The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 055: Bozeman, Montana. Steven Rinella talks with bear biologist Frank VanManen along with Janis Putelis and Nicole Qualtieri from the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: February 9, 2017

Subjects discussed: Bear DNA; bear denning behaviors; why Steve thinks the naming of 'The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem' was a mistake; Sloth bears; Andean bears; Panda bears; tricks for uncovering a journalist's biases; closing garbage dumps to save grizzly bears; super cougars; bear population size estimating methods, including Chao 2 and mark-resight; bear populations in Europe; Kate Kendall's research on grizzly bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem; getting hosed by bear spray; genetic connectivity; bucket biologists; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, our guest is Frank. Tell us your last name.

Van Manen. Van Manen. us your last name. Van Manen. Van Manen. Or Von Manen. Von Manen. Whatever you prefer. I was surprised when you walked in. You weren't born in the U.S. I wasn't born in the U.S., no.

I am a U.S. citizen. You became a grizzly bear biologist. Or a bear biologist, yeah. Bears in general. I came to the U.S. in 1988. Do you remember how old you were when you saw your first bear? When I saw my first bear? I was about 25, probably.

Yeah. So at what age did you get into wildlife biology? Did you get that back home? Yeah. So I did a master's in biology at the university in the Netherlands, at the Agricultural University. Studlands at the agriculture university and studying what like what were you looking at there um well in the beginning it was actually a combined bachelor's master so it in the beginning was kind of undetermined and and towards the end um i i got

really interested in in doing an internship on a large carnivore because there weren't any in in the netherlands you know there's no wolves there's there were no bears or anything like it the largest carnivore we had there was a was a red fox not that they'd been extirpated but they weren't there in the first place uh no they were extirpated okay brown bears were extirpated there probably more than a thousand years ago i see um and wolves i don't know exactly but that that had been quite a while as well. And interestingly, wolves are now gradually returning to Western Europe. There have been a few sightings of wolves now in the Netherlands. How are they received there? Open arms?

Is it controversial there as well? Not yet, but I think it's because it's just been a sighting or two. They haven't dusted off someone's lamb yet. Exactly. And once that starts happening, it might change. But so far, it's mostly excitement, actually. It's amazing that in a place like the Netherlands, it's 16 million people in a country this size. That's one-ninth of the state of Montana. Really?

Do the math. It's pretty amazing that you still wow and wolves there so you started looking at large carnivores in what but not in the Netherlands yeah so there were people were working on brown bears and what at the time was still Yugoslavia and then in Spain and so I was trying to get in on some of those projects the timing just didn't work out but I did through through those contacts that I made with those projects I was trying to get in on some of those projects. The timing just didn't work out, but I did through those contacts that I made with those projects, I was able to get an internship at the University of Tennessee with Dr. Mike Pelton, who was a well-known black bear biologist in the Eastern US. And so that's really where I got started with my-

What were you guys looking at with black bears? Well, a lot of different things, primarily population dynamics. So population changes and trend over time, looking at denning behavior, which was really interesting over there because most of the black bears, they are denning high up in hollow trees. And so I did a lot of tree climbing in those days. Yeah, what's high up in hollow trees. And so I did a lot of tree climbing in those days. Yeah, what's high up in a tree? Well, the highest one that we ever measured was about 110 feet up in a tree.

Oh, so not in hollow trees. Yeah. In the canopy. No, in hollow trees. How the hell has he got a hollow big enough to hold a blackberry 110 feet in the air? Well, in the Smokies, you still have some areas with old growth. What kind of tree was he in?

Well, I think that was actually a – I'm trying to remember. That might have been a tulip poplar. And there was a hollow big enough for that thing to climb into. Tulip poplars, some white oaks, chestnut oaks, those were the most common trees. Now, are they up there to avoid predation, or are they up there for some other reason? Not so much to avoid predation, I think, but certainly to avoid disturbance. No better place to be than high up in a tree to avoid disturbance. No one's going to stumble across you.

Heck no. And so we would climb up. We'd set up a climbing rope, which was pretty tricky most of the time. And then we'd get up to the entrance of the den. And most of the time it was just a hollow. So it's a cavity into a hollow part of the tree that was established years ago from a big branch breaking off, so a windbreak or a lightning strike, something like that, would over time, over 50 to 100 years, could create this big hollow compartment

where bears would just basically hibernate for the winter. You could reach in there and touch them, right? Yes. In some cases, they were that close. In other cases, especially with chestnut oaks, you would go up 45, 50 feet up in the tree, and you'd look down 45 feet, and the bear was all the way down at the bottom. It was hollowed out all the way to the bottom,

and the bear would actually be resting basically at the bottom of the tree. But the only way to get there is to climb up in the tree first. So really amazing experiences to see where those bears end up. Now, you grew up using the metric system and you still use it in your discipline, but you don't mind conversing to Americans in standard?

Yeah. You got to learn that? That's like a professional skill? That's right. It took a while. Because when you publish work, you publish... That's like a professional skill. That's right. It took a while. Because when you publish work, you publish. It's all metric. So you just do standard just to talk to people so they know what you're talking about.

