Ologies with Alie Ward - Ursinology (BEARS) with Chris Morgan

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

Grizzlies. Pandas. Black bears. Chonkers. The episode you’ve begged for with scientist, explorer, and Ursinologist Chris Morgan. Why are bear ears so cute? What’s up with hibernation? How do you play nice with bears? What is it like to hug them? How creepy is Teddy Ruxpin? Panda patterns, fat bear competitions, tooth nubbins, land “bridges,” camping tips and more with host of “The Wild” podcast and your new favorite bedtime story teller. Also: bear butt plugs. Really.Listen to The Wild podcastFollow Chris Morgan on Twitter and Instagram A donation went to Wildlife MediaMore episode sources & linksBecome a patron of Ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, pins, totes, shirts, etc.Follow Ologies on Instagram or TwitterFollow Alie Ward on Instagram or Twitter.comSound editing by Steven Ray Morris & Jarrett SleeperMusic by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hi. Hey, it's that person with your exact same name that you wanted to follow on Instagram because you thought it'd be funny, but they never approved your follow request. Alleyward. Back with an episode of oligies you have begged me for. You've pleaded with me. Bears. Bears, do bears, do bears. What's wrong with you? Do bears. And it has been a few years in the making because bear scientists are busy people, people. And I had the wonderful Dr. Rae Wynn Grant on deck, but the pandemic, she started doing field work. And then I started meeting more and more bear biologists. And I didn't know what to do because they were all great. And then this bear guy happened to be available. I jumped at the chance to chat Bruins with him. And Patrons,

thank you so, so much for supporting the show. You can join Patreon for as little as a dollar a month. Patrons sent in almost 500 questions for this one, which we couldn't possibly have gotten through in one episode. So surprise for everyone. There is going to be another with even more personologists. So sit tight for that. But before we meet this episode's oligists, thank you also to everyone who rates and subscribes to oligies. It means so much. It honestly keeps this podcast in front of so many other ears and eyeballs. And I read every single one. And then I thank someone who has recently left a review this week, such as Justin VK, who said, the back catalog of oligies held great promise. So I started the Volcanology episode and haven't

looked back. As of tonight, I've caught up on all the old episodes, leaving me both satisfied and disappointed that I'll have to wait for new episodes. Oligies shares the work of so many cool people and interesting topics while always being fun, engaging, accessible, and progressive. Thanks, Allie and all the oligists. Justin VK, thank you for the review. Also, if you have listened to Volcanology, Jess Phoenix has a new book that just came out called Ms. Adventures. My Wild Explorations in Science, Lava and Life. And I just thought I would plug that because she's great. So if you listen to Volcanology, get her book. Okay, Buckle Up for Bears. So, Ursinology comes from Ursus, Latin for bear. In Greek, it's arctus. So if that's right,

arctus, the arctic has bears and arctica does not. I will never be the same after learning that this week. So this oligist, whew, what a get. So not only is his voice just butter in your ears, which doesn't really make sense, but it's good. The dude also just loves bears so much. He studied conservation management in Farmboro in the UK, got a bachelor's in applied ecology, a master's in advanced ecology, and has studied all kinds of forest critters, but his heart is all about Ursus. So he co-founded the Grizzly Bear Outreach Project, which is now the Western Wildlife Outreach Organization. And he is the executive director of Wildlife Media, which is a nonprofit production company. He's done research and education on every continent where bears exist.

He's talked about bears, hosting programs for PBS, BBC, Discovery, and more. He also hosts a very good, highly acclaimed and respectable podcast called The Wild with Chris Morgan. And we recorded this episode a month or so ago, but I've been sitting on it because the Wild's new season debuted today. So sit tight and learn about how many bear species there are, what happens during hibernation, panda poops, milking a grizzly, weird teddy bear trivia, how to read a bear's behavior, camping and hiking safety tips, California grizzlies of yore, cute ears, why are they so cute, soft fur, and the absolute majesty of winter bear butts, with bear friend and world-renowned personologist, Chris Morgan.

I'm so stressed out about this. I can't even tell you. The most stressful interview. I have never had so many questions about bears. That's really lovely to hear. I don't know how I'm going to get to all them. It's like those game shows where you have to go shopping in like under a minute. The clock is ticking. And first thing, I always have people do up top. If you could say your first and last name and also what pronouns you use. Yes, it's Chris Morgan and he, him. Cool. And now you are an personologist, correct? Yes, I guess I am. Yes, yes. I have a feeling you do not use that word very often. Not really. No, I was thinking about that before the call. And it is, yeah, it's a

strange word that you don't hear much in the world of bear biology and conservation, but it makes total sense. And you're a bear biologist and a conservationist, slightly more syllables than a personologist, but you're a person who studies bears. Yes, I've done quite a bit of studying of bears and I'm part of a community of people around the world that actually focus their lives on these creatures. So it's a pretty interesting group of folks, these ursynologists or bear experts or bear biologists. And, you know, some of us are outreach and educators and born from science and others are the hardcore sort of field work research biologists that focus every day of their life doing that stuff. And I've dabbled in just about all of it. My whole, my whole life is about

bears and appreciating them, understanding them, telling stories about them, having people sort of relate to them in some ways and maybe even learn about themselves in the process. Well, speaking about the humans involved, like what is a gathering of bear people like? That's a good question. There can be a lot of ego in the room. You know, these big creatures, it would be a very interesting task actually to interview lots of different bear biologists from various parts of the world and ask them why they got into it. And I'm sure there's as many different reasons as there are bear biologists. Some of it is just born of the fact that these creatures are so incredibly big, impressive and physical. There's

a presence about them. Another aspect is their high intelligence. Another aspect is their conservation value by protecting them. You protect all kinds of other species. And so for different people, it's maybe different reasons. And some people slip into it by mistake like I did and other people sort of focused their entire, you know, life from day one on these creatures, because perhaps they were born into it by their parents being into it. So it's always an interesting mix of people at these gatherings. In fact, there's an organization called the International Association for Bear Research and Management. And it's made up, a few years ago at least, it was made up of about 600 bear biologists around the world. So it's a big community and each of them studying various

aspects of their own bear species from India to the Arctic and South America to Russia, you know. So we have these bear conferences and there's a lot of drinking and a lot of bear stories, as you can imagine, and a lot of science shared and a lot of enthusiasm and then there's certain little cliques and, you know, the sloth biologists, bear biologists stick together a bit more. There's the grizzly corner, you know, there's the black bears that are not quite up to being a grizzly bear, but you know, it's really interesting dynamics. Yeah. Well, speaking of that, I understand that there's not that many bear species in nature. Is there something like seven or are there way more? No, there's eight bear species. That's it. It's a nice little tidy package of, it's a family of

animals called ursids. And so there's only eight of them around the world. So I always feel like it makes it quite manageable, quite understandable. Like way back in history, talking 100 years, you know, when sort of nomenclature was really taking hold. Nomenclature? Is that a regime or was it a war? It took me a minute, but I realized it's nomenclature. So yes, at the start of binomial nomenclature of genus and species and such. There was thought that there were dozens, perhaps even hundreds of different bear species, but that's sort of condensed. They've been clumped a bit more, you know, you get your splitters and clumpers when it comes to these Latin names for different bear

species. And like for example, brown bears, some of the biggest bears, in fact, if not the biggest bears in the world are brown bears, coastal Alaskan brown bears, and those found in that part of the world and the equivalent over in Kamchatka in Alaska, these big fish eating brown bears that get to colossal. I always think like dinosaur prehistoric proportion, some of them the biggest can be 1,800, 1,900 pounds when they go into their dens, right? That's a brown bear. That's ursus arctus. It doesn't get more bear than ursus arctus, you know. Ursus arctus literally means bear bear, one in Latin and one in Greek. So you don't get more bear than ursus arctus, right? So these giant bears in Alaska, same species as a brown bear in Italy,

and it gets those mountains where they are maybe 250 pounds in weight, almost 10 times less heavy than some of the bears in Alaska, five times at least, you know. So yes, those 1,900 pound chonkers up in Alaska and then the 250 pound Italian Alps barinos across the globe. Same species though, ursus arctus, these bear bears, grizzlies, right? So I call them urogrizzlies. So you can see how this family of bears, even just within grizzlies, were split eons ago into, whoa, that's got a bit of different species to the one in Alaska, you know. Italian and Alaskan bears can't surely be the same, but they've clumped them more now into just these eight. So yeah, it's pretty interesting,

the history of them. And how did they get to where they are? How did the range expand all over the globe? I guess other than the Antarctic? Yeah, yeah, they're found on four continents around the world. They're not found in Australia. Everyone always says, well, what about koalas, you know? But koalas are distinctly marsupials, as you probably know, and not in the bear family, koala bears. So yeah, they are, and especially when it comes to brown bears, they're one of the most widespread, they are the most widespread of the eight bear species. And you know, starting life in the Asian subcontinent and working their way to the new world across the Bering land bridge. If you're secretly wondering, where is the Bering Strait again? Well, it's the slim 55-mile ocean

