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.
Continued... After moving to Missoula, Montana, Wright began roaming the wild Bitterroot Mountains that separate Idaho from Montana. On the Idaho side he came upon a cascading, boulder-strewn stream teaming with spawning salmon, and there in the mud were fresh beat tracks. Wright wrote:
As I waited along the stream, I was not uncomfortable at first, but as the sun dipped behind the ridge, I began to tremble but still did not want to give up the hunt. Then my teeth began to chatter and I decided that I would wait five more minutes and then leave. When I stood to leave, I looked upstream and saw a grizzly very much like the old bear I had studied in the circus many years before. The brute was headed straight for me. I hunkered down and waited until he was so close that escape would be impossible. As I raised my rifle, it seemed certain that my dream of a lifetime was to come true. When some firty yards off, he turned a little to go around a bush and presented a perfect shot. I raised up, aimed carefully just on the point of the shoulder close to the neck, and pulled the trigger. It never entered my thoughts but that the bear would drop in its tracks. One can, therefore, imagine my surprise when he gave a roar like a mad bull and came my way on the jump. My rifle jammed ... it looked like I would shortly have all the grizzly down on me I ever wanted. Terrified, I dropped my gun and dove over the stream bank and hid under it. The water was ice cold and I was almost frozen before I jumped in, but now had no regrets. After a half hour of no grizzly charging over the bank after me, I eased out of the water and, though terrified, eased my way toward my rifle. When I finally got a fresh load in it, I again felt brave and began to search for the bear. To my amazement, the brute had expired no more than twenty yards from where he had been shot.
Continued... The old grizzly was everything Wright had ever wanted, but he soon found that the Lochsa River was not only full of salmon, it was also full of bears. William Wright, true to his word, loved bears. He loved then to death. Like a man possessed, he embarked on an orgy of unrestrained killing. A short time after his first Idaho bear kill, Wright discovered winding along the river a major bear trail that held a 14-inch-long track. He became obsessed with finding the big bear responsible for that track. Wright continued killing grizzlies with regularity. In Wright's memoir it becomes apparent that the senseless murder of these baby bears began to eat at him. The massive, gluttonous blood drenching that he had at one time gleefully recounted eventually began to wear on his mind. The memories of baby bears bawling for their dead mothers inspired a fairly momentous decision. William Wright, who claims to have killed more than fifty grizzlies, put down his gun and began to approach the grizzly bear in a far different - and more humane way.
Grizzlies and Grizzled Old Men continued... Theodore Roosevelt may have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but there was no silver lining in his lungs. The first son of affluent New Yorkers, Teedie, as he was called as a child, suffered from acute asthma. During those precarious days of Teedies early life, if anyone had predicted the boy would one day become an impressive physical specimen, a fearless adventurer and outdoorsman, the father of modern conservation, and one of the most popular presidents of the United States, Mr. Roosevelt would have laughed them to scorn. A more realistic goal at that time would have been to see his son live through the night. But live he did, though for several years Teedie was confined to life indoors, where he usually gravitated to his father's library, which contained all the classic books of the literary world, plus an ample assortment of adventure novels and books by famous explorers. Roosevelt during this time most likely read The Journals of Lewis & Clark and John Hittell's biography of Grizzly Adams. As he grew older, Teedie's severe asthma miraculously abated, and he began to venture outdoors more and more until, by the age of ten, he was spending every daylight hour exploring the nearby forests and streams. Much to his mother's dismay, Teedie often brought bugs, spiders, mice, rats, snakes, and other objectionable "specimens" into the Roosevelt house.
Roosevelt killed a large bull elk one late afternoon, and while he was hiking out in the dwindling light of dusk, he made a disturbing discovery. He later wrote: "I came upon the huge half-human footprints of a great grizzly, which must have passed by within minutes. It gave me an eerie feeling in the silent, lonely woods, to see for the first time the unmistakable proofs that I was in the home of the lord of the wilderness."
When Roosevelt returned the next day with Merrifield, they discovered that the bear had been feeding on the elk carcass. They waited in ambush all day, but the animal didn't appear. After sunset, as they were preparing to leave, they heard branches snapping in the nearby forest. The grizzly was coming to the carcass. Unfortunately, it was dark before the bear began pulling and tearing at the dead elk, and Roosevelt dared not risk a shot.
