data was that which could be gathered down the sights of a rifle. Grizzlies were earliest and best described by Meriwether Lewis during the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1805. Lewis' journal entries regarding animals of the western states were then passed along by statesman De Witt Clinton in his seminal address to the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York I 1814, in which he characterized the grizzly bear as "the ferocious tyrant of the American woods ... the terror of the savages ... devouring alike man and beast, and defying the attacks of whole tribes of Indians." This in turn led to the 1815 classification of the American grizzly bear as Ursus horribilis, "horrible bear," by George Ord, who wrote that the grizzly "literally thirsts for human blood." Later, after the heated controversy on nomenclature had quieted, when the Alaskan and European brown bears were united with the grizzlies into one taxonomic classification - Ursus arctos - the "horrible" was retained for the North American grizzlies in the scientific name of the species Ursus arctos horribilis. Although grizzlies have been called brown bears, white bears, silvertips, gray, and golden, color is not a defining characteristic of a bear's species. Conservationist Enos Mills wrote in 1919 of a mother grizzly with four cubs, each a different color: she was cream-colored, one cub was black, one brown, a third gray, and the last black and white. The inability to distinguish a from the more retiring forest-dwelling black bear - Ursus Americanus - often led people to erroneously believe all bears were grizzlies. Or just bears. Nineteenth-century exploratory expeditions to the Far West frequently included naturalists eager to collect, catalog, and name new species. But emphasis was put on the categorization and potential use of all that was observed, with little careful description and much behavioral misinterpretation. "Grissley bears are very numerous" did not provide the annals of science with much new information. When the curious bears stood up to get a better look at the newcomers, the posture was interpreted as aggressive. In hindsight, the bear's reputation as a gratuitously ferocious man-killer might more correctly have been attributed to the female of the species protecting her young when facing down strangers bearing arms and ill will. Regardless of how accurate these interpretations were, this reputation influenced encounters between bears and humans, and even the scientists were not immune. Ironically, it was the bear hunters themselves who probably knew the California grizzly best, as they had to learn the habits and routines of the bears to prepare for safe successful hunts. Seasoned hunter Grizzly Adams, George Nidever, and Jim Duncan all describe waiting patiently, acquainting themselves with the patterns and habits of their targets, revising plans according to a bear's age and gender, learning the ways of a particular bear in order to kill it. It is significant that twentieth-century zoologists read Theodore Hittell's biography of Grizzly Adams to learn about bears. As the number of bears in the state declined, science began to take notice. As early as 1890, C. Hart Merriam recognized that the grizzlies were hurtling toward extinction without sufficient documentation. He would later serve for twenty-five years as the first chief of the U.S. Biological Survey, during which he brought new and higher standards to the study of mammalogy. His method was one of collecting and labeling many specimens, taking careful measurements, making elaborate field notes, and gathering corollary data such as geographical and climatic conditions. Another advocate for the accumulation of grizzly data was Joseph Grinnell. Born in 1877 and raised in Pasadena seeing grizzly tracks on camping trips to the San Gabriel Mountains, he later lamented never having seen a live California grizzly other than the captive Monarch in Golden Gate Park. He became the first director of the University of California's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology when it was founded in 1908, and he worked avidly to procure the remains of grizzlies for the museum. To preserve some lasting biological record of the dwindling species, Merriam Grinnell, and others desperately gathered bits and pieces - claws and tall tales both - of the remaining bears. They consulted hunting lore, clipped newspaper stories, interviewed witnesses, and read many of the same sources found in this book. It was a tremendous disappointment - and dramatic testimony to the speed and manner of the grizzlies' passing - that they were unable to preserve a single complete scientific specimen of a California grizzly with full data measurements. Not even the remains of Monarch - a bear kept captive for twenty-two years - are intact. Grinnell wrote to Jesse Agnew, the Fresno County rancher who is said to have shot the last grizzly killed in the state, to ask for the bear's body for the museum. A tooth pried from the skull of the adult female had earlier been positively identified by Merriam as belonging to a grizzly. Agnew replied in 1928 that his nephew had taken the pelt to Korea but, once the snow over the bear's remains melted in the spring, he'd see what else he could find. But, even this story is murky: the tooth has since disappeared and the pelt may not have gone farther than the side of Agnew's barn. Despite the earnestness of science, once again the tall tale won the better share of the meager facts. Scientists began to better document the lives of grizzlies during the final years of the bears in California. New, more considered assessments of grizzly behavior were published by William H. Wright in 1909, William Hornaday in 1914, and Enos Mills in 1919. In a 1937 farewell essay on grizzlies, Joseph Grinnell wrote sadly of the lack of wisdom in Homo sapiens to have orchestrated the demise of these California natives. Unfortunately, the twentieth-century disciplines of ecology and behavioral science, the doctrine of the interrelationship of species, and the demonstration of chain reactions in habitat destruction were all too late to rally awareness of the plight of the last bears.