corridor where Alaska almost touches Russia, like two outstretched fingers on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Except during the Ice Age, the sea levels were 300 feet lower. And so there wasn't so much as a land bridge, but like a land promenade over which bears and humans and all manner of clever beasts could just saunter over. And fricking camels, camels that evolved in North America, and piece the fuck out and headed to the other direction. This historical region is called Beringia, which if you ask me sounds a little too much like Bazinga. They became incredibly successful, incredibly diverse in their habits, and incredibly adaptable is the word. And it makes them my favorite species to grizzly bear. It's the one that I've looked into and worked with and

around and been around most. And I just think it's partly that these creatures are, oh, they look at every day of their life with calculated risk and reward and memory and figuring out what they need to accomplish that day and that week and that month and that season in front of them. And there are so highly intelligent, they've become incredibly adaptable and successful as a bear species. And so they're the most widespread, the brown grizzly bears. Brown and grizzly are the same species. Okay, that was my next question because I was like, wait a second, you've called them grizzlies and brown. So brown bear is a grizzly, but a black bear is not a grizzly. Is that right? Right, exactly. Yeah. So we would call a grizzly a brown bear in Italy. Right. So they're all under

the umbrella of being a brown bear. Some of them are called grizzlies, and those are in North America. Those interior grizzly bears that we hear about, the famous Yellowstone bears, those are grizzlies. Interior Alaska, those are grizzlies. Interestingly though, even in North America, you start getting to the coast and people start referring to them as brown bears. But the umbrella is brown bear and then some brown bears are referred to as grizzlies, even though I joke about these little Italian bears being like, you are a grizzly, you know. It's kind of like Americans have huge trucks and then there are smart cars in Europe. It's like a fiat, still a car. Everything is bigger over here in the states.

So yes, grizzlies and brown bears and Kodiak bears, they're all the same genus and species, but there are subspecies within them, including California's grizzly bear, which numbered over 10,000 before the discovery of gold nuggets in Northern California in the mid-1800s. And by 1924, every California grizzly bear had been hunted and killed. And a California grizzly with golden brown fur and that signature brown bear shoulder hump still adorns our state flag as a reminder of how they came here and killed stuff. That's not true, but it kind of is. But just a reminder on a flag with no grizzlies, can we fix that? Well, in 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was on the receiving end of a plan to reintroduce grizzly bears to California. And they were like,

that's okay, we have black bears, we're fine. So bear in mind that the brown bear isn't the only species of bear, of course. There are seven other species and, you know, they can sometimes I don't talk about them enough because I get so obsessed with the grizzlies, with the brown bears, you know, but the seven other species are found in really interesting places as well. So the species are, let's start in the north, the polar bears up there, grizzly brown bear that we talked about, the American black bear, spectacle bears in South America, they have these spectacle marks look like eyeglasses. So they call spectacle bears down in South America in the Andes, the Asiatic black bear different to the North American

black bear. So those are found over in Asia, the sloth bear. And that's a long shaggy, coated bear that specializes in eating termites in places like India, interesting creatures. And then lastly, the eight species. And the smallest, interestingly enough, is the sun bear. And the sun bears are found in Borneo and other places in Southeast Asia. I've seen them in Borneo and worked with some incredible people who are focused on sun bears there and they're really tropical. So the cool thing about this range of these bears and where they're found is really the fact that they could be found, I mean, think about it, a polar bear in the highest reaches of our planet in the most hostile environment in the Arctic. That is, it's thriving. The best part

of a polar bears year is the middle of the winter. Can you imagine that pitch dark up there? Absolutely treacherously freezing conditions. And that's when they're at their best. And that's when they're up and at it. That's where the hunting is best. You know, so you got the polar bears up there. The same time as a bear in Borneo down in the tropics of Asia is scaling trees to eat figs. And these are the tiniest of bears, the smallest bear species, a big male might be a couple of 100 pounds or 150 pounds. But they're really important because they help to manage and help this jungle, this rainforest home in Borneo thrive by spreading seeds, by telling the earth, by representing most importantly, that ecosystem, that rainforest. So and we can talk

more about that because they're incredibly powerful as umbrella species, we call them right, you know, just being able to look at a bear like a sun bear in Borneo and say, hey, if we protect that population of sun bears in Borneo, we protect everything it needs, right? So you're automatically by default protecting that forest. And bears are awesome at that, right? Every one of these species has a story to tell and a place to protect. PS, what is an umbrella species? So that is a species that needs a pretty big habitat. It might migrate or need a pretty wide territory and preserving their habitat provides protection for a ton of other species. So this is not to be confused with a keystone species, which really defines an ecosystem and really holds it together

by being there. And without a keystone species, things would start to be thrown really off balance. Now an indicator species is one whose presence is a good sign things are going okay. Human beings, probably not an indicator species, TBH. But now let's move on to a hardball question. I think one that's on probably all of our minds. And as a bear biologist, do you get to hug any bears? One of the best days of my life was doing just that. I've not done bear research, per se, myself in dens. I've not done denning bear research, but we joined a biologist back east for I was working on a series for PBS about animal homes. Like great, we've got to do animal homes. So it was everything from bird nests to beaver lodges and lots of different species over

the course of about three different episodes. And I'm like, we've got to do bears. They're like pretty obvious choice Chris, right? You're the bear guy. But I'm a bit biased, right? But I wanted this experience to get into a den with some bears. And so we went out to Maryland and literally crawled in with the biologist into this den. The bear was tranquilized, the female was tranquilized. And I got to pull out these four little cubs that were just born a matter of weeks beforehand. And I was just absolutely heart melting. I had them, you know, as we were processing the female and radio coloring her and taking a blood sample and just checking on her health, the cubs of course are used to being a need to be with the female to

keep warm. I mean, it was snowing, freezing cold outside, middle of winter, of course. And so it was my job to hold these black bear cubs in my jacket while we processed the female. Oh, just purple eyes looking at me and just like, Hi, are you my new mom? It was the sweetest, sweetest thing. It'll stick with me forever. So yeah, crawling into those sorts of dens and having that kind of experience is amazing. Thinking about what those what those bears, what they're, what those bears are going through and how they accomplish that. And, you know, hibernation in bears is such an interesting thing. Can you imagine being a creature that big? I mean, we're about as big as a black bear, right? How big is a black bear? So smaller than a brown bear, with females around 150 pounds

and males topping out usually around 250, about the size of an English mastiff, which is a very large dock. But there are outliers who have topped 800 pounds, which is huge for a black bear. And one gentle giant black bear named Duffy weighed 690 pounds and then lost over 400 pounds in a winter, just snoozing himself scrawny. So you imagine just saying, you know, October comes around and just going, well, it's kind of cold, a little bit difficult to find food, think I might just sleep for six months. It's incredible, isn't it? I can't imagine. I can imagine very well. Too well in fact. Yeah, nice, long six month nap. Yeah. See ya. Well, I have a question about getting into it. The world would be overrun with Ersonologists if there was a promise that one day,

even for 15 minutes, you got to snuggle a baby bear. I think you're right. But what kind of got you toward this path? Was there a specific species or an experience that you had that really kind of lit that fire in you? Yeah, definitely. One really, sometimes it's an evolution, isn't it? And an interest grows and oftentimes it's like an intersection and you go left or right or you bump into something or someone. And for me, it was definitely that. And I'm from England originally, I've lived in the States 23 years. But before I emigrated to the States, years before that, I'm 52 now. So I was 18 years old and wanted to come to the States and experience the wilderness of the place. I always say that I think I was born with a very strong nature gene, I like to call it.

And I think everyone's born with a nature gene to some extent. But I think society sort of whittles it out of us and chips around at the edges of a nature gene to the point where people and young kids think, oh, I can't make a living out of it or I can't survive by just having a nature gene. And so, and perhaps they're teased at school, you know, we're often loners, we're often introverts, we're often people who just want to be out in the woods turning over rocks and stones and looking for insects and stuff, right? So I had all that about me and depth of sort of love for wildlife. But I'd always dreamt of going to the States. So when I was 18, I came and worked on a summer camp in New Hampshire, like a wildlife conservation summer camp. And it was amazing,

all these young kids all there to learn about wildlife and about how to wildlife management and even hunting and other things, you know, bush skills, bushcraft and backcountry survival and things like that. And I loved it. So I came over as a summer camp counselor from England. And we'd have these guests come through once in a while to talk to the kids about wildlife. And one week it was a moose biologist and this woman came in to talk about her moose research. And then it was a coyote biologist. And these were all interesting, but didn't, you know, for some reason, grab me like the next guy did, because he came in talking about black bears. And I just literally remember my jaw dropping at everything he was saying.

