INTERVIEW: This Earth Day, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant celebrates the resiliency of bears
Photo: Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant keeps a young bear cub warm. Photo courtesy of Andy Richter / National Geographic / Provided by press site with permission.
Bears and humans have never had the easiest of relationships. With the rise in human population and human development, pristine environment for the world’s bears has been lost, and the bruins have had to learn to coexist or seek refuge in the few pockets of land still untouched by those pesky Homo sapiens.
In the Lower 48, where grizzly bears dominate in the northern Rockies and black bears are ubiquitous and widespread, there are numerous cases of bears and humans impacting each other’s journeys.
On the East Coast, it used to be a frequent sight to catch a black bear with its nose diving into a garbage can. While in Yellowstone National Park, those carnivores — both grizzlies and black bears — eat a more wild, natural diet, free from garbage and human intervention (at least when talking about current times, not historically).
Trying to understand their eating habits and their changing habitats is one of the missions of Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, a conservation scientist and large-carnivore ecologist. She is currently a fellow with the National Geographic Society, and her journeys into the wild are one of the highlights of Earth Day programming on Nat Geo and Nat Geo WILD. Audiences can catch her adventures to find black bears in northern Minnesota when Born Wild: The Next Generation airs Wednesday, April 22 at 8 p.m. Streaming will also be available on Disney+ and Hulu.
“National Geographic is two organizations,” Wynn-Grant said in a recent phone interview. “One is National Geographic Partners, which is a media company, and the other is National Geographic Society, which is a nonprofit, grant-making institution that funds all kinds of really cool science and exploration. So I am funded as a research fellow with National Geographic Society, and so they give me the funds that I need to do research on large carnivores. Right now I’m studying large carnivores in North America, like grizzly bears and black bears, so being a part of the National Geographic Society community allowed me to be more visible to National Geographic Partners. And because they’re so committed to showing amazing media of the natural world, they took it upon themselves to include me in some of their cool features, so I actually get to show the science that I do on TV.”
For the Born Wild special, which also features Beverly and Dereck Joubert, Brian Skerry and Sandesh Kadur, the bear ecologist heads with the Nat Geo team, including ABC correspondent Ginger Zee, to the northern forests of Minnesota, right along the border with Canada.
“When you see it, you’ll be able to feel that it was like 20 degrees,” she said. “Black bears are hibernating, and female black bears give birth during hibernation, so in the den. And so that’s a great time for scientists to come in. We sedate the female bear, and we basically go in to check on the health of her newborn cubs. So we want to make sure that they’re healthy, they’re strong, they’re thriving, count how many of them there are, see their sex, and then that allows us to track that family for years and years and years and make sure that they stay safe and healthy.”
The subsequent tracking of this mother and cubs comes courtesy of a GPS collar, which is outfitted around the neck of the adult bear. Wynn-Grant said the device looks like a dog collar, but there is a large, yet lightweight tracking box attached. This GPS transmits a signal to a satellite, and that satellite relays data to Wynn-Grant’s computer.
“It shows me where the bear is in longitude and latitude at all times, so it’s great,” said Wynn-Grant, who also worked on the movement and predation of lions in Africa. “We don’t usually need to check on them in person too often. We try to be really hands off with wildlife, but once or twice a year we’ll actually go in and find the animal and make sure they’re OK.”
Wynn-Grant’s research has found that black bears in North America have an exceptionally large range. These northern Minnesota individuals may even end up heading across the border to Canada and traveling many miles away from the den where they were born.
“Black bears are a solitary species, so unlike wolves that are in a pack or lions that are in a pride, it’s just one black bear,” she said. “Unless it’s a mother bear, then she’ll have her cubs until she’s done nursing, so it’s possible that they might go over the border. That’s something that the GPS collar can tell us, but usually they create what we call a home range, which is like a territory. The cool thing about having a GPS collar is that we can get maps of where they traveled, and it’s kind of a dot, dot, dot, dot. It creates a polygon, like a weird figure, a weird shape that shows us their home range, which is essentially their territory. So we’ll see one bear’s home range against another bear’s home range against another bear’s, and it makes this beautiful puzzle piece of bear habitat in North America.”
[Read Hollywood Soapbox’s interview with Dr. Jane Goodall.]
One of her research questions deals with whether bears change their ecology or behavior in reaction to human presence and human activity. Might a black bear augment its territory if a new road has been paved? What happens if forests were cleared for a condominium complex or large agricultural tract? Wynn-Grant wants to see whether the bruins modify anything in their daily wanderings.