Grizzly Years by Doug Peacock.
I learned to distinguish the personalities of about fifteen individual grizzlies. The animals formed a social hierarchy with a huge brown grizzly, the alpha male, at the top. When he arrived at the feeding site, all other bears scattered. Otherwise, the bears fed together without a great deal of conflict. Another dominant grizzly, a female who was subordinate only to a couple of big males, showed up on the scene in August with four cubs. This group constituted the biggest family I had ever seen. Sow grizzlies usually have two cubs, sometimes one, and occasionally three, but hardly ever four. This mother bear was the most protective I encountered.
Grizzly Years by Doug Peacock.
I rounded a corner of trees and stepped onto a game trail leading down the defile. I took three steps down the meadow corridor and stopped dead. Thirty yards away on the opposite end of the clearing, walking toward me on the animal trail, was the huge brown grizzly, the alpha animal of all the bears I had watched. I froze. The grizzly paused, catching my movement, then lowered his head slightly and, with a sort of stiff-legged gait, ambled toward me swinging his head from side to side. I knew from having watched this bear interact with other animals that the worst thing I could do was run. The big bear stopped thirty feet in front of me. I slowly worked my hand into my bag and gradually pulled out the Magnum. I peered down the gun barrel into the dull red eyes of the huge grizzly. He gnashed his jaws and lowered his ears. The hair on his hump stood up. We starred at each other for what might have been seconds but felt like hours. I knew once again that I was not going to pull the trigger. My shooting days were over. I lowered the pistol. The giant bear flicked his ears and looked off to one side. I took a step backward and turned my head toward the trees. I felt something pass between us. The grizzly slowly turned away from me with grace and dignity and swung into the timber at the end of the meadow. I caught myself breathing heavily again, the flush of blood hot on my face. I felt my life had been touched by enormous power and mystery. I did not know that the force of that encounter would shape my life for decades to come. Tracking griz would become full-time work for six months of many years, and it lingers yet at the heart of any annual story I tell of my life. I have never questioned the route this journey took: it seems a single trip, the sole option, driven by that same potency that drew me into grizzly country in the beginning. *Note: Doug Peacock: Viet Nam veteran and grizzly enthusiast.
Grizzly Years by Doug Peacock - a follow-up from post #11...
I returned to camp and kindled a fire, tending it into the night. I threw a pile of lodgepole twigs on the embers and poked at it with a stick. I thought about my old road map and the huge brown grizzly. In Vietnam the primary predator was man. If I had salvaged a grain of wisdom from the agonies of combat, it had nothing to do with knowledge of killing or of waging war. There was no enlightenment in homicide. What was burned deepest into my consciousness was the little acts of grace, lessons that had lain dormant in memory and now were retrieving themselves from anesthetized corners of my brain. It never mattered why. The granting of quarter itself was a transcendence. The grizzly radiated potency. He carried the physical strength and thorniness of disposition that allowed him to attack or kill most any time he cared. But, almost always, he choses not to. That was power beyond a bully's swaggering. It was the kind of restraint that commands awe - a muscular act of grace.
Grizzly Years by Doug Peacock.
In the end, there are limits to what may be quantified. The bear is tied by delicate threads to other animals, from the raven with whom he hunts food, to the coyote and wolverine with whom he shares meals, and to the elk and mountain goat who become objects of that hunt. Individual grizzlies are twisted by irritation and jerked around by weather patterns. Whole populations or segments of populations may evolve socially over time; bears adapt, habituate, and change their behavior and habits when exposed to other bears and human beings for periods of time - as the parent species, Ursus arctos, adapted to the proximity of people in places like Japan, Italy, and Spain. In North America, the initial behavioral response to open country and the presence of other predators was probably increased aggressiveness in grizzly bears. How much, if at all, have they changed some 15,000 to 50,000 years later? And what role has man, especially in the last 120 years following the invention of the repeating rifle, played in this change? At the time of European contact, the grizzly - who is extremely adaptable at exploiting new habitats - was probably in the process of expanding his range southward into tropical regions of Mexico and Central America, perhaps poised for a crossing into the Andes. Given time, the brown bear also may have moved east across the Mississippi. Could the grizzly, so adaptive, even flexible, in other ways, learn to get along with us if we elected to give him a chance? So far the bear hasn't had this option, so we don't know. Nor do we know how quickly these kinds of changes take place - or how much of this would ever be conveyed by a radio collar.
Brown Bears by Melissa Gish.
At 10 or 11 years old, a ( brown ) bear is fully grown. Brown bears can live up to 35 years in the wild and 10 years longer in captivity. |
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