Fascinated by him. The fact that this guy was studying bears and making it a living. And he knew everything that he did about these creatures. There's something in the moment of meeting him and hearing about him, his work talking to these kids that just really grabbed me. So I ended up asking him for about three weeks if I could join him in the field. I wanted to go and experience what he was doing. He was catching the local bears and radio collaring them. And after about three weeks, I think he was just sick of hearing, you know, being annoyed by me, you know, so he came to the summer camp, picked me up. And one night it was, it was weird. It was like nine o'clock at night, 10 o'clock at night even.

It was dark. It was, it was about August, it must have been jumped on his truck. And we drove out the summer camp. And you know, it's a left to the left turn to the forest where you presume all the bears are on a right turn to town. And he turned right. I'm like, where are we going? I thought we're going into the field. And he said, yeah, we are. These are my study animals down here. We got into town and he pulled up at the garbage dump. And it was garbage dump. There were, there were 14 black bears sitting on this giant pile of garbage, like moonlight shining down on them. You didn't even need a flashlight. It was the most, aside from like the hellacious stink, it's like, this is the most beautiful thing I've

ever seen in my life. So like, I want to do what this guy's doing. And we haven't even done anything yet. Just seeing these bears. I was like, that is, I just couldn't believe someone could do that with their life. And so it represented adventure, excitement, wildness, intrigue about these curious, smart animals. And this smart guy that I'd met, I'm like, wow, this guy is, you know, probably one of the more intelligent people I've ever met as an 18 year old kid. And he's focused on this one animal. And that's where his knowledge begins and ends. And it was amazing to me for lots of different reasons. And so after that, I came home to England. After a summer of life experiences like that. And well, back to the garbage dump, we ended up tranquilizing

bears on this garbage dump, he would take potshots with tranquilizer rifle, they'd go to sleep. And he's like, okay, go chase that bear. Because the dart had a tranquilizer and a signal, a transmitter in it. So he would shoot the rear end of this bear with a tranquilizer dart, it would disappear into the brush and I'd have to go off charging after it and make sure we found where the bear was before it disappeared out of range. And you know, I just remember standing in the middle of this garbage dump and I couldn't find this bear. It was my first one that I'd ever chased. And suddenly went really quiet and I don't know where it had gone, it was pitch dark, I had a headlamp on and then suddenly among the garbage, just a few feet away from it,

I could just hear this. And it was one of the bears that he tranquilizing was right there asleep. So the whole thing blew me away. And I came back from England and slowly started to figure out where bears were. Do I have to go to New Hampshire for this? Where are they? So like, I had no idea. And then came to find out they were in Spain, they were in two or three Eurogrisleys, brown bears in France. There were these 50 or 60 in Italy. So there was some kind of on my doorstep near England. And I made it my life's work to get to know them. And that's kind of where the journey in the bear world began. Did you ever keep in touch with that bear biologist? You know, I didn't. I think about it all the time. I didn't and I'm dying to. It wouldn't

be amazing to just pick up the phone and try and find him. I tried to find him about what, 10 years ago, because I want to thank him for the path that he'd set me on and just that level of influence in your life is powerful. I think about it and him all the time. Actually, you know, I've never tracked him down, but I will. Okay, I did a little digging and it seems that the bear guy in New Hampshire is Dr. Andy Timmons. And I discovered this by Googling bears plus dumpsters plus New Hampshire. Also, I found out on April 15th, he's leading a seminar about the state of New Hampshire bears and human wildlife interactions, i.e. bears and garbage. Now, the best news is that it's over Zoom. And I'm going to post the link on my website in case you'd like to join from your

own quarantine den in hibernation pajamas still. And can you explain to me a little bit about what a bear's yearly kind of cycle is like? Because hibernation completely blows my mind. But I also don't know. I hear bear biologists refer to as carnivore ecologists sometimes, but I don't even know if bears are carnivores or if they're apex predators. Like, how are they eating and sleeping? You ask a lot of questions. Yeah, so they are carnivores. But they are, a lot of them are not very carnivorous, if you see what I mean. So they're officially in the carnivore group of animals. But a lot of their diet is vegetation. So grizzlies, for example, some parts of the world, the grizzly bear eats like 90% vegetation and only 10% meat. And then if you get to places like

coastal Alaska, I spent a lot of time literally sitting among grizzly bears there watching them feed on salmon. The salmon in that part of the world becomes a huge part of their diet. And so, you know, there's the carnivore coming out of them. Some grizzlies will eat elk. Some eat deer that have been killed by avalanches. They're not essentially really good at chasing down big fast prey like elk and deer, but they're happy to clean them up when they find them, you know. So that's where the carnivore comes in. They're kind of opportunistic carnivores, meaning that if there's a meaty meal around, oh my God, of course I'm going to take it, because their metabolism benefits from it. So in the case of a grizzly or a black bear,

you know, they basically spend their entire life just thinking of two things. One is food and one is sex. Chris says, perhaps that's why bears are so relatable. Just snacking, loving, cuddling, plus all you can eat salmon sushi and boning, seasonal depression naps, and eating literal garbage. Who's never been there, right? Constantly saw it just driven by their stomachs and constantly trying to find the maximum number of calories for the minimum amount of effort. And they do that in a very intense way, because they've only got six or eight months to do it. And during the spring, summer and early four, when they're out of hibernation, they're basically preharing themselves every year to go into hibernation. So they need enough fat

to see them through a winter, which is when they recycle. They recycle their fat into your rear and they don't defecate, they don't urinate. They basically, they recycle all of their bodily fluids and fat in order to stay and survive in the winter den, avoiding the lean times of food. So you could see why summer and fall is so important to them, like, I've got to get fat, got to get through the winter. And in the case of a female bear, it's really important for them to be in shape by the time they go into the den, because that's when the cubs appear. So the cubs that we were checking out in Maryland in the den, that was in February, just before they were about to emerge. March, April, they emerged from the den, but they had just been born in, like,

January in that winter den with the female, you know, incredible story in itself, you know, a female bear basically, you know, just pops out a little bear cub, it's the size of a smaller and same weight as a squirrel. It's blind, it's helpless, it finds the warmth of its mother's teeth and latches on and drinks some of the richest milk in the animal kingdom and grows like a weed. Side note, how do they know that? Well, I just read a study about obtaining bear milk, and it's done by tranquilizing the bear and giving it an oxytocin injection. And then, quote, manual expression. There's also a company, grizzlymilk.com, that claims to sell hand harvested Montana grizzly milk. And from what I can tell, it's not a real company. But speaking of debunkable flim flammery,

when mama is giving birth, she has not passed out cold and surprised to see kids that look like her when she wakes up in the spring. It's not like, draw on your face with sharpies, when did I have this baby kind of sleep? And then they pop out of their dens in March or April and like, wow, okay, into the outside world. So the whole cycle is based on, you know, eating, finding a mate, and for the females giving birth to the cubs, and making sure that they're in a fit enough state through each of those seasons, to survive and thrive and do those things, right, and to procreate. And for a bear, it's all about calculated decisions, you know, about where the food is at any time of year, whether it's up in the high mountains or down in the valley bottoms, or

a range of both, right. So a lot of them will start feeding in the valley bottoms in spring. I mean, a lot of plants start gorgeing on things like obscure plants, like, like, horsetail. And, you know, horsetail being that ecocetum plant, you know, one of the oldest plants in the world. That's one of their favorite things in spring. And then as it's so woody, it is when it gets old, but in the spring, when it's really sort of fresh and delicate, they go for it. Horsetails, side note, are those plants that look like a bunch of tiny bamboo. And bears also love to munch sedges, which are tufted, grassy looking marsh plants. It's kind of like belling up to and all you can eat salad bar for them. And the same with sedges. You'll watch grizzly bears in

the sedge meadows of Alaska. I've done this a lot and they literally look like, sometimes you'll see a herd of a herd, what looks like a herd of bears, 20 of them strong in a meadow. And they're all just grazing these sedges because they're packed full of protein. And that's what they want when they come out of their dens. And then as the plants start to evolve and grow and emerge further up the mounted slopes, and the bears will follow them on this kind of elevational migration, which is such a cool thought. And then they come back down as things start to emerge down in the valley bottoms again. And then in the case of Alaska, the salmon come in in July and then even more at the end of August. And the bears know it. So you can sit there in just amazing places. I took a small