Continued... The next morning, Merrifield, a good tracker, took up the bear's tracks. The men followed the bear into a dark forest littered with downed trees. As Merrifield passed by a huge pine log, he dropped to one knee. Roosevelt eased forward with rifle raised. Suddenly, the huge grizzly stood up, and Roosevelt took steady aim at the bear's head and pulled the trigger. The bear dropped in its tracks. Roosevelt estimated the grizzly's weight at over 1,000 pounds and later claimed it was the biggest grizzly bear he ever killed or saw, dead or alive. Though Roosevelt did not specifically target the grizzly for preservation, he most assuredly included the great bear in his wish list of endangered wildlife to be spared extinction. And while it is true that he hunted the great bear, he also called the grizzly the lord of the wilderness - the one animal who, much like himself, would give as much as it got when provoked. During those dark years for wildlife conservation from 1900 to 1960, Yellowstone and Glacier were the great bear's only sanctuaty, and without them the grizzly may well have become extinct. Roosevelt made sure that didn't happen.
Continued... On a late summer afternoon in 1924, a Salish Indian hunting party of two dozen men and women with children rode their horses up a steep mountain trail in western Montana's Swan Range, south of Glacier National Park. The group's leader, Philip Pierre, clad in traditional brown buckskin shirt and leggings, urged his Appaloosa stallion up the rocky path. Deep wrinkles creased his burnished face, and graying hair pulled back in a tight braid attested to his age, but among the Salish there was no equal to his strength and prowess as a hunter. The whites had brought his people nothing but misery and hardship, and the heat of anger flared within him for an instant; but he remembered that the boy, named Bud Cheff, had taken a keen interest in the old ways. He fashioned bows and arrows from creekside willows and hunted small game with the Indian boys. And he pestered the Salish elders about stories of the old days, especially about Sumka, the great bear that roamed the high mountains above the Flathead Indian Reservation. A white Indian.... The thought intrigued Pierre and brought the hint of a wry smile to his cracked lips.
Continued... Pierre led the way, slipping effortlessly through the shadows, but he kept a long, sinewy hand on the boy's skinny shoulder to make sure he did not stray. Pierre knew what lay ahead. He eased forward until amber-gold sunshine splashed upon his face at the edge of the meadow. He grasped the boy's arm to keep him from running, then brought him forward. Young Bud Cheff's eyes bugged out. He gasped and cowered back. Just two rock throws away, three silver-tipped grizzly bears rooted and pawed at the meadow grass, their teeth snapping and lips smacking noisily as they devoured hordes of ladybug larvae among the wildflowers. Cheff turned to the Indian leader and whispered urgently, "Will you shoot them?" Pierre shook his head, but Cheff persisted. "Won't they kill us if they see us?" A faint smile creased Pierre's leathery face. This would be the little white Indian's first lesson. He pointed a crooked finger at the bearsand said, "You no bother'um Sumka, Sumka no bother'um you."
Continued... Seventy-seven years later, I sat across the kitchen table from Bud Cheff in his rustic ranch house nestled among massive ponderosa pine trees at the base of the Mission Mountains. I felt thoroughly humbled and awed to be in the presence of a man whose life spanned an implausible stretch of time: from a time when the last free-roaming Indians clung to the old ways to our present high-tech cyber generation. I had grown to admire the historic Native-American ways by reading books. Now I sat in the presence of a man who'd walked the Indian path, who'd been taken in as one of their own, and whose tongue still tumbled out an occasional Salish word. As a testament to the bridge that Cheff had built between Indians and white men by using trust and respect, the Salish speak of him today with the reverence and respect afforded a tribal leader. Though Cheff and I found common ground in our admiration for the Native American culture, our passions also included the grizzly bear. Cheff had formed a kinship with the great bear by learning from the Indians how to live peacefully with this massive, lumbering beast they called Sumka. Through the years, Cheff's influence has spread to both Native-American and white society with a gospel of respect and understanding for the great bear and a spirit of restraint when man and beast cross paths.
Continued... Bud Moore... I was the ranger at the Powell Ranger District when the grizzly officially became extinct in the Lochsa. That was back in the 1950s, and in those days the idea of bringing back the grizzly was as foreign as putting a man on the moon. The philosophy among Forest Service land managers concerning the grizzly was: "When they're gone, they're gone." Something died in me when I made my annual wildlife report and added a zero next to the grizzly bear. I really wasn't interested in being in a place where the grizzly was absent. It wasn't the same. It didn't have the same feel. The grizzly was gone. What a tragedy. Not only that, but the Lochsa was being roaded up with logging and recreation roads. Then we had this big spruce budworm epidemic. The worms were harming young spruce trees, so the Forest Service sprayed those areas with DDT. We killed the budworms alright, but we killed all the other insects too, and the birds that fed on them, and the frogs and the fish in the waters where the DDT ended up. Six years later, Rachel Carson would write her epic book, Silent Spring, which sounded the alarm about the effects on the food chain of pesticides and other chemicals. For me, it was time to leave. It just wasn't the same anymore.
