Radiolab - Breaking Bad News Bears

Episode Date: September 28, 2018

Today, a challenge: bear with us. We decided to shake things up at the show so we threw our staff a curveball, Walter Matthau-style. In two weeks time we told our producers to pitch, report, and produce stories about breaking news….or bears. What emerged was a sort of love letter for our honey-loving friends and a discovery that they embody so much more than we could have imagined: a town’s symbol for hope, a celebrity, a foe, and a clue to future ways we’ll deal with our changing environment.  This episode was reported and produced by Simon Adler, Molly Webster, Bethel Habte, Pat Walters, Matt Kielty, Rachael Cusick, Annie McEwen and Latif Nasser. Special thanks to Wendy Card, Marlene Zuk, Karyn Rode, Barbara Nielsen and Steven Amstrup at Polar Bears International, Jimmy Thomson, Adam Kudlak, Greg Durner, Todd Atwood, and Dawn Curtis and the Environment and Natural Resources Department of Northwest Territories. And thanks to composer Anthony Plog for allowing us to use the Fourth Movement of his "Fantasy Movement," "Very Fast and Manic," performed by Eufonix Quartet off of their album Nuclear Breakfast, available from Potenza Music.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. Who, I mean, I don't have a real good game plan for how we start the show, but in the spirit of the show, maybe we should just drop into that radio lab staff meeting that we had. Yeah, I remember it. It was a very, it was the people are like, like, what? James, can you put this next to the speaker? Okay, so set it up. Recently, we came up with this challenge. Challenge, yeah, for the radio lab staff.

We get everyone together. An inappropriately stodgy conference room. There is, Sorin dialing in. From Wisconsin. All right. We're good to go? Yeah. The big reveal.

Everybody taking deep breath. I had warned them ahead of time that something big was coming. It's nothing bad, obviously. Is it obvious? Anyway, after we got over that little bump in the road, I basically outlined this challenge. We came up with a little plan, which basically boils down to this. On September 27, I hope.

We're going to release a story, or a set of stories, really. And between today and that date, you will have to pitch, report, record, produce, said story. You will have that much time to do it, and we'll be putting it up no matter what. In other words, we're giving them like a week to pitch this story and then a week to make it. And you will have to do a story either about breaking news. So something that just happened. Or you can do a story about fairs. So I'm calling the whole thing.

Bad news bears? Because we've had bears sort of in the room for so long. And you know, I remember the, I remember the text. In my memory store and tell me if I'm right, this happened over text. It was a text, yeah. This is one of those like, you know, Rari, you talk about Princess and the P? Like there's a P 14 mattresses down that just bothers you. Like one of the P's that's been bothering me is the length of time it takes us to make these stories.

Sometimes I can feel too burdensome. And we wanted to just do an experiment where we shortcut the hell out of that. It was just the strange juxtaposition scene. All right. I want you guys to go out now and find something that is hot, new, and sudden and just breaking, like a real reporter, or bears. It's such a weird... That's exactly it. And how are you going to cook that dish?

Let me explain how it's going to go then. So you're going to get paired up. those pairings in a second. The story has to be under 10 minutes. The story must at some point in it include audio from the movie Bad News Bears, the original. The story must include some point a recording from outside the office. Any narration has to be done in conversation. You have to be staring at somebody across the glass. You cannot go in and attract solo lines. before I do your teams, your parents, are there any questions? How are we defining breaking news?

Pat had a reasonable question. I would give you a little bit, like I would maybe be willing to accept something from last week, otherwise today forward. Wow. Yeah. Why are we doing this? I don't know. Guilty

It's gonna be fun It's gonna be fun Alright You probably have to clear out of this room Yeah Okay, great All right Thank you

All right I'm glad I'm Robert Thorne Sorry I'm sorry I'm sworn Okay

This is radio lab Today Today we are breaking bad news bears Okay So everybody went out From that meeting And again, the task was to reiterate the breaking news story. Or bears.

One week to do everything. Yeah, you got to go out. You got to get the tape. You got to come back, put it in the computer, cut it up. Add the music. Write the things. And we have eight producers. Fact check.

Fact check. Got a fact check. Eight producers means four teams. So that means we end up in the grand total of four stories. Yes. Starting. Who we start with? How about Molly Webster and Simon Adler?

Well, I will say that we have checked both boxes here. we have a story that is both about bears and breaking news. You're kidding. Ding, ding, ding. Extra points. Well, you do get extra points. So, all right, you there, Matt? I am. Great.

Last week, we gave this guy a call. My name is Matt Montaigne, and I am the director of public works for the city of Newburgh. And you've got quite the task ahead of you, huh? Yeah. Yeah, it's big. That could do some destruction. Hurricane Florence is making landfall with devastating flooding and damaging winds. We had Hurricane Florence come through last week.

One of the hardest hit areas is Newburn. In New Bern. Newburn, North Carolina. This is a live-looking Newburn. As the water has really overtaken this. There's relentless rain and wind. It's brought down trees. If you've been watching the news at all over the past couple weeks,

you've probably seen Newburn on TV. As you just heard, it was one of the town. that was hardest hit by Hurricane Florence. Homes were destroyed, tens of millions of dollars of destruction, trees were knocked down. And with those trees have come power lines. With the power lines down, the lights go out. Thousands of people are in the dark around here.

We talk about the flooding of Newburgh, and we've got historic councils that were built into 17, 1800s that were pushed off the foundation. Oh, wow. And as Director of Public Works, it's Matt's job. Our department is in charge of the cleanup. not only the leaf and live debris, the trees and the shrubs, but also the construction debris from the houses that are being gutted.

And I'm actually at the disposal site right now looking at a line of about 30 tractor-trailer trucks that are lined up and getting ready to roll out and start doing debris cleanup. But what we called Matt about was the cleanup of something far smaller. Trust me, this bear is not supposed to be here. Far less vital. Right now, but I'm sure they'll get them back where they need to be soon. But maybe just as important. The good old North Day.