group of people to Alaska a few years ago. I do a lot of expedition guiding. And so there's a small group, four or five people. And I said to them, I want to show you these bears and the way they behaved during the salmon season. So I went up to this river and I said, we're all going to sit here. It was about six or seven feet away from the riverbank. Water is right there, no fish around, no bear around, no bears around. And so everybody's saying, great, okay, yeah, this looks okay. But why don't we sit on the riverbank, like our feet dangling over the edge of the riverbank? I'm like, no, you'll see why. And so we sat six feet from the edge of the riverbank. And suddenly the tide changes. The water starts to come in. And you can imagine it. There's beautiful clear water coming

up through the willows and mountains, snow capped all around us. It's the most mind blowing, like primal setting. The tide changes. The sea starts to bring in fish. And these fish, sockeye in this case are coming in and silver salmon coming in and into the shallow water to spawn upriver. And as they do, you can hear them scuttling through the water and the bears hear them too. So the bears start coming out of the forest. So these people I'm with are like, oh my god, there's the fish. And like, oh my god, there's the bears. Literally immediately the bears start to come out because they know the tide has changed and the fish are coming in. And before you know it, this giant female and her three cubs walk by us right on the riverbank,

five feet away from us. And she stashes her cubs, which are just cubs of that year. So the smallest cutest variety stashes them right there next to us while she goes fishing. And so there she is tuned into these fish. She's seen enough, not many, but enough humans to know that we're not a threat. And in fact, to know that we can actually defend and protect her cubs from males, which are sometimes going to come in and be aggressive towards the cubs, because the males are more nervous of people. So this bear's been around. She's protest all this year after year. She knows where the salmon are. She knows what to listen to when they're coming up the river. She knows she stashes her cubs on the bank next to some Homo sapiens and they'll

probably be okay while she fishes because she's trying to replenish her fat stores that she's lost over the winter. There's like a thousand things going on at once. Sorry, I got a bit hyperactive talking about this stuff. No, I love it. It's just, it's the coolest sensation and you feel like you're stepping back in time in a place like this, into their annual lives, into their seasons and their thought processes. And it really, it recalibrates you. Another point, this bear comes by and stands on the riverbank and the people on where they're freaking out by this point a little bit quietly because I've told them to sit quietly and everything's going to be okay. And I'm watching and monitoring the behavior of all these bears and we're surrounded by six,

seven, eight of them now. And one of them stands at the riverbank in front of us, literally stands up, grabs its fish that it's got between its paws. He's talking about a bear, not a person, grabs its fish and stands up on its rear legs. And now at this point it's looking over us. And a couple of the people are like, oh my God, is he going to attack them? Like, no bears don't attack when they're standing up. He's just looking at a bear behind us. And this place in Alaska is like, they're literally looking through you as humans. They're not interested in you. They don't perceive you as a threat. You're kind of a neutral entity. And it's the other bears that they're interested and curious about. So it's this big sort of game of chess going on in this place where they all

know the limits of each other and the dangers and how to avoid them and how to avoid physical confrontation. And we're just a tiny part of that chess game where they actually use us to their advantage in some cases. It's the most wonderful connecting thing. You're not thinking about email and texts while you're in that situation. I can't, I've never seen one in the wild. But I think a lot of us when we hear about bears in the wild, we think, do I freeze? Do I yell? Do I make myself bigger? Do I run away? And I realized I wrote just a list of questions that I had for you. And then I have a bunch from listeners as well. One of the questions I wrote down, which I didn't even realize I typed it until right now, is just, have any bears eaten you?

What kind of question is that? Have you ever been killed by a bear? Yeah. Have you ever been devoured and mauled by a bear to death? You know, a lot of people have asked me if I've ever been attacked. And I guess it begs the question, doesn't it? But no, never. I've been charged. I've been treed. Did I look up the word treed? Indeed. Because I pictured Chris being forced to scramble up a tree and hide just out of reach as a bear tried to swipe its closet as butt. But bears can very easily climb trees. So that's not a good escape. And it turns out that to be treed means to be cornered

and forced to face one's attackers. And this can happen with or without an exasperated tuba sound. I've been very close to aggressive bears, not intentionally. I don't have some death wish. I'm always very respectful and want to keep my distance and take lots of precautions. The thing about bears and being as smart as they are, there's lots you can, lots you can do to avoid being getting into trouble with them. And they appreciate it more than you do almost, because they don't want confrontations. They're born into this bear society of avoiding those types of confrontations with each other. Because you think about it, if you've got an 800 pound grizzly bear or brown bear that is aggressive and cantankerous, and it can do a lot of damage

to a creature that big. And so bears have learned this sort of body language around avoiding conflict. It's really interesting. And sometimes I think about it when I'm watching humans, you know, sitting on a bus or a train or walking down the street. And we're all just basic mammals underneath this exterior, right? I think we've become a bit full of ourselves, because really, we're just these basic creatures. And some of the same body languages, you know, like looking out the corner of your eye or pretending not to look at somebody when you are or maybe walking sideways or lowering your head when you're in front of somebody, because I'm tall, I'm 6'4", so I'm constantly lower in my head and trying to not look too

overwhelming to people that are less tall than I am. And there's all kinds of things that we're doing all the time, and the bears are doing it too. And they've figured out how to avoid conflict in that way. And so it's easy to stay out of trouble with them, you know. And the case of grizzlies keep making lots of noise as you're walking down trails. They hate surprises. Some situations you can't avoid. In this one situation, I remember I was on the coast of Alaska, and it was breeding season. So it was about June. And around the corner comes this big, brown female. And beautiful prime of life. But she's running and looking over her shoulder, like, uh-oh, something's behind her. And you always wonder what it is that's coming towards you. It's clearly a bigger bear that

she's afraid of. So sure enough, around the bend comes this boyfriend wannabe, this big male, three times her size. You know, this sexual dimorphism is huge in these bear species. He chases her around the bend. She sees us there and she's a little bit startled. Part startled, part relieved. She runs behind us and sits down about 15 feet behind us. Can you imagine a 500-pound bear tries to use you as a cock block from an even bigger, very horny bear? And again, she's using us as cover from this big, marauding male that wants to mate with her. And she's not ready for it. She might not be an estrus yet, or partially an estrus, but not receptive to him yet. And he's following her until she does start to ovulate and

he's going to be ready. So he sees her behind us and us in between. And, you know, he's like, what are you doing? This is my target. This is the female that I want. I'm pursuing. What are you doing there? And I could just tell he was getting anxious and started to jaw pop, which is this kind of sound. And then the next stage is a sign of anxiety. And then the next stage of that anxiety in a bear is salivating. And he was salivating profusely. And then, boom, like a bullet out of a gun just charges right at us and stops just a few feet away from us. And that's called a bluff charge, right? But it's a stupid name for it, because it's not a bluff. It's as real as it gets that charge. It's a bluff attack, really, is what it is.

So he didn't attack, but he's charging to give us a very clear message. And, you know, I talk him down. It's okay. It's okay, bear. It's okay. You know, we mean no harm, you know, just talking calmly to him and to yourself to calm the situation down. And he backed up a little bit and realized he had the upper hand and just walked around us by which time she looks at us and goes, okay, here we go again. And she starts running again and off they go, you know. So every situation is different. Every bear different. But it is quite easy if you know a few rules of their game to stay safe in bear country. And is it a myth? I picture if you're camping, you just any time in the middle of the night,

a bear will come into your tent looking for like a cliff bar. Does that happen? It does. It does. Yes, it's not a myth. In fact, they'll come into your tent looking for a piece of candy or toothpaste or... Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, my dog is sneezing. Is that a dog sneeze? Maybe he's allergic to bears. I know something's in her scooter. What you got up there? She looks, she's like a small poodle shih tzu mutt. And she looks kind of like a gray bear cub. And she's the cutest thing ever, but she's just been napping. Oh, that is sweet. You know, dogs have a real interest in reaction to bears. They can get you into trouble to start with because they run off down a trail in front of you and sometimes bring a bear back like chasing it. The other thing I've

noticed, I'm surrounded by bear skulls in my house, you know, skulls from various bears that have died. And if I take... We don't have a dog, but we have lots of friends who have a myth. If a friend with a dog comes over, I'll take one of those skulls and just open up its mouth just a couple of inches. And it's big, canine teeth show. And every dog I've ever seen, no matter how big or small, they're just like completely recoil. They're like primarily afraid of that skull and what it represents. It's very interesting. Yeah. So maybe the dog was hearing the bear stories. Yeah, I love it. So yes, pardon that sneezey distraction. Also, I googled dogs plus bears. And I must relay that in 2018, a family just outside of Kungming, China adopted a Tibetan Mastiff puppy

while on vacation. And it was so hungry. The little puppy ate two buckets of noodles and a bunch of fruit in a sitting pretty much every day. And after two years, this Tibetan Mastiff was 250 pounds. But when it started walking on its hind legs, the family was like, oh, maybe this is a bear. And then the critter was, yes, a bear, an Asiatic Black Bear. And it's now living at the UNN Wildlife Rescue Center. Also, if you see a bear in the wild acting more like a Tibetan Mastiff and just approaching people for snuggles, as some have been spotted doing in California in recent years, definitely do not snuggle it and rather call wildlife personnel. Because no, sadly, you're not just cosmically soul bonded