Continued... Today, the vast 16.1-million-acre Bitterroot ecosystem harbors stately ponderosa pines towering 200 feet above the forest floor. There are alpine meadows and breathtakingly beautiful snow-capped peaks. Royal bull elk grace the high country, and bighorn sheep and mountain goats cling to rugged peaks above. There are whitetail deer and mule deer, coyotes, and now even wolves. There are lots of black bears. But there are no grizzlies.
Howard Copenhaver's name, like that of Bud Cheff and Bud Moore, is little known in today's high-profile world of eco-bear warriors, but to wildlife biologists and bear experts, his contributions to the ultimate success of the grizzly bear are considered priceless. Howard literally stood in the gap for the grizzly at a time when hate and fear, and bullets and strychnine, threatened to extinguish its spirit from the land.
Continued... John and Frank had been nature boys since their early days growing up in Washington, D.C. Though their home and family were definitely upper middle class, the two Craighead boys could always be found in the woods, studying frogs and snails and fish and birds. When it came time for college, they enrolled at Pennsylvania State University. "They didn't have any wildlife programs in any of the colleges at the time," John told me. "Frank and I chose biology as our major. Exactly what that meant as far as a career went, we didn't know." During that time both young men wrestled at the collegiate level, developing their upper body strength. They didn't know it at the time, but even their sport was preparing them for their careers, especially when they were forced to hastily climb a tree to avoid a confrontation with a grizzly.
Continued... After the war, the Craigheads continued their studies. Frank found work as a professor in the Environmental Research Institute at the State University of New York. John joined the Montana Wildlife Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Montana. While there, he bagan reading up on the grizzly, Montana's state animal and the symbol of all that was still wild and free in the West. John recalled: It was a short read. There was almost nothing scientific to study about the grizzly. Adolph Murie had studied grizzlies in Alaska, and there was a book by Enos Mills, but it was mostly behavioral stuff and nothing you'd call scientific. Enos Mills's book was so old that he had thirteen different classifications for the grizzly. Frank and I decided to study the grizzly scientifically. Our main goal was to analyze the grizzly's reproductive rate and all the science surrounding it, and the mortality rate to see exactly how the grizzly population was faring. If the mortality rate was higher than the reproductive rate, then the grizzly was in danger of vanishing, and vice versa. We put together a program and got the funding for it. We looked all over the West and finally chose Yellowstone because that was where the greatest concentration could be found in the lower states. We were also aware that the park had been feeding their grizzlies garbage behind their hotels, and we thought those bears would be much more visible and easy to gain scientific information on. I wasn't real happy to be studying bears that frequented dumps and would've preferred something in the heart of the wilderness. One thing we learned was that as soon as those bears left the dump, they acted like any wild grizzly.
Yellowstone Park in 1959 had all the trappings of a modern park, with up-to-date facilities and multiple paved roads to handle the millions of tourists visiting annually. However, its bear management was still primitive. Essentially, park rangers dealt with black and grizzly bears only when they had a problem with them. If a bear attacked someone or if it began breaking into facilities or became a pest or a danger to a campground, it was either relocated , shipped off to a zoo, or killed. The park had no idea how many grizzlies it had and had not even attempted a count in the nine years prior to the Craighead's arrival.
The Craigheads began a vigorous program of live-trapping grizzlies, using either culvert-traps or a CO2-powered dart gun to sedate free-roaming animals. After a grizzly was immobilized ( conscious, but unable to move ), it was weighed and measured. A blood sample was drawn, and a tooth extracted to discern its age. Colored ear tags were fastened to females, and males received aluminum ear tags. Females with young were especially attractive to the researchers as they tackled the monumental task of gathering reproductive data.
Grizzlies and Grizzled Old Men continued... During these early years the Craighead brothers could best be described as whirling dervishes - constantly on the move as they grunted and hoisted sedated grizzly bears onto scales or stalked close enough to put a tranquilizing dart into a bear's butt. ( During the twelve-year study period, 389 grizzlies were tagged and studied. ) They also followed ear-tagged bears for miles into the wilderness, gathering information about their reproductive, feeding, denning, and mortality cycles. This early period was a time of cordial relations and cooperation between the researchers and park rangers, and the Craigheads often assisted rangers in live-trapping problem bears. Data began to accumulate, and though the Craigheads were far too professional to begin drawing conclusions from a few seasons' findings, certain tendencies were already becoming apparent: A lot of young bears were dying inside the park, and a lot of big bears were dying outside of it. As a result the Craigheads felt impaled to study intensely the reproductive-versus-mortality dynamics of Yellowstone's grizzlies. And a lot of it was at close range.
The Historic Grizzly