Let me step back here on. You'll just a quick little history. Great. Oh, city of you know, but we found in 1710. Our downtown is a really beautiful, six, maybe eight square blocks where you see the beautiful porches. This is local restaurant owner. Buddy Bengal, and our town was settled from Swiss settlers. And if you look up the meaning of burn in Switzerland, burn means bear.

And so over the next 300 years, they really ran with this. Let's go, bears. The high school mascots, the bear. They have a city flag that has a little black bear on it. It's like a nod to their past, right where they came from. But it's also, they've got all these bears in the woods surrounding them. Simon found out a lot of bears in the woods. Okay.

Largest black bear ever recorded from Craven County, North Carolina. And the way this bear sort of obsession, one of the ways it's taken hold is that they have bear statues all over town. They either stand up on their hind legs that are about six foot tall or they're down on all fours and they're about three foot tall. And we're probably somewhere between 60 or 80 of them around town. So that being said, you know, bears are everywhere. Including the morning of September 14th, 2018.

You know, Hurricane Florence came in. And by about midday, water started to seriously start rising. Again, Buddy Bengal. We were up to seven feet by Thursday night. I mean, it happened in some places just extremely quick. And so Buddy and a few other locals took it upon ourselves that we needed to go out and help people. And they would go to areas outside of the downtown, and they were just banging on doors. Say, look, guys, in the next six to eight hours, this water is going to be over your head and flood your apartment.

You need to get out now and get to a shelter. Meanwhile, back in the downtown, with the waters continuing to rise... As close as we are to the river, we received 8, 10 feet in our downtown area. This strange thing started to happen. Those giant bear statues that had for years just been looking out over the town, the rising floodwater actually managed to pick them up. You know, they all sit on concrete slabs, but, you know, with the amount of water we received, A lot of them floated.

Many of them were lifted cement and all, and were just floating there standing upright, bobbing gently along. Yeah, a lot of them in that flooded there, they moved. Down the downtown, through the alleyways. Some of them floated just down the street. Others floated on for blocks. Oh, my God.

Just closed your eyes. hear the hurricane, see the water, and then astonishingly watch the bears go by. And then as the water recedes, they're gently set down and left there in these still slightly flooded waters of the downtown. That's a whole new view for him. Photos of these bears started showing up sort of virally. Is that bear over there? He decided to travel on the walk. Local residents started posting to social media.

And then... So it was Saturday morning. You know, it was the first day that the winds really had subsided. And I was getting up to just assess damage of everything that was outside. But he's at home. He wakes up in the morning. He goes down the door of his apartment building. He opens it up and it's just like...

My God, this town has just been destroyed. I got branches everywhere. The rain is still. lashing. And there was a lot of debris and stuff flying. And when he looks just right in front of him, right outside the doorway, right there on its side and kind of a little bit of a puddle of water is a bear. One of those floating bear statues had ended up at his apartment. Oh. And he immediately recognizes it as the City Hall bear. So you have on there a lot of the colors and scenes from the city of Newburn. So you have on there, the back of the bear. The back of the

is painted yellow, like the Newburn flag. The middle of the bear is painted with the North Carolina state flag, and then the shoulders and head of the bear are red, white, and blue. And that bear represents our entire city. And there it was. Right in front of my doors.

And a gentleman happened to just be walking by in the street who lives about a block and a half away from me, and he helped me pick the bear up. He grabs the back legs, the other guy grabbed his front legs, front back, whichever they grab. I march it across this. I'm presumed to be probably still six inches of water sort of washing through the street.

And Florence is like not done, right? Because it sat over the coast for a while. So the winds have gone down. But like the rains were still torrential. There was like, I mean, flood watches a week out. Yeah, we were trying to figure out what to do with it. And there's a bush right behind City Hall with a little bit of an alleyway in between the bush and the building.

So we put the bear in between there because we knew it would be hidden enough Yeah, buddy Bengals. He took the bear back across City Hall and put it behind some bushes. A few days later, they're actually getting ready for President Trump was going. And so Matt Montane, the head of public works, goes down to City Hall to, like, prepare it. I was asked to go down there and make sure we had a flag on City Hall and make sure it was flying high. And while we went down there, we took a couple of hours. He and his team, they spot the bear, go over to it.

So two of us were able to pick it up very easily. They pick up the bear, they march it to the platform. Set it back on the concrete pedestal like it was, and then bolt or screw one side of it into the bear's foot, and then put the other side into the concrete slab. And we actually did that on all four of the lengths. And they step back and take a breath for a moment. And then they raise a new American flag, and they move on.

Is you wiping a tear away? No, I'm just kind of an itchy eye, but I could. No, it's nice. When you have something that represents your heart, as odd as it may be to be a painted plasticine, their image, but still, that's called, we're back. We aren't over. To quote Francis Gagli, you're still there.

When you look at the grand scheme of it, the bears, You know, it's not that important, but, you know, it kind of symbolizes that we're putting New Bern back together. We need, you need a symbol to get behind. And our symbol in this city are the bears. Well, that's one bird down and a love him to go. Wow, all right. So what's... Bears.

No, bears. Bears. Bears. Bears. So what's, that was number one. Story number one. What's next? Well, who is Pat Walters and Bethel Habtee? And what?

Well, remains to be seen. Let me do this. Should we talk about this thing? Yes, talk about the thing. Okay, yeah. So this is a story about... My park right here, right behind him. Bobcat.

This guy named Rob. Hi. Hello. Hey, really nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Hello. Hey, Pat. Nice to meet you.

And Rob is... Rob is who exactly? Rob Devin, he's a comedy writer. He worked in the city for a really long time, like 10 years plus working for the Colbert Report. Oh, wow. Just basically like a high-rise living city guy. Yeah, but about a year and a half ago, he and his spouse moved upstate. This is great.