with a friendly bear. There have been a rash of encephalitis cases and some sort of unidentified neurological disease that these poor friendly California bears have developed. They're still figuring it out. Anyway, back to camping and bear's sense of smell, which is intense, intense. So there might be like some tasty Thompson main or something in your cosmetics bag, and it'll be like dinner. Yes. Yeah, they, they, they're definitely attracted to any unusual smell, even the smell of plastics or petroleum based products, you know, a lip sal in your pocket. So whenever you're camping, you definitely make sure you don't have anything stinky or even slightly scented in your tent. It, it is a risk and it, and

they occasionally do come sniffing around. Now, the idea of a bear attacking you to get to that food and injuring you or killing you, that's a very, very rare thing. Okay, but how rare? Like a thousand people a year in the US, what are we talking? A few years ago, the stats were North America wide. There's one or two deaths per, one or two deaths, deaths per year in North America from both species of black and grizzly bear combined and 10, 10 to 15 serious injuries. That was a few years ago. I'd be surprised if it's changed much of those statistics. So not much at all considering there's a close to a million black bears in North America. There's probably 35,000 brown grizzly bears in North America, most of those in Alaska. And, you know,

look at the number of people and, and the number of people that are spending time in bear country and camping and recreating, it's growing all the time. And I don't know, I think part of it with these creatures, it's fascinating and, and amazing to me that they don't do more damage when they are so capable of it. Same with mountain lions, cougars, you know, same with, same with a lot of these species wolves, they are equipped to do damage to humans and they select and decide not to, you know, part of that is natural selection and, you know, those that are surviving and still walking the landscape are perhaps the shire individuals, you know, because over many generations, they've become that way, you know, they've had to. But yeah, they would choose

to stay out of trouble more than they would to get into it. But every bear is different. If you sat in a room with 20 bears and you sat in a room with 20 humans, all those, those 20 bears would be as different in personalities as the 20 humans would be. Just they're that smart, they're that different, they're that individualistic. When was the last time you cried about a bear? This morning. Was it really? That's a really nice question. I don't know, I'm, I'm easy, I'm one of, I'm an easy crier.

I cried pretty recently about our North Cascades bears. I saw probably four months ago, five months ago, I, these guys here are, so the North Cascades are the mountains here in Washington State where I live and there's maybe three or four grizzly bears left. That's it. And they, you know, they've been here for thousands of years. They have a right to be here. They have, they have a past and just about a present here, but their future is totally in question. You know, they, they need help or they'll blip out into oblivion and they may have already blipped out into extinction here in the, in the, in the North Cascades. We don't know. There's a few on the Canadian side of the border. There's a

few on our side and they need help. And to me, if we can't help a creature like a grizzly bear, in this 10,000 square miles of, of wilderness in a place like this that says that wild and that inaccessible and mountainous that we don't need for farming. We don't need for recreation, all of it. We don't, if we can't share a place like that, I think as much as the bears themselves, that's what gets to me. You know, it's like, oh, because I do think if we can, if we can coexist with grizzlies, you could coexist with anything, right? And perhaps even with each other. Yeah. Oh, that's a beautiful sentiment. What do you think a person can do that might be able to help? It's so good to know that there are people who study this that care

so much, you know? There are a lot of people that do, you know, and that's what, that's what gives me hope. Part of my work is trying to relay these stories to others, though, because a lot of scientists don't do it very much. Thank God for people like you that are getting science out there to huge audiences. And we need more of it, don't we? It's, otherwise science can sit on shelves and collect dust and PhD dissertations. And, and scientists aren't always the people that want to be out there on the front line, you know, getting attention and raising issues. And, you know, they're often happier in the field or in a lab, or it's so important, isn't it? So I think people finding out, even I'm like, who their local biologists are and what they're studying and why

and in the case of bears, there's bear organizations. We've got a little non-profit organization called Wildlife Media. We made a bear film a few years ago that followed my journey around the world to Borneo, to the sun bears, to Alaska's brown bears, to Peru's spectacle bears, and, and, and to the polar bears of Northern Canada. So four locations and I did it on the back of my motorcycle. I like to ride a motorbike. I've been preparing for my bike trip for the last five years. But in many ways, my journey started long ago. And this film followed me around to these different locations and we found these amazing bear heroes in each of these places for each of these bear species. And then the proceeds from the film and donations from donors

that had made the film possible, we gave it all to the people that were doing the work on the ground that were in the film. And so it felt really good. So we created a little non-profit called Wildlife Media that was designed to do that and still is doing that. It's creating stories and supporting science and scientists and especially young people, you know, encouraging, encouraging those people with the nature gene that they feel might sort of be whitted away to keep it and go for it and make it part of their lives, you know, and we're at that stage, aren't we? Everyone's got a role and, you know, it kind of is frustrating when you hear, oh, it's up to the next generation, they'll save us. No, it's up to whichever generation you're in. Each of us has to do it,

whether you are a hundred or whether you're eight years old, doesn't matter. Each of us can play a role to solve some of the planet's problems and whatever that means. If you've got money, donate money. If you've got time, volunteer and donate your time. If you've got intellect and smarts, then offer that. If you're an accountant, do some accounting for a bear biologist, right? If everyone can weigh in, protecting big, beautiful animals and nature can ultimately ends up protecting us all. I'm obsessed with bears, but I do it as much for people as I do for bears because by protecting these big ecosystems, these 10,000 square mile chunks of the world that bears need to thrive and exist, you know, we're protecting clean water, fresh air, natural resources, the trees that breathe

out, the oxygen that we breathe in, right? Really basic, fundamental stuff. Like I always think even climate change, you know, I'm on this jag at the moment to really sort of try and help position the natural world's biodiversity can save us from climate change, right? By protecting these vast areas, we're protecting forests, you know, something like 25% of the warming effect by human beings is because of deforestation. So imagine protecting a forest in Italy, or Alaska, for a bear population, suddenly you're protecting the forest that we all need and you're reducing carbon and all the rest of it. Can I ask you a few questions from listeners? Yes. Oh my gosh. You, okay, literally, I put up a call for questions. 478 questions overnight came in.

Wow. Okay. But before your questions, let's give some monies to some bears. So the bonus episode is coming out with all of the other wonderful bear biologists that'll be out this week, but we're giving to several causes for that. But for this episode, it's going to wildlifemedia.org, which was established to create the movie Bear Track with Chris, and it's a non-profit dedicated to telling inspiring and impactful stories about wildlife and conservation and supports emerging and established individuals in the field, including scientists and filmmakers and conservationists. You can check out wildlifemedia.org's documentaries, Bear Track and Ocean Souls about cetaceans, and Chris's podcast, The Wild with Chris Morgan. Chris also told me that according to

his back of the envelope math, protecting the eight bear species of the world would be protecting one third of the Earth's land service. And he says his dream is to protect a million square miles of bear habitat in an international bear park for each of the eight bear species. So it's exciting to support that kind of vision made possible by the following sponsors. Okay, this first question was on the minds of many patrons, including Laurent Duberglas, Katie Bauer, Matt Saimo, Bailey Griffin, Adam Weaver, first-time question-asker Taylor, Emily Roth, Felix Besperholly, first-time question-asker Daniel Belland, Ned Lansing, Ashley Herbal, as well as Jasmine Montreal and Rainy Day both asked, why bear so cute if so mean? I just want

to squish. If bears are so dangerous, why are they so cute? Why are they both? I think I followed that, yeah. I just want to squish. It's great, that, isn't it, right? We've kind of run that gamut in the conversation already from like these little cubs that you just want to put in your jacket to a bear you don't want to have in your tent or on a trail. Okay, it's a great question because I think it answers why bears are so prevalent in the human mindset, right? We're always society, culture, through art, stories, fables, mythology, the naming of stars, right? Bears have always been there since the days of us sitting around a fire in a cave. And maybe it's because of that, right? Because that, my God, they're resistably cute and

you want to take them home to, oh my God, it could rip my head off if I don't do the right thing. So there's nothing boring about them either end of that spectrum. That's a very good point. Elizabeth Edwards, Moe Casey, and a bunch of listeners. Shayla Zink, Miranda Halsey-Vincent, Alex Bowman, Annie C, Miranda Panda, Grace Robichaux, and B Wilson, who asked, Pandas, what's up with Pandas? All of them. Want to know, in Elizabeth's words, why are Pandas? Shouldn't evolution have eliminated them by now? And Moe Casey wants to know, can you explain Pandas? They seem too ridiculous and chaotic to be in the same family as Grizzlies. So what's going on with Pandas? Oh, I love the way he's

