Grizzly bears are back on the prowl. Both Glacier and Yellowstone national parks reported sightings in mid-March, and the bears will soon be out in force. Bear spray is once again required gear if you’re playing in bear country.
Up in Glacier, tracks were spotted. In Yellowstone — typically rather empty this time of year as snow machine season has ended, but the gates haven’t yet opened for asphalt-bound tourists — griz were spotted scavenging winterkill by park staff.
The bears are understandably hungry. The good news is those Yellowstone bears were just getting started on what should be a spring bounty of frozen protein. One of the roughest winters in the Northern Rockies in recent memory surely took its toll on the weak and aged. The bears should be able to follow the snow line up slope as the melt reveals fresh meat.
Freezer burn could be a problem, but the bruins probably aren’t that fussy.
There won’t be any fresh meat available right away, but later in the spring, elk calving season begins. For some bears, that’s the start of elk calf hunting season.
Conventional wisdom once said grizzly bears weren’t big-time hunters; the bears were too big, too lumbering to be that good at it. Sure, opportunity would occasionally provide a bear with the chance to run down the sick or injured, but a bear was more likely to chase a wolf pack off a kill than it was to kill an elk itself.
Wolves are the real elk killers, we long believed. Bears were eat-anything scavengers. Heck, for decades they literally opened the dump in Yellowstone so tourists could sit in their cars and watch griz pick through the garbage left over from a day’s worth of humans lodging at Old Faithful Inn.
Ahhh, communing with nature.
Bears are opportunists, of that there is little doubt. But I guess the story of Winnie the Pooh lounging around the honey tree all day lapping up bee juice really was fiction. Grizzlies may be much more efficient predators than we thought.
One recent study, based on the hipster trend of attaching a GoPro camera to anything that moves, indicates that’s the case. Of course, the study in part relies on the notion that the footage the cameras record is actually data.
The researchers attached the GoPros to camera collars, then used the remarkably incomprehensible footage to determine that brown bears in Alaska kill a lot of caribou and moose calves. One bear killed 45 calves in just 25 days.
The sample was too small to provide real data that we could extrapolate across the entire brown bear population, and most of the bears fitted with camera collars had already been identified by the researchers as being aggressive calf predators, so the video might just be the worst of the worst — if you see it that way.
By the way, one of the collared bears, a 10-year-old male, killed and consumed a 6-year-old sow. What nature takes it gives back, I suppose.
In Yellowstone, eyes will soon turn to cutthroat trout spawning streams around Yellowstone Lake. There are signs lake trout suppression is working and the cutties are making a comeback. There was a time when spring spawning cutthroat were a key food source for the recently awakened bears. Then introduced lakers decimated the native fish (sound familiar?).
Without the trout bounty, some theorize the bears increasingly turned to elk calves to make up the caloric deficit. That’s probably true to some degree, though I doubt it alone accounts for changes in elk populations and behavior around the park.
But this much we know: if griz are feasting on cutthroats in the spring, then they won’t be killing too many elk. Once those calves get to be a few months old, they’re too fast for the bears, lumbering or not, anyway.