Oh, thank you. It's been rainy the last couple of days, but stuff is happening. Yeah. They bought a little white house with a big yard and this beautiful mountain ridge in the distance. But when it gets really rainy, it gets super foggy, and then it sort of disappears. the way that sometimes a building would in Manhattan. Is you relating things to buildings still? That's all I got.

And pretty quickly after they get there, they realize there's all this food growing in their yard. They have apple trees, and then they find a pear tree. Squash and kale and pumpkins. Pumpkins and hops. Wow, this is like Garden of Eden. Yeah. Had you ever had trees that grew fruit or food before?

No. And right in the center of... this yard is this peach tree. And we had so many peaches. I think we pulled like 200 off this tree. We made jam and pie and Sandy's an amazing pie baker. And so we had a ton of pie. So the next year rolls around and Rob is like rubbing his hands together.

Like, yes, it's peach time. You know that they're ready because they come off when you gently tug at them. And if they're not coming off yet, they're not ready yet. So it was in the part where we were like waiting and ready for it to start to happen. When he hears Sandy yell from the back of the house. It's a bear. So he jumps up, goes to the back window, and sees. It was a bear.

It was a, I mean, you can't mistake it. Just sitting there. Sitting like Winnie the poo on its butt. And it was just reaching up all lazy to the tree. and I was pulling off a peach and it would like look at it and it would put it in its mouth, then it would drop a pit and then it would reach up for another one. It was just having the time of its life. And I love that it's sitting.

Not only was it sitting, it's back was to me, which I found also very upsetting in ways that I couldn't totally articulate at the time. I was like, you need to be more aware of the fact that you've come to someone's house taking their food. And so he jumps up, he grabs his tammerie. that he used this to punish his cat. So I grabbed it, and I ran outside, and I started shaking it. One of them took a video of it. And then Sandy, his spouse, is like by the house,

woofing like a dog. Ra! And like... Bear immediately was like, oh no. The bear totally freaks out. And it booked it back into the woods that way. So they walk up to the peach tree and... Peachtree has been, like, massacred.

The parts of this tree that are six feet or below were pretty much stripped of peaches. And there's just all these peach pits and like half-eaten peaches scattered around and every one of those is like a peach that they're not going to have, like a pie crumble that they're not going to have. What was the feeling that you had? Just loss and determination.

I was like, no, I can't, I don't want this to keep happening. At this point, I see the peaches that are left and I would like them to be ours. I think the bear has had its fill, and this has to stop now. So they go back inside, and Rob immediately Googles, like, how to deter bears. And then at some point, they come across a website that says, the one thing that bears are very afraid of is human voices. Yeah, so I was like, I think that what I need to do is make a giant playlist of podcasts and play it.

A podcast? Yeah, and so he takes this old iPhone with a broken screen, and he... Then begins to build. this spare deterring podcast device. I have a telescope, has a mechanical mount, and I have one of those little power banks that you can get to charge your phone when you travel and stuff.

And on a Bluetooth speaker that I connected directly to the phone. And he covers that whole thing with a recycling bin on top of these logs. So he hooks the whole thing up, and he loads it with the entire catalog of Repai-All. From Gimlet, is Repai-All. I'm PJ Vote.

And I'm Alex Gould. Reply All. This is a show about the internet. Yes. Oh my God, it's like the two most citified Brooklyn kids. So Reply All is this podcast by these two guys, PJ Vote and Alex Goldman. And a whole bunch of amazing producers. Absolutely, an entire team of incredible people who produce the show.

But anyway, yeah, Rob just happens to like Reply All. It was something that we were comfortable with. So, Alex, yes. You've been mostly out sick this week. I love imagining PJ. and Alex just talking to no one in the middle of a garden. So mainly I'm just curious what you thought about your podcast being used as a scarecrow. How do you feel about that, Alex?

I thought it was great. I thought that there were very limited ranges of application for this show. I'd like for our show to be like the duct tape of podcasts. You can do all kinds of stuff with it. So far, we've only figured out the two. Listen to it, scare bears. But he also thought, like, there's one aspect of reply all that might be particularly effective at scaring away a bear. It's the laugh.

It's the laugh. PJ's laugh. Just imagining a bear that was like, I don't think it's people. And I'm going to walk a little closer. I'm going to approach this tree. And then it was like, oh, that might be a little extra pop. Yes. I do have to say, like I do mostly feel, like I feel like I'm supposed to feel bad about it, but I mostly feel good about it.

Like, I mostly feel good that it's just like useful, even if it's useful in a very stupid way. Right. I'd like for... Well, the terrible irony is here's a city boy who escapes the city, learns to love the peace and quiet, and then has his peace and quiet invaded and turns it back into a city. Yeah, I mean, they're, it's like Brooklyn just kind of followed him up there. Some guy with a radio going on too loud that is convertible. I'm sure, though, it kind of felt. reassuring to have that, like, going in the background.

You know that your bear deterring machine is doing its job. It was an instinctual choice that I felt like continually revealed it's helped to be the right one. Yeah, so he goes out, he checks that first morning, the peaches are all safe, goes out in the evening, reply all continuing to play. Hey, Jean, how are you? Next date, he goes out and there's no sign of any bears,

and he gets, like, ten peaches off the tree. And then the next day, no bears again. in this tweet, but I don't feel the tweet in my bones the way you might. PJ and Alex are still talking about the internet and there's like 20 peaches off the tree. So over the days, how many peaches did he capture from

the bear? He had counted that the bear had eaten about 40 peaches. Based on the pits. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he had kind of counted in his rage, you know, as he was cleaning up the mess, how many peaches the bear had taken from him? The way it shook out, we got about

as many peaches as the bear did. He thinks that he and Sandy got like 40 peaches too. So like by the end of peach season, he's thinking I win. Or at least I didn't lose. We tied. And so anyway, he he ends up writing this entire story on Twitter. Put it up on Twitter and I was like, this is a story about what's happening in my yard right now. And it got a big response. And I was a little surprised, I think, at the number of people who took the bear's side. But I was like, Well, that's the problem. Why can't the bear have some? Not enough peaches for you?