the phrase. They seem what? Too chaotic. What was it? Too ridiculous and chaotic. To be in the same family as Grizzly. I'd actually kind of agree with that. Does it really belong like next to the lineup of eight next to a Grizzly? No, Pandas are a bit of a, they're a bit unusual. At one point, Pandas weren't in the Bear family, and then they were welcomed into the Bear family of eight. So they are firmly there now. And I'm glad they are, because they're found in these just a few mountain ranges in China, and they need help. And China's been pretty good at protecting them and getting the word out and raising them in captivity. And wow, there's a competition between a Grizzly Bear cub and a giant panda cub. I think

the giant panda cubs are the most incredibly sweet creatures on earth. But they are, they're a bit of a bit of a social outlier in the Bear family sitting around eating nothing but bamboo and quite happy with it. Yeah. Just a side note about pandas. How many are there? There are fewer than 2,000 giant pandas left in the wild, but they're listed now as vulnerable instead of endangered. So that's good. And these carnivores do occasionally scoop up a rodent or a bird to eat. But yes, 99% of their diet is bamboo. And an adult panda, I look this up, can eat up to 30 pounds of food a day. And it's digestible because of a microbe that lives in its pretty short poop chute for a plant eater. Speaking of which, next time you need some first date low trivia, feel free to mention

that pandas shit up to 40 times a day. And that their faces are so cute and round because they have wood gnashing jaw muscles. Also, their white and black fur helps them hide in the snow and in shadows. Hey, why are their ears something we want to softly bite on? Well, according to science, bears have little wee round ear flaps. Because the smaller the ears, the less heat they'll lose from them. So you know the Phenic Fox? Huge ass ears lives in the Sahara Desert. Those big sailboat ears help dissipate heat. So bears have the opposite. But both types of ears are so cute. It makes me personally nauseated. I want to touch them so bad, but I won't. I promise. You know, I don't know about you, but I look at a creature like that sometimes and go,

how is that even possible? How is that even possible? And also, how is that possible on this one planet, right? That we are here as homo sapiens sharing this space in time and in place with a creature like that, whether it's a honestly a giant panda or an earthworm, it's it's puzzling and it's just magical. It's just it's wondrous, isn't it that we do that we're sharing it in this period of time on this planet's history with this variety of species? And I think that's what gets to me. It's like, they deserve to exist. They deserve a place on this planet. They deserve to thrive. It's not all about us, my God. Not about us. But when we do crash on a bear's couch, aka go camping, patrons such as first time question asker, Sanny Lee and Anna Luna,

who I accidentally just called Luna, had a question about if that's always such a bloody good idea. And we had a lot of folks, including someone named Luna, and Jeffrey Bradshaw, Derek Allen, Tyler Duggan, and Annie C, who phrased it this way. My asshole uncle, who likes to tell horrifying man versus nature stories, claims he saw a woman get dragged out of her tent by a bear in Yellowstone because it could smell her menstruation. My uncle is a complete and utter dick, but I've wondered if this was a thing ever since he told my sister. So, and Luna asked about their moon and camping. And so, is that flimflam or is that real? In terms of the menstruating women attraction by bears, it's not true in one degree. The risk is

that the pads and towels used by menstruating women smell of blood, and if they're not discarded off safely, can attract wild animals. But it's not an animal. It's not a bear saying that woman is menstruating, therefore becomes a target and I'm attracted. No. And so attacks don't happen just from like a shark smelling blood in the water? No, exactly. But if towels and byproducts of that menstruation are not dealt with, just like other attractants of any sort, food or any other tractants or garbage or anything, then it can bring bears in. And if there is ever a correlation, it's that. Oh, okay. Good to know. Also, ever helpful, the Yellowstone National Park website has a whole page dedicated to refuting this flimflam, giving statistics on bear attacks,

which are very rare, and how an even slimmer percentage of the people attacked were doing so during their lunar bloodletting. So people who bleed, you'll be okay, probably. But treat your used goods like food and keep it 10 feet above ground or in a lockbox or a car and pack out what you pack in. Don't bury it. And if your uncle is an asshole, tell him he's wrong. And also that the mask goes over the nose, dude. I just have a feeling he's one of those guys. Anyway, let's change the subject. This is a very softball question in every sense of the word. Kristen needs to know which bear is the softest? Oh, the softest fur, softest as in to touch. Well, I haven't touched every species. I've got to say, I still got some still left to fondle.

Let's say the under fur of a grizzly is really a delicious place to be. It's, you know, they have these like three layers, the one against their skin is almost felty and thick. And then the next one is, is warm and fuzzy. I've got piles of it that I found discarded on the, in Alaska. I've got piles of it on various shelves around the house. And I just love touching that stuff. And then the outside is this guard hair. They should have shed the snow and the rain and keeps the sun out and keeps them warm and cool when they need to be. And so a bear's coat is a pretty special thing. But yeah, grizzly bears sort of under fur is a pretty nice, nice soft texture. That's for sure. And the cubs, oh my God, even more so, right? You can't even imagine.

No. Do you know much about the legend of Teddy Roosevelt making the teddy bear? You know, I, not a lot, but I do know that he had an opportunity to kill a bear in a hunt. And whether it's the legendary part of the story or truth, but he raised his rifle to the bear and decided not to. So gave this bear a chance. And that's where the name teddy bear came from, in respect of his choice not to kill that bear, which he's kind of nice, isn't it? I did not know that. Fact check. And yep, Russian-born Brooklyn candy shop owner Morris Mitchum and his wife, Rose, heard the story. Rose made a stuffed bear. And the rest is history. They ended up opening one of the largest toy companies in America. So there you have it. Teddy bear

question askers, including Thomas N. Wyndham, Natasha Barge, TV Scotia, Megan A., Aloysia Froez, Earl of Grammlekin, Nicole Kleinman, Katie Simothy, Nikki, and first-time question askers, Mina Craig, Dowd Halali, and Morgan Betul. Okay, so that's answered. But who invented the Teddy Ruxpin? No one but me asked. Well, I had to look it up. And the creator of the late 1980s talking, singing toy bear was invented by a guy named Ken Forsy, whose previous work involved co-founding Chuck E. Cheese and engineering Disney's animatronic country bear, Jan Burry, and designing the haunted mansion, which knowing all of that, Teddy Ruxpin makes so much more sense. Okay, speaking of kid stuff, the wonderful Greg Wallach listener asks,

does a cub become a bear in their 30s or 40s? When when are they grown-ups? Awesome question. So a bear, a really old bear in the wild would be 25. I think the oldest bear that's known in research right now in the wild, certainly in the lower 48 states, is Bear 399. She's called her name is Bear 399. And she's in Grand Teton National Park Yellowstone, the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. So she's basically a Yellowstone bear. And she's 24. And so she's really old bears don't get to be that old usually, because we've either shot them or hit them with cars or they've died from fights or even lightning strikes and natural causes, drownings as cubs, things like that. So she's a really old adult bear. A cub, you know, unfortunately,

the first year or two of life, half of the cubs died just because of all these threats to them, you know, so it's it's a tough life being a being a cub. By the time they're three or four years old as a grizzly bear, that's when they're like, okay, mom, I'm out of here. They hit the teenage years. They're like, I don't want my own. And they become independent that three or four years old. And they might not get a chance, they can mate physiologically, but they might not get a chance to behaviorally until they get a bit older, bigger, meaner, decide to, you know, fight other dominant males or even the females competition between females for male attention is not uncommon where there's dense populations of bears. So yeah, three or four is kind of when they're in those young

teenage years. And then, you know, an established healthy dominant bear is usually sort of 10, 11, 12 years old. And then by the time they're in their mid 20s, like three, nine, nine, they have usually especially the males from fighting canines broken off teeth worn down. They don't look like a healthy happy bear anymore. You know, it's the slow demise at that point. They can live longer in captivity than when they've taken well care of. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, side note, there are many instances of bears reaching 40 in captivity. Though if you Google oldest bears, you will mostly find obituaries. I accidentally learned about a 34 year old male grizzly and Yellowstone who was put down a few months ago

after he was munching on calves a lot. So his name was 168. And he only had three little nubbins of rotten teeth left, but he was able to hunt baby cows by just gumming them to death, which is kind of cute and ferocious. It's also impressive and makes me sad. Anyway, RIP 168. Kayla left. Kayla says, I saw a TikTok recently joking about how everyone thinks that hibernation was literally just sleep for several months. And everyone's like, wait, it's not. So during hibernation, are there like intermissions where they get up? Is it like Twilight sleep? Are they out? Yeah, they're pretty much out when they're out, but they can also rouse themselves,

bears can rouse themselves from that winter sleep more than a truly deep hibernating creature like a ground squirrel. And they can come out to fend off danger, or some of them come out to even, you know, maybe grab something to eat on a warm day. And, but it really is a form of hibernation. And hibernation is really a spectrum right from the very deep sleep with kind of like humans some of us sleep very deeply and others quite lightly and bears are on the lighter scale of that. But you know, their breath goes down to around one per one or two per minute. And their heart rate drops down to about five or six per minute. And they really sort of enter this incredibly efficient physiological state of being where they can sleep for that length of time,

reprocess everything that they need and still survive and not urinate, not defecate and just be ready to pop out once the spring emergence of plants that they are waiting for comes out in the spring again. I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up, could you? It's crazy. Like even describing it, I'm like, God, that's amazing. Yeah. Well, this dovetails, well, with a question Arthur Apadaka asked, they wrote in bear with me and my ridiculous question. But do bears make their own butt plugs for winter hibernation? And Rika Putnam said, Oh, Lord, imagine if someone else did it for them. But yes, is there some sort of nature's butt plug happening? There is a nature's butt plug. And it's called, it's even got a name, it's called a tappan.