“So two things are happening right now at this moment,” she said. “The human population in North America is increasing, and the black bear population in North America is increasing. There was a time when — maybe 50-60 years ago — we were getting way more people, and the bear population was declining. But now they’re both actually increasing, so we’re getting way more bears showing up to places where formerly there was forest, formerly there was high-quality habitat. And now there’s people, towns, roads, that kind of thing. It’s creating a lot of conflict, but it’s also creating a lot of opportunity for scientists like me to learn about coexistence. So there’s a science to human-wildlife coexistence, and that’s what I’m trying to learn.”
The eating habits of black bears also fascinates Wynn-Grant. She used to live in New York City for 10 years, so she knows about the black bear population in the nearby Catskills. She also knows that many of these bears eat garbage, which should come as no surprise, given that garbage is often plentiful and easy to attain.
“Bears operate by instinct, and so their first instinct, for every single bear out there, is to eat,” the researcher said. “And there’s this theory in ecology called Optimal Foraging Theory. And it sounds complex, but it’s really easy to understand. The thing I love about it is that humans do this, too, so it essentially says that most wild animals their goal is to maximize calories by expending the least amount of energy. So how can I eat as much as possible without having to do a lot with my body, which is why a lot of people ask me, well, do bears fight each other for food? Is a bear going to fight a mountain lion? Of course, they could do that; that happens every so often, but it takes a lot of energy for a bear or a big animal to have a fight when they could just bow out of it and go eat somewhere else.”
That’s what is happening with garbage. Bears, who have a sense of smell that extends 1 mile from their noses, can sniff out candy bars, food refuse and burgers barbecuing on the grill. They’re not going to turn down a free lunch.
“So they’re just following their instincts, and they’re saying there’s food this way,” Wynn-Grant said. “I don’t think I’m going to have to work hard for it, so let me go to the edge of town. Let me dig in this dumpster and try to find it. Bears that are more in the backcountry that can smell salmon, or they can smell berries and nuts closer than they can smell trash, are just going to go to that. It’s not laziness.”
Currently Wynn-Grant is funded by the National Geographic Society to study grizzly bears in Montana. Specifically she is wondering whether grizzlies — a much larger species compared to black bears — are making an eastward journey from their usual stomping ground in and around Glacier National Park and Yellowstone National Park. Wynn-Grant has found that they are heading east, and she wants to know why, how and where.
“Glacier is way up north, and Yellowstone is near Wyoming,” she said. “And they’re moving east toward the Great Plains, so I’m actually tracking which pathways they’re taking to move back to eastern Montana. … So they’re not following human paths. Grizzly bears, as ferocious as they are, actually would prefer to be far away from people. We’re finding that mostly they’re following riparian areas, so any type of stream or riverbank where there’s a lot of forest cover but also easy access to water, and also where there’s water there are other things to eat, like birds, nests with eggs, deer, etc. They’re actually following those riparian areas all the way east. It’s almost like a little bear highway that’s safe from people for the most part and provides a lot of resources along the way.”
A hot-button issue in the bear community is how far these habitats will extend and whether grizzly bears — what the Lower 48 calls its brown bear population — will ever be relocated to areas of the United States where they used to reside in great numbers. The California state flag, for example, has a grizzly bear in a prominent position. The state, however, has not had a specimen in quite some time.
Wynn-Grant actually grew up in California, and she has some thoughts on whether grizzles will make their way back to the Golden State, perhaps setting up camp in the Sierra Nevadas near Yosemite National Park.
“I grew up in California, so this is something I’ve thought about a lot,” she said. “Naturally — no, I don’t think that they will be able to make it, and that’s because of human tolerance. They have a long journey, and right now they’re having a hard time making it from southern Montana to eastern Montana without being shot. So there’s a lot of people who own land who do a lot of agriculture and cattle ranching who shoot bears, and sometimes it is legal, like if a bear eats one of your cattle. That’s called depredation, and so you are able to shoot the bear. Sometimes it’s illegal, but the laws are not enforced. I think it’s entirely possible for the scientific community to relocate bears from the Montana area to California. I think that’s much more likely. I still am not convinced that it’s a great idea, just because of human tolerance. In terms of the ecosystem, it would do wonders for the ecosystem, but I’m not quite convinced that people are ready for it.”
And the bear-human drama continues, with questions and debates aplenty.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Born Wild: The Next Generation, featuring Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, will premiere Wednesday, April 22 at 8 p.m. on Nat Geo and Nat Geo WILD. The special will also be available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu. Click here for more information.