Really? There's a bear apologists? Yeah. Do they understand that there are other food sources than the one peach tree in Rob Dubbins' yard? Like... I clearly, no. Yeah. The way I see it is like, if Rob had domesticated the bear,

raised it to only understand that food came from that tree and then sent it out into the woods, they would be justified. But other than that, that's ridiculous. I'm not taking the bear's side. It's not even about the morality of it. It's just the bear doesn't like reply all. Rob does like reply out. That's like very straightforward for me.

Rob gets the beaches. Do you think on any level the bear like got something out of listening to the show? No. No. I don't know. We just don't design it with bears in mind. What would a show designed with bears and mind sound like? Radio Lab

Oh my God It's their next spin-off Radio Lab presents For Bears For Bears Yes we've been under sort of estimating the size of our bear audience Listen real talk here

Okay We like bears We could do many more episodes Oh I got no in particular We've run across so many And they Our staff has run across so many things about bears That we've got a whole bear season

We could do a whole Honestly we could do that We could just decide that right now. We could. Or we could try again, see if there's anybody in the house who's going to do a non-bearer store. Yes, we are still, we have two more. And so next up is Matt Kilty and Rachel Kusick with Breaking News, I hope. We'll see.

All right, you just want us to go barreling into this or something? Yeah. Yeah, go. Okay, well, if we start all the way at the tip-top, we drove out to Oak Ridge, New Jersey, Yep. Which is about an hour and a half west of the city here. Okay. Drove out for a story about a bear.

Surprisingly. Who would have thought it? I've definitely heard dogs barking in the video. Oh, that's a dog. But not just any bear, a famous bear. The most famous bear, you could say. Yeah. Hi.

Hey, how's it going? My name's Matt. I'm Rachel. We're reporters for the whole thing. So we showed up totally unannounced to this house. A woman answers the door. A little suspicious. We explain who we are.

Hi, Matt. I'm Marissa. Hi, Rachel. Eventually, we get her name. It's Marissa, Marissa McAllen. Hi. We meet her husband, Greg, who just got home from work. Rachel. Yes, hi, nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you as well. Nice to meet you. So, Greg walked us around in the backyard. This is really beautiful. Where there's this huge forest. Yeah, this is gorgeous. And then... All right, we try this.

The kids are playing games. Thanks so much. Let us into his basement. Let's go in there. We'll shut the door. Try to see. It was somewhat isolated. Okay.

Sure. Oh, this sounds great. Start screaming like two minutes. Um, yeah, I guess, uh, we were just curious, like, I mean, Marissa was telling us a little bit about the first time she saw the bear. Like, when did you, did she tell you about that? When did you first? Yeah, my wife saw him the first time. I'd caught up just a glimpse of him.

But, uh, the time I videotaped was actually the third time I saw him. So it's the summer of 2014. It was, uh, it was a week day. It was nighttime. It was about six o'clock at night or so. And I was hanging out on my deck. When he sees this bear. Coming from the woods up towards the street.

A black bear. So I ran out. I grabbed my cell phone and just started videotaping with an old Samsung Note 3. It's like a shaky video. Greg started just like painting the phone all over the place. To try to find it with the phone. Marissa's outside. Yeah.

She gets another video. Oh, so she's taking a video too. She's got a video of. me taking a video of the bear. I don't see it. So he starts walking up his front yard. He's going down his driveway and he's looking, he's still looking for this bear. And really like you just see

a little picturesque slice of suburban America. It's just like some you see some trees, a road. Green grass everywhere. And then there it is. There it is. All of a sudden Greg zooms in on this like blurry blob

that is moving across his neighbor's driveway. And it's grainy, but what you see is this black bear. That is a bipedal bear. Walking on its hind legs. Walking across the street. Like a human. Oh my God.

Wait, that's the bear? That's the bear. So the bear is just straight up walking on two feet. You could totally be like a kid in a bear suit. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, the first time I saw it, I was like, that is what my dad looks like when he stumbles out of the hallway

in the middle of the night without. his glasses on, but still motoring. Yeah, it's motoring and also sort of puttering, but puttering with purpose. Okay, so Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg. Oh, yeah, okay, so Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg's filming this whole thing. Yeah, I'm over in the front yard of my house watching this walking bear. That's when I see him walk up my neighbor's driveway into the street. Walking towards me, I am walking backwards.

Then the bear, so the bear ends up crossing the street over into another neighborhood. neighbor's front yard. Let's walking through the front yard right now. And somewhere off camera, you hear their neighbor. Does she know that's a bear? You know that's a bear, right? The video lasts for about three minutes. And then Greg stops recording.

So we got the video. We watch it go through the woods and stuff. I go inside. I start giving the kids baths and stuff. And I just take it. I want to share it with some people. So I throw it on YouTube, you know, and a half hour later after it uploads, I go and send out a couple emails. To like some friends and family just be like, hey, I saw this weird wild bear walking, like check it out.

And that's it. Go to bed. And then the next day, Greg, checks his phone. And I start seeing my emails popping up again and again and again and again. And it's people from viral media companies. It's family members. Somebody put it on Facebook and it was spreading on Facebook. And I was blown away.

Why? But then, all these other people start putting up videos. It's like... Because this bear is being spotted all over town. Some of the videos are, like, of the bear. Awesome. Coming out at, like, nighttime or, like, walking in or out of the woods.

I think he walks better than you, Don. But there's also videos of this bear just, like, strolling down neighborhood streets, popping his head into garbage cans. Going through people's backyards. It was like... Underneath this woman's deck. It was amazing.

He would come, like, right there. You know, right there. And the two of them were like 20 feet away. He looked up at me. They made eye contact. Then the bear kept strolling. Um, there's a pear tree over there. Showed up across the street from this woman's house.