It's not like the bear isn't sitting in his den going, all right, I'm going to forge this tappan out of a clump of dry grass and shove it where the sun don't shine. It's not that. They're out eating a certain vegetation that when they go into the den actually becomes sort of plugged. So the theory is that so that they're not defecating in the den and it helps that process. So yes, there is such a thing as a bear butt plug. Oh, wonderful to know. If you were to say, look at the ingredients list on the back of a tappan, you might see the words bark, shed epithelial cells, undigested plant material, the bear's own hair, and some dried up foot calluses. So according to bears.org, they have a page that wants you to

know that this winter ass cork is just the natural desiccation of stuff parked in the colon for a while and that when bears groom themselves, yeah, they eat their own hair and calluses a little bit on accident, maybe a little bit not. So what? You would too. Also the tappan doesn't just prevent midwinter pooping. It also keeps ants out. And yes, when spring springs and the blossoms start to bud and they awaken, they do their thing in the woods and they eject the tappan. But in order to pull off a David Blaine sitting in a room underground without eating or pooping for half the year stunt, they have to prep. And patrons Eric Kay, Hope, Mary Beacon and Jess Swan had questions about the Battle of the Bedonks. Kelly Phillips said,

do you follow the National Park Service's Fat Bear Week every year? Totally. Yes. In fact, I know those bears quite well because they're in a park, a national park. Thank God for these national parks, right? And this is a really special one Katmai National Park in Alaska. And I've guided a lot there and observed the bears there and practically lived among them for film projects over the years. And it's a really special place. And those are the bears that are feeding on the salmon I was talking about earlier on that get to these giant proportions. Because when you think about it, they're losing sometimes a third or even up to a half of their body weight in the winter den. And they regain that. And most of that in the summer and fall,

and most of that regaining of it is in the sort of midsummer to late fall before denning. They get into this mode of excessive eating. And it really puts them into this overdrive of feeding. And the bears there during that Fat Bear Week are just gorging on sockeye sap. I mean, it's amazing. You can watch them eating 10 or 20 of these fish in the course of an hour. And each of these fish is five, six, seven pounds, you know, and they get to the point where they're eating so many of those fish that they'll just choose, they get very selective, they'll just choose the most beneficial parts. So they'll pull off the brain, they'll bite the brain off, and they'll strip the skin off these big beautiful salmon that, you know, that we pay $30, $40 for in a store. And

the fillet will just float off down the river not interested in the meat. They just want the brain full of protein and fat and the skin the same, you know, because they're okay, they're like, they're full up, but they're like, I still need more, still need more. I'm in overdrive, you know, it's it's called, oh my goodness, my brain has just slipped. What is it excessive, hyperphagia, so excessive eating, you know, they go into that mode. And that's what those bears in Fat Week are right in the middle of where they, they look like something out of a Disney cartoon where they can hardly, you know, waddle around and fat happy bears. Thank goodness they have places like that, you know. And is that Alex Brown, first time question asker wants to know,

is that kind of a blubber that they put on? Yeah, we wouldn't call it blubber, but it's just a fat layer. And on some of them, you know, the rump fat layer on a bear can be six, seven, eight, nine, 10 inches long on some of the big ones. And yeah, it's what they're born to do is put that fat layer on every year. Oh, last October's winter, an Alaskan beautiful beast known as number 747. And the bears bios are all hosted at explore.org. And I have to tell you scrolling through their before spring skinny pictures, and their autumn afters or their plump and ready for winter, some topping 1000 pounds, it's truly body positivity and a reminder that all animals are indeed extraordinary machines to be celebrated. Now, what if you encounter one of

these bears, though? Will it be hungry for you? Rachel Moore and a few other people wanted to know if there are any useful rhymes or sayings to remember which bear you're supposed to cower in fear at, which you're supposed to yell at, just to give people a peace of mind. That's a great question. I'm glad it was asked because, you know, the difference between various, we've already established bears are all individuals, right? They're all completely different characters and personalities like humans. And there's even been scientific studies done, you know, and in the scientific literature, you can find words that describe certain bear personalities like playful or joyous or angry or discontented or irritable or aggressive and violent, you know, all the

things that you might describe a human by, right? So every encounter with any one of those bears is very different when you're thinking about your safety out in bear country. And so you might encounter a normally playful bear that is particularly aggressive that day because it's protecting a food carcass that it's that it's an animal carcass that it's killed. There's essential food for it or its cubs or it might be a mother protecting its cubs. We might have surprised that bear and they don't like surprises. So, you know, there's lots of factors stacked on each other about how dangerous a situation can be with a bear. But for the most part, you want to make lots of noise to avoid them, let them know that you come in to avoid the surprises. Don't go in anywhere near

bears where they're sitting on carcasses. So if you smell stinky, stinky, nasty rotten meat when you're out in the forest, don't head that direction. If you find yourself in the middle of berry patches in the mountains, in the fall, blueberries and and huckleberries, know that a bear might be there just feet away from you doing exactly the same thing. You know, so just being aware of your surroundings and circumstances, know what bear scat looks like, right? Picture, if you will, an upturned tin of brownies studded with pomegranate seeds, but a pile bigger than both of your hands. Just gaze into it, asking it questions of the forest. It's one of my deep fascinations is everything you can learn from bear scat. And

look for claw marks on trees, look for fur on trees where a bear will stand up against the trunk of a tree and rub its back and leave hair behind. So all these indicators. And then if the worst comes to the worst, the question about a rhyme or how do you remember, you know, there's really two categories of bears attacking humans. One is generally a category of like self-defense, being defensive, you're in my space, I want you out of my space, that's when you'll get a bluff charge like the bear that charged at me. Then you'll also have bears that could be predatory and they're very different. That is a bear that is looking at you as a meal, as a source of food or a meal yourself. So you can see immediately those two categories need two different responses,

right? The bear that you've surprised, once you're out of its space, do not surprise it and get the hell out of its space, right? Quietly, calmly, don't look at the bear in the face, back away, be incredibly humble and respectful and just make sure that that bear knows it's allowed to come by. And I've been in the countless situations and you just come off a trail and the bear will either walk by you or it'll disappear at a high speed in the other direction. Once it knows, it's kind of got a handle on the situation. So in that situation, back in the way. Okay, so a bear may run at you to scare you away or? A predatory situation is different and strangely, this is statistically more common with big, wild, dominant black bears in the back

country that don't encounter humans much. Those attacks can be incredibly scary. And so in that sort of case, you need to be more dominant and you need to make sure that the bear knows you're not going to make an easy meal. You're not surprised it, you're not in its personal space, it's following you, it's expressing interest. So it used to be that people would separate them, oh, if it's a grizzly bear or a brown bear, you do this. And if it's a black bear, you do this. The rhyme that she might be thinking about, and it's not really correct is if it's brown, fall down, if it's black, fight back, because a black bear fights in a predacious way more commonly than a grizzly. And a grizzly is going to potentially attack you to defend its space,

in which case you'd fall down and play dead. But the rhyme, there's overlap. So we don't use that rhyme anymore. And I'll get into trouble for actually saying it. So again, that's a really long answer. The short answer is there isn't a great rhyme, but it used to be, used to be that one, brown fall down, like fight back. But really, you better off looking, is this a sudden aggressive, a sudden defensive encounter, or is this a predacious encounter or something in between? And just, you know, knowing where the bears are, knowing their behavior, knowing what they're inclined to do, man, it's really easy to, it's really easy to work around their world, touch wood, and give them the benefit of the doubt, and let them give you the benefit

of the doubt, you know? Also, I read that if you're buying bear pepper spray, always bring for the larger can. And don't wait until a bear is directly in front of you. Bears can cover eight to 10 feet in one stride. So if you spray it, while the bear is 30 to 60 feet away, the cloud has time to take effect and disrupt the charge at you. So how you use it is important. Now for a few more bear tips, keep your ears open for that very special bonus episode this week, because when I get 478 bear questions, sometimes you've got a call for backup. Okay, two quick lightning round. How many bear tattoos do you have? Oh, I don't have any tattoos. Really? Okay, I was like, it was either going to be zero or a thousand. Okay.