And we saw him one time there getting the pairs out of the tree. It was great to see him, you know, because he's so famous. This bear is amazing, everyone. He walks on two legs. Eventually, folks in town give him the name, Pedals. Petals from the word bipedal. He hit, like, Good Morning America. funny tonight walking tall.

And like all the national news. A black bear walking on his hind legs. He walks on his hind legs. With the agility and ease of any human. Completely upright like a human. And everybody's just kind of like, oh my gosh. Like what a fun, cute, adorable animal doing something that looks like a human. That's so fun.

Well, sort of everyone. Which is where we get to Lisa. Hi, I'm Rachel. Hi. Sneaker tag. So basically, we heard about Lisa. She was, like, a big player in this whole, like, love affair with pedals. So we go inside.

We sit down under dining room table. Okay. Like, where, when did you first learn of the bear? I don't remember the exact date. And I even have a hard time with years. But I think it was in 2014 that she was on Facebook. I saw a post about this bear, and he was in a video walking by. And I was like, oh, my.

Oh my god, this is so sad. Like, you didn't think it was, like, funnier. No, I thought it was sad. Why does the video make her sad? Well, so Lisa actually works in animal rescue, and she explained that, you know, so rather than being like... Just in awe of it, like, whoa.

For her, when she watched the video, what she saw was a bear that was injured. Yeah. So the thing is that if you look at some screenshots of petals, close up, you'll see he really had no hands. One was, like, amputated. It was like a stub. bit was like pretty much missing.

And the other one was just broken. Mangled. And Lisa said that's why... He walked on his hind legs. I mean, I'm sure he ate whatever berries or whatever he could get. But Lisa said it was probably because he couldn't use his paws is why he was walking around these neighborhoods. Because he was starving and he couldn't beat himself. So her first thought was...

We have to help this bear. So she gets in touch with a couple of women. They start a go-fund-me campaign. Help save pedals. Raised 25,000. $1,000 in like four days. To basically dart him. Transport him and house him at this place called the Wildlife Orphanage.

There's a couple other wild bears there. A couple of tame, like retired circus bears, if you will. There's a pond, a lot of trees. And it's private. You know, it's not a zoo. So the very last thing they had to do was petition the state of New Jersey to just, you know, like, do it. Because that's against the law for us to just dart a bear and put him in a truck and take them. So they get this petition going and ends up going like around the world.

Like 400,000 signatures. 400,000? Yeah. They send it off to the state. We're all ready to go. Everything was in place. And the state says, No.

We're not doing that. Really? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Why? Well, so I got in touch with the press people at NJDP, which is like the Environmental Department of New Jersey. And basically they said, we have no interest in commenting on this.

Why would they not even comment? Well, I think you can, understand that if you know the rest of the story of pedals. Yeah, there's a lot more to this story. Don't, done, don't know. All right. Let's hear the rest then. Okay, well, so what you basically have is you have a collision of two ideas about

black bears and what they are and what they need. Okay, so that's John Muellum. I'm a writer at large with the New York Times magazine. Long time pedals fan. Yeah, I'm more, I knew more about his earlier work, like before he got famous. He's written a lot about animals, including pedals. And John explained to us that what you had was this divide, where on the one side you had people like Lisa who, when they looked at the bear, they thought that the bear needed help. It's injured.

Seems to be struggling. We got to get it out there. But on the other side, you have the state of New Jersey. And they came at it from a completely different viewpoint where they were just as interested in quote unquote helping the bear and making sure the bear could, you know, live its, I don't know, best life, I suppose you'd say. But they wanted to go about it in a very different way. As far as they were concerned, it was a wild animal, and you don't take a wild animal out of the wild unless absolutely necessary.

And the fact that you saw this bear walking on two legs. They basically saw the bipedal bear as a real survivor. This is like a feat of evolution. Like this bear evolved to survive. We should just let him do his thing. It was still out there being a bear. So we're going to leave the bear there there. It's the right thing to do.

So this is the part of the story about pedals that we haven't told you yet. So Peddles was first found in 2014, first showed up. Yeah, showed up again the next summer. Showed up in 2016. Yeah, even early 2016, there were videos of pedals and then nothing. And then... A bear that had become a national sensation is dead. The bear known as pedals.

So in October of 2016, news broke that pedals. had been killed. Was killed during a bear hunt on Monday. We told you about the annual bear hunt that takes place in New Jersey. And pretty quick, a familiar story played out. Growing outrageous morning over the apparent killing of a famed black bear. There was anger, protests. Death threats against whoever may have killed the bear.

His fucking pick piece of shit. Death threats against an innocent hunter. Against himself, his family. People have actually threatened to burn down his business. People posted photos of his home. His wife's name. and in the midst of all of this. I think everybody out there should be going after the state of New Jersey.

People were angry at the state. The state of New Jersey did nothing about the bear. Where was the DEP when people reported this bear being injured for years? This is their fault. Where were they then? That was so rough. I had my moment, you know. But people sent me bear things.

You know, like I have like the little, see the bear on top of, with a radio and Sabrina got me a picture that looks just like petals from an beautiful artist that doesn't even know pedals but made this picture of a bear that looks just like them and it's just cool and so she gave me one of those you know it's just nice people thought you know they saw how hard we fought yeah yeah but the book is the best it really is and what's the writer's name john mollum yeah i talked to him he was nice he's a really nice guy I remember being like, you want a what? So John actually wrote an obituary for pedals.

Do you have a copy of the magazine? That's cool. That's just look really quick. It was for the New York Times Magazine's annual Lives They Lived issue. Damn. You got it? I just thought, you know, the way I've always, you know, I've always thought of like the lives they lived.

There's the Bowie picture. You know, it's about these people's lives. So many people. But it's also just. an interesting way to talk about the world that we live in. Janet Reno. Pedals the bear. There's pedals.

One reason why I find conversations about animals so interesting is because the animals always have no comment, right? You basically have groups of human beings. Oh, they're pedals. Standing around this. She's like a little screenshot object. Pedal standing. Yeah.