And how often do people just refer to you, not with a name, but just as the bear guy? All the time. All the time. Yeah, yeah, even my children. Some of my friends' kids, actually, call me not just the bear guy, but my full name, and then it says like, where's Chris Morgan, the bear guy, like the full title? You know, it's bizarre, it's hilarious, you know, little kids. You need that on your business card. What about movies or cartoons that really do not get bears right? A lot of people want to know what kind of bear Winnie the Pooh is. Looking at y'all, Annemarie, Daniels, Kevin, Riggy, Lisa Bernal, Nicole Kleinman, first time question asker, Hay Artemis, and Zachary Peterson.

If Winnie the Pooh is actually a girl bear. Wow, good question. I don't know, but I would imagine Winnie the Pooh's a brown bear. What's the marmalade all about though? I can't even remember. Or the honey. They eat honey in real life, right? Yeah. Was Winnie the Pooh marmalade or was that Paddington marmalade? I think Paddington was honey. Paddington. What's cooking? Marmalade, Mr. Brown. Go on, have a taste. That's right. Yeah, but do they dig honey that much? They do love honey, absolutely. They would love marmalade if they could get their paws on it, but honey is definitely high on their list. I've seen, yeah, and sun bears in the tropics, they eat lots of honey, and I've seen black bears climbing

tree for honey. Gurus, these love it as well. Yes, absolutely. Packed full of calories for them. I imagine the beastings don't get to them that much. No, they're pretty well equipped with that fur, and they're just hardcore. I have a bear in my local forest here that I track, and I have one remote camera out there. I just have this one camera experiment, and the woods are just out the back door here, and so I can check my camera and see what's on it, and one day there was a bear on it last year. It's just before hibernation, before fall, and I thought I'd go out and see if I could find this one bear. I was excited because there aren't many right here, and sure enough, I found him right in the forest just a couple of days after finding him on this

hidden remote wildlife camera and tracked him. He was a young black bear and eating hornets from a hornet's nest. Hornets don't make honey. He was eating the hornets. Fist fulls of hornets for breakfast. I mean, the bragging rights. So they'll dig into the roots of old rotten trees and pull out hornet nests and larvae and grubs, and you can see them swatting them away from their nose, but it's just like a mosquito bite to us kind of thing, and it's definitely worth their while. They eat a lot of insects. Oh, and was it one of those famed overblown murder hornets in Washington? I know. What would they make of those? I know. Yeah, that's true. A stiff price for a meal. And the last questions I always ask, this one was, I usually ask it, but it was phrased

so well by Sarah Bowen. Not a question, but I do hope you ask him, what is the most unbearable part of their job because of the pun? But usually I always ask, what sucks the most about being a nurse anologist? What's either something petty or something trivial or something huge, but what is the hardest part about what you do? Paperwork probably, right? It's like, you know, you don't get into it for that. You could say weather or insect bites or what. I love all that stuff. The worse it is out, the more pressure the nature puts on you and puts you through the happier. I love bushwhacking, for example. Bears do a lot of bushwhacking. I love bushwhacking. I like getting right off the trail through sticker bushes and just thick scrub and

whatever it takes. I love that stuff. So none of that's miserable to me. It's just the stuff back at home in front of a laptop. If only there were worms and grubs under our laptop, we'd be more likely to pick them up. What about the best thing about bears? Just your favorite thing about them? I think, I think is their intelligence actually. I mean, they're strong, they're mighty, they're powerful, but I think they're intelligence. It's just, it's off the charts and it's surprising to most people. You know, you've got your primates, you've got your whales and dolphins, citations. A lot of people put bears next. They're very high up in terms of animal intelligence. And I think it makes them special spiritually and special as a species to learn

about because they're full of surprises because they're smart, you know. I didn't realize how intelligent they were and how social and able to read cues and really assess a situation almost emotionally. Yes, definitely. And capable of memory and applying things that they've learned over space and time. So they can learn, they can learn where a salmon run is in a particular run, at what particular time of year, and they can traverse hundreds of miles between that time and the next year when they're going to be back. And they'll know to be there in time. It's amazing. Same with a garbage can, unfortunately. So they get into trouble, you know, in places where there are humans on that human wildlife dimension, which is where a lot of my work is in trying to

have people understand wildlife and especially bears and in that human wildlife space, that gray area between where our world ends and their world begins, because I think that's the front line of conservation. And so, you know, bears learn very quickly to get benefits from that space, you know, whether it's getting into garbage or occasionally killing a young livestock or things like that, you know, so it's right on the edge of people's tolerance and it's right on the edge of where the bears are able to be and it's fertile ground there and they're smart, figuring it out all the time, which makes them, they always seem like they're a step ahead, you know. Well, I know people can learn more about you and other ursinologists and bears through your films

and through your podcasts. Any particular film that you think people should go to first? I would love people to go and watch Bear Trek. It's really interesting. It was a film that we did a few years ago. It came out in 2018 and it was that journey I took around to four different places to meet three different bear biologists, each saving their species from the most mind-blowing rock climbing bears in Peru, spectacle bears that my friend Robin Appleton studies there, to these sun bears in Tropical Borneo and my friend Sute Wong studies them, to polar bears in the Canadian Arctic with Dr. Nick Lund and each of these bear species has a different story to tell and the story starts with me in Alaska among the big bears that I've

been talking about and then I sort of embark upon this journey to go and find others who are crazy about bears or the ursinologists like myself, you know, to try and understand what makes them tick and what their bears need. So that's the movie Bear Trek and it's streaming on Amazon in case you want to see all kinds of bears with Chris and also had a camp on a motorcycle. Okay. It was really popular and it resulted in lots of good things for the biologists and people can stream that on Amazon. So easy to access and I love it if people would check out The Wild with Chris Morgan. That's a podcast that I do about wildlife and lots of bear stories in there as well and from different parts of the world, but lots of other species as well. Just doing

one on jaguars right now. I was in Belize recently doing some field stuff on jaguars and Scarlet McCaw's. I'm really attracted to these bright interesting creatures that represent so much. So that's kind of what the podcast is about. So amazing. I have a feeling there's gonna be a lot of people tagging along with whatever your next adventures are. Just consider ourselves plus ones too, like the front row seat, all those beautiful stuff. So this has been so great. I'm so glad I got a chance to talk to you. This has been fun. I've really enjoyed it. Hope I didn't talk a mile a minute too much. Don't ask me about bears, whatever you do. No, you're kidding. This is like my ears are open. Great. So ask intelligent organisms doofy questions and then just sit back

and bask in the bear biology. Now, once again, that was Chris Morgan who hosts the excellent podcast, The Wild with Chris Morgan. New episodes this season are out literally today. So go find that. And the film he talked about is Bear Trek, available streaming. You can follow Chris Morgan on Instagram at Chris Morgan Wildlife and at Morgan Wildlife on Twitter. There will be links to all that plus the charity in the show notes. And we are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. And I'm Ali Ward with 1L on both and links are in the show notes to that. There's an oligies podcast Facebook group moderated by my good friend, Aaron Talbert. There's merch available at oligiesmerch.com. That is managed by Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch. And thank you, Noel

Dilworth for helping schedule all of the interviews and for leaving an Easter basket on my doorstep and making me want to cry in a good way. Thank you, Emily White for transcribing episodes. If you ever need something professionally transcribed, find Emily White. She has a new website called The Wordery. She is excellent. Transcripts and bleeped episodes are available at aliward.com slash oligies extra for free to anyone who needs them. Thank you, Kayla Patton for bleeping the episodes. Thank you to full time hunk and editor, Jared Jarebear Sleeper, as well as the sunniest sunbear, Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts the podcast See Jurassic Right and the Percast. They both edit the show. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme song. And if you stick around to the end of the episode,

I divulge a secret nugget of truth. And I'll tell you, this week, number one, the plastic is still in the neighbor's tree. It's so high. I don't know. I don't know what to do. And number two, I was talking to my friend, David, about this. And if anyone feels like they've hit a wall where they're just really tired and the world seems like maybe it's about to open up, but you're also like, I also kind of want to hibernate for a while, even though that's supposedly kind of what we've been doing for a year. Don't worry. I think that you're totally normal. I think we're all going through that a little bit. So if you feel really tired and you're like, I think that's normal. Okay, that's not a very good secret, but it's earnest. All right, bye-bye.

Bears. Beats. Battlestar Galactica.