Trying to figure out what to do with it. Walking towards a mailbox, just fetching the mail. Yeah, and this is actually the picture that I used on his hour version of like rest in peace pedals. For like a memorial page. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, do you want me to, I felt like, do you want me just to read the end of the piece? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd be great.

Okay. It was impossible to know the circumstances whether the hunter knew the bear's identity before he or she fired, whether pedals who did spend some time on all fours had been distinguishable from an ordinary bear, whether he had been standing upright in the wilderness looking preposterous and conspicuous and conspicuously like himself. That is, the bear's posture,

the very proof of his resilience, might have marked him for death. It was never clear what we owed petals, exactly. You could argue that allowing petals to live in the woods and be hunted, like any other bear, was an act of respect, a validation of his wildness. You could also argue that it was a gruesome lapse

of human compassion. Pedals stood for something. We may never agree what it was. So wait, do you guys even have, did you, there wasn't a clip in there. You didn't use a clip from the movie. Do you have a clip from the movie? Well, a matter of fact, we do. Yeah, we got a clip.

Where did you send that thing again? It's in the Cilaxic. All right, okay, I found it. We call, uh, on your stupid rules. I play it again. Full shit. And yet in doing.

doing so you followed it. That's right. That's the beauty of it. Yeah. All right, you know what we're going to do? We're going to take a little break. We're going to clear the air. We're going to come back with a couple of producers who have a little bit more respect for the rules.

More in a moment. Hi, this is Jason Studstill calling from Seattle, Washington. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. sloan.org Chad, Robert, Radio Lab. Breaking bad news, bears,

and we've had three bear stories so far, and maybe, you know, maybe this is the moment when I should admit that everybody broke for bears. Yeah, that was, I could see that coming. You know, really,

if you had the choice, you know, and you woke up in the morning full of Vim, vigor, and excitement, would you do the hard news or would you right away? And these days,

would you do the bad news? It's really true. What I was hoping, actually, was that, I mean, admittedly, Molly and Simons had a little bit of, like, the hurricane had just come in. But what I was really hoping

was that somebody was going to get a solid, rock solid, breaking news about bears kind of thing. And I actually had one in my sights that I was just sitting on waiting to see if anybody got it. So something that the Trump administration did, though most people don't know,

actually the seeds of it were planted during the Obama administration was that the grizzly bear came off the endangered species. They were delisted. And in the wake of that, there was about to be, for the first time,

in almost 50 years, a hunt, around Yellowstone, because the grizzlies have gone from, like, you know, whatever was a hundred left to now around 700. They've also started encroaching on hikers, campers, hunters, and ranchers. And so the idea is that once you delist them, which should be a success, hey, they came back, we can delist them now. But also at the same time, that means that we can start. Call them or shoot them. Yeah, so the ranchers are geared up to get their licenses and head out there and have this hunt.

And at the last moment, there was a court case, and a judge said, no, no. not time to do the hunt. And that happened a couple weeks ago. That was just at hunting season. It was the days before the hunt or whatever it was. And what was the reasoning from the judge? I mean, I think clearly, like, some activists had come to them and said, they're not yet ready.

This will damage the population. And so, yeah, the judge had kind of like that maybe that the administration hadn't shown enough recovery to warrant hunting. And but that then just two days ago, that ruling got sort of like either confirmed or upheld or whatever it is. And now that functionally actually means that the grizzly is not delisted, that it is still on the endangered species list. And there's even some among bear concerned folk that you talk to, they're not quite sure what to think. Because if you're going to have an endangered species list, you need to occasionally have an animal come off of it.

Yeah, you need a win. Otherwise, you just lose the political will to even do it. Or you just show that doing it is pointless and you're going to lose them eventually. Every once to get on, you never get off. Right. No, you need someone to get off. And I guess, you know, you could probably go back and forth for a lot about whether it's time for the Yellowstone Grizzlies to be off or not. But yeah, so nobody got to that. But still, we have one more story.

And it comes from Annie McEwen and Lothaughnasser. Of course, it's about bears. I think in some ways both. Both. Really? Yeah. This is another. Yes, Lauren.

It's not breaking news in the sense that it's recent, but it's breaking news and that we're saying stuff that is true about the world that has. has not been reported before. Oh, so it's breaking news about bears. Yeah. I think so. Okay. Where do you start? We start in the far north, in the Arctic islands in Canada,

the coldest, wintriest place you can imagine. With an Inuit hunter named David Kuptana. I was born in Lukahto in April 1359. And I live in the smart community of 400-something people, and everybody knows everybody pretty well-related. Anyway, he told us this story of a hunt that he was on that was unlike any hunt he had ever been on before where he caught a bear that was unlike any bear he had ever seen before.

Wow. What happened? April 2010. Me and my wife were going hunting bear. It was a nice morning. It's soft snow on top, nice weather. He and his wife set out on their school. What's a skadoo?

What's a skadoo? Skadoo is a snowmobile. It's just what they're called up there. Yeah, just sort of like the snow machines that you can... This is a mechanical device. Yeah. They hop on their skadoos. They head out across the sea ice.

And they're heading towards this island that they're playing in camping in this empty cabin. And we got to the cabin and we're going to camp there, but the cabin was damaged by some bears. Wow, they knew that immediately. Yes. And then they decided, let's go back to another cabin. After we had tea and fuel up and everything, we started heading back. about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. And as we were following the coast, getting close to a cabin, there was a hill, and I could see some tracks coming down, down to the cabins.

Fresh bear tracks around this cabin. They were not there before, Henry were going forward, and when were coming back, they were there. And as they approach it, they see that this cabin has also been ransacked. The bear has gone in... Pull out a mattress. She broke the window. Okay, well, we'll continue on. And it ran into another cabin.

So this is a third cabin they pass? Wow. Broke the door open, made a mess inside. Is it normal for a polar bear to go into cabins and throw mattresses out? No, no. Polar bears don't really do that. So we started tracking it again. We could see the tracks all the way. And at this point, they start getting a little worried.

Because these tracks... It was coming towards the communities, to Lukukhok Dok. So we started going faster. A fourth cabin ransacked and a fifth. Jesus. also been through, and right next to the fifth, there is a sixth cabin. I noticed it was not open, so I better not to get too close to this cabin. Oh, so this is presumably the next destination for the bear?

Right. So I went a little further and started going around it, and sure enough, this bear was hiding behind the cabin. He had his head stick out, he shook his body, and he started running. So I started chasing it. They got kind of close to it. I stopped my skis. I ran for my rifle on the slits.

Back of my hair was just like it was standing up, you know? And why were you afraid? I don't know. I just never run into that kind of bear before. He was used to polar bears, but this bear, he just had this feeling that it was different. Something was off. Then I take a shot at it. I hit it.

He kills the bear. He does. Okay. And then we went to it. they approach it on their skidooes, they get off. This bear looks strange. It's a blonde bear. I just thought it was just an ordinary grizzly bear

because I never once catch a grizzly bear before, and that was my first time. And the legs are dirt, so it's just like it got boots on it or socks or whatever. It also has dark circles around its eyes. Wow. Interesting. So he takes it back to town,

and he checks in with this. government officer, and this guy takes a look at it, and he's like, David, I think this might not be a polar bear, it might not be a grizzly bear. It might be a hybrid bear. A hybrid bear? Yeah. Like, a little bit of both? A little bit of both.

And David had never even heard of that before. I have never actually heard of that. It's not a common thing that happens. But a few years before David's bear... An extremely rare creature is shot and killed in the Canadian Arctic. The first one ever was caught in the wild. Have you ever heard of a grower? A grisly polar bear hybrid.

And the media, Grizzly bears. David Attenborough included, the results of polar bears and brown bears into breeding, got really excited about it. So we've known for a while that it's happening out there. Wow. And even David has encountered a few more out there in the wild.

I run into a mother polar bear with two little teddy bear cups with a hybrid. So cute. So this is some kind of crossbreeding between these two species. But the crazy twist was when this guy, David, Kuktana shot this thing. This particular Pizzley bear, he sent it off for genetic testing. They told me it's called

the first, second generation bear. The mother was half polar bear, half grizzly, and the father was a full grizzly. This bear that David shot is the first indication that these bears are fertile. No way.

Which is something that you wouldn't think if a horse and a donkey, say, would breed. Together make a mule. those mules can't then have offspring. Wait, wait, I thought that two different species, because you're different species, right? These are different species. They branch off evolutionarily like hundreds of thousands of years ago. Pretty much the same time that we broke off from the Neanderthals.

And so it would be like us meeting a Neanderthal out in the, you know, the Crown Heights Bar or something, and going home with that person and creating an office. This is really specific. It sounds like you've had. Franklin Ave, April 10th, call me. Wait, wait, wow. So they branch, so the Polos and the Grizzlies branched at the same time as us and the Neanderthals. Around, the ballpark.

I mean, all these are ranges. Okay. And that just goes to show how far apart they actually are. Wow. So, okay, so I thought that that's not, that doesn't work. Well, it kind of shouldn't work. But wildlife manager Marsha Branigan says, it sort of does.

That's kind of against the biological terminology that we use for species. Oh, they're breaking the rules. Yeah, they're breaking the rules. But, hey, the rules we made, right? The number of polar and grizzly bear hybrids has been growing over the last few years. It's evolution and action. We're seeing it take place before our eyes.

The roller bear might not be considered a rare creature for too long. And the sort of general idea about this whole new species is that it's linked to the changing climate. Because now these two species are overlapping. Hotter temperatures are moving Alaska and Canada's grizzly bears north, while polar bears are losing much of their ice and spending more time on land. So, for instance, polar bears have hair covering the bottom of their feet. Grizzly bears do not.

They have pads. They have pads, yeah. But then the grower bears has, like, partial hair covering. So, like, maybe you get the best of both worlds. You can, you know, grip or whatever, but also you're warm. You're warm. Oh, so it's a good. thing to be one of these half-frey hybrid vigor best of both worlds kind of thing this is the new

bear in town yeah so busy bears are not bizarre frankenstein-like creatures they're valuable new hybrids that may become increasingly common so that's that's kind of like and that's the story we got interested in and that's the story that has been reported but then last year this paper came out and it kind of completely changes the story Are we at the place where the bears become breaking news? Yes, this is it. I actually think it's even more interesting than that first story. It's way, way weirder.

It could more dramatically play out like on an HBO miniseries. Yes. Okay, lay it on me. So last year a paper came out. And that scientist we talked to you, Marsha Branigan, is one of its co-authors. And what they did is they basically made a big giant list of every sighting of a hybrid bear and of all the genetic analysis of like every time we've seen this happen in the wild

and all the information we could possibly glean from that. And what she found was that every single one of these hybrids can be traced back to one female polar bear. One single bear. Really? Named bear 10960. Only a scientist would name a bear that. What?

She is literally the mother of all hybrid bears in the wild. Wow. So there's something about this polar bear that seemed to attract grizzly gentlemen? Or she was just interested in grizzly gentlemen. Whoa. We mostly just have kind of guesses of how it went down since there were no witnesses. This is Elisa McCall. She's staff scientist at Polar Bears International.

But what we think could have happened is that there was this female polar bear and maybe she did have some, you know, interesting personal preference for brown bears or maybe it was simply that she was an estrus and a male grizzly bear. Yeah, she was basically in heat. So she's giving off a scent that she wants to mate. Okay. They leave these stinky foot trails. And so males will follow them on the ice. What do those smell like? Oh my gosh. You know, I've never smelled them. But I know to a male polar bear, they smell good. Really? That's all I know. But as the female puts down these smelly footprints, the males are like, oh yeah. And they'll follow her for, you know, days. And it's cute. They'll actually put their feet.

right in the footprints as they follow her. Oh, no way. Yeah, so maybe there was just this really aggressive brown bear, grizzly bear male who followed the female tracks and could have fought off other polar bear males. Maybe this is a case of like non-consensual. But if you look at sort of like the genetic analysis, it looks like... She's made it with two different grizzly bears. She had babies with two different grizzly bears, and with one of them she had babies, she had babies

years apart. Oh, so she's had three litters with two different grizzly bears. Interesting. And all the offspring are from those three non-hybrid bears. So this is narrowing in scope really quickly. Yeah, it's not like, oh, this is this, yeah, this like species-wide, you know, new adaptation. It's just like, here's this one lady who has this one kink. We had strange taste in men, I guess. But. Right. It also, there is a possibility that it's like, Those were just the only dudes around. But I was thinking like, oh, my God, maybe this bear is a genius. And she's seeing this, like, ice change around her.

And she's saying, like, I need to save my DNA. And the best way to do it is to put it with a grizzly because they're doing better than I am. That's hilarious. I mean, yeah, imagine that bears thought that way. That would be pretty good. Unfortunately, the hybrids were kind of a mess, to be honest. They weren't really well-suited for land or for ice. They were such an in-between bear.

that they really just weren't that fit. Grizzly bears are so well adapted to life on land and finding food. They've got the big hump, they've got the big white head, they've got these long claws for digging. They don't have fur on the pads of their feet because they don't need it. Polar bears are so well adapted for the ice. They've got a much smoother, sleaker head that helps them get in and out of seal holes. They've got thicker claws to grab seals and help them walk on the ice. Their fur is hollow, which helps trap warm air.

against their bodies. And the hybrid, they're like this weird in-between. So their head is kind of like not really sleek but not really boxy, kind of this weird in between. They don't really blend in that well with the ice or with the land because they're kind of this creamy color. Right. And then their fur itself is, depending on where the fur is on the body, is like a mix of hollow but not hollow. So, yeah, it backfired on her if that was her original thought. But I like that idea.

So these Pizzley bears are just probably not the new horizon of the bear that will be. And actually, on top of that. So, okay, so if you're imagining the family tree, right, so there's a mama polar bear with these two grizzly bears at different times, right? So there's, let's say the dad and the stepdad. One of the kids, a daughter, and she's the only one who's had kids herself, so the third generation came from her. But it turns out that all those third-generation bears, including the bear that David Kuttona shot, that bear, the daughter bear. She made it with her father. Wait.

There's some sort of incest part to this? Yeah. That's so weird. And not only one, but she also made it with the other bear that's kind of like dated the stepdad sort of thing? Yeah, sort of. Yeah. She slept with the same two dudes that her mom did. Oh, my gosh.

Whoa. Now we're going from HBO to like Shakespeare. Yeah. Or like Greek tragedy or something. That's a weird family tree. So now all of a sudden it looks less like a species wide movement for Life Will Find a Way. And it looks a little more like this is one crazy intra-bred family. Wow.

So what do you make of that? Maybe this one like crazy inbred family is the first, you know, quite awkward attempt at what may become like, you know, might be like evolution. striving forward, making shaky step after shaky step. Because nature is raunchy. It's not, like, pretty the way you expected. It's raunchy because sex, like, animals try things. It's like this could, maybe this is going to keep going, but only time will tell.

There's no way for us to know. And one last thing, which is kind of an afterthought, but maybe not. because while it's not clear whether our polar bear family is an awkward evolutionary step forward or just plain freaky, what we do know is that nature is not exactly shy when it comes to being sexually creative. Is this seventh ab? Yes. So it turns out at the Museum of Sex, they have this exhibit called the Sex Lives of Animals. And my brother was coming into town. People aren't shy with the horns.

And we thought incest is on theme, so let's send both of them. I'm glad you went there because my mind went there, and I was like, whoa. It's funny. I sort of organized this before I learned about the incest thing, but just so you know, but then it just made it all that more uncomfortable. But anyway. Okay, let's go in. He also didn't know about any of this going in, so poor guy, yeah.

How are we here? Really? But we got into that room, and a very nice woman named Stephanie Spicer showed us around, And we learned just like nature is trying some crazy stuff. Give me like a list of... Dolphins have sex through their blowholes. Whoa. I guess why not?

Tortoises have a crazy tongue penis. Whoa! That comes out of nowhere. It looks like something from alien. Ducks have sex with each other while they're dead somehow. Oh, wow. Deer have threesomes. There's all kinds of butt stuff.

What is that? I don't know if I want to get into it. And actually, at one point, we were sort of surrounded by clitoris and other things. I am starting to feel like I've been in here a while. I'm feeling a little queasy. And then we're like, they need like an abstinence room for brother-sisters. Just like, we just need a minute. Can we have a minute?

Just where's the celibate space? And then we got free passes to the booby bouncy castle. And I was like, Jimmy, got to do it. And so we did it. And he's like, okay. I actually sent pictures to my parents. And they're just like, what is happening? Come back to Canada right away.

Yeah, like, this is too much. But I have a real... That's wonderful. That's how you end a bear show right there. Every bear show ends in a sex museum, I think. I did not see that coming. Anime Q and Latif Nasser. Andy's brother, Jim? Is it Jim?

Yes. Jim. Real quick, special thanks. Thanks to Wendy Carr. And thanks also to composer Anthony Plogue and the fourth movement from his fantasy movements, titled Very Fast and Manic, performed by the Euphonics Tuva, euphonium quartet off their album titled Nuclear Breakfast, available from Potenza Music.

And Stephanie Spicer at the Museum of Sex and also, of course, Bear 10960. And thank you, Sean, for having thrown this whole idea into the hopper and come out with what we came out with. It was kind of crazy. Yeah. Yeah, for real. Okay, we should go. Yeah, I'm hibernate. You go hibernate. We'll say goodbye. I'm Chad I boomrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. Sorry. And I'm Soren Wheeler. Thanks for listening. To play the message, press 2. Start of message. End of message.