Try to. Yeah. I mean, that's important. I don't have all the stats necessarily in the English system. But yeah, that's something you pick up on. You know what someone told me once, and then someone told me it's not true. Would you find that those cavities,

that they would take a year off between using those cavities, that the cavities would sit empty a year and then the bear would come back? Or is that not true? They wouldn't necessarily come back to the same cavity. That was actually pretty rare. We only saw about 5% to 15% reuse of the same cavities.

Well, how the hell did they find them in the cavities? Well, you know, they spend a lot of time in trees. So they're up in trees eating grapes or acorns even before they drop on the ground. So they're up and eating other fruits. So they're up in the trees a lot. And my guess is that as they spend a lot of time in trees, they will remember places where there's a cavity. They saw one.

They know their habitat like we know our house. It's something that I think that we underestimate the capability of these animals. Their spatial awareness. Yes, total. They know every square inch of their home range. And then the females, they would drop their litters up in the cavities. Exactly, yeah. So for those cubs, it's an incredibly safe place to be born.

Do they lose – that cub could probably withstand a little bit of a fall, but it's got to be dangerous getting be born. Do they lose? That cub could probably withstand a little bit of a fall, but it's got to be dangerous getting them back down out of there. Yeah, and so we've seen them come out, and it's pretty amazing. I mean, sometimes in April or so when they came out, you would see them climb down this huge tree and these tiny little cubs, but their claws are amazing. So when we would do these den visits, if we had an opportunity to do it safely,

we would immobilize the female and examine that. That would give us a chance to examine the cubs and all that. And when you take those cubs out, I mean, their claws are like Velcro. They just stick to you. Oh, really? Yeah, like a little kitten or something yeah yeah so so it it gave them enough uh traction on the bark of the tree to to get down the tree and it's it's pretty amazing to see that how how well equipped they are right from from that age you know when they when they first come out of the den to uh to spend a

lot of time in trees that's that's their their safety place yeah so is there a for a bear guy like you're a bear guy right like you you focus on bears yeah totally is there a journal you guys use like is there like a journal called like ursus or something there is the world's bears that's what i thought i thought i remember seeing something like that so what other what other species of bears around the world did you look at before you got focused on grizzlies um so between my you know so when i first started on black bears i spent quite a bit of number of years on working on black bears and eventually got involved with some international work um with researchers in

other countries so uh in sri lanka for example i worked with with a researcher there who was working on the sloth bears that was a really interesting project i've worked with a researcher there who was working on sloth bears. That was a really interesting project. I've worked with China. And then you were doing population work on those as well. Population work, also a lot of habitat work, habitat analyses, home range sizes and things like that. Because there was so little known about, there's nothing known really about sloth bears in Sri Lanka. Are they stable or are they in decline? Well, they're still holding on pretty well right now.

Interestingly enough, there used to be a civil war there and in a way that was good for sloth bears because the rebel, the Tamil Tigers is the group that basically had a conflict with the national government. And so the Tamil Tigers controlled a lot of the area where sloth bears still existed. And they would not allow people to go into those areas with guns and such.

So it actually, sadly enough, that the war actually created, in some ways, a protection for those populations. So is there a bushmeat market there? Or are people hunting for parts for the Asiatic trade and aphrodisiacs, or what? It's most of, like, what happens a lot is there's people going out, sometimes illegally into national parks,

going out for honey. But in the process, sometimes they are attacked by sloth bears because sloth bears tend to be relatively aggressive. And so when that happens, a lot of times those bears end up getting killed. So it's not necessarily for meat or anything. There's really no poaching problem per se. It's just conflict that that leads to mortalities of those bears and and now probably illegal logging does that tie into

the habitat loss and stuff or is that not an issue for them um not so much the bigger issue right now is now that there is a peace agreement people are moving back into those areas you know because they avoided the areas of conflict of course now they're moving back and those areas because they avoided the areas of conflict, of course. Now they're moving back and moving into sloth bear habitats. So that is probably going to have a potentially lasting effect on populations there. So we'll have to see how that pans out in the future. And then have you done work with the bears in South America? Yes.

They're called sun bears, right? Those are Andean bears. Andean bears. Where's the sun bear from? Sun bear is mostly in Southeast Asia, so Malaysia, Indonesia. So the Andean bear is the South American bear. That's the only South American bear. And kind of a relatively primitive bear species if you look at it evolutionarily.

They're quite old same with with giant panda is also an old bear species of the current uh the you know the currently the eight species that that we have in the world um and it's when you say old meaning that like the animal hasn't changed much over a long period of time? Well, old in the sense that it stems from an older evolutionary lineage. So brown bears and polar bears are the most modern bears, so to speak, in that sense. Polar bear being the newest, right? Exactly, yeah. And so the giant panda and the Andean bear are the older bear lineages, so to speak. And so, yeah, Andean bears was a really interesting species to work on.

They occur in some of the really high elevation areas in the Andean mountains. Like an alpine species? Yeah, they cover quite an elevational range actually. So some of the work is in these areas called paramo, which basically means no trees. So these open areas in elevations, over 14,000 feet or so. And they feed primarily on bromeliads.

So they consume the tissue that's at the bottom of the leaves, that tissue that has a lot of sugars in it. And so they will rip open these big bromeliads and eat the base of those leaves. It's really neat how uh how they've adapted to that and do they mix it up with people or is they are they pretty docile um they they they're fairly you know for for in terms of calling any bear species docile you know it's yeah they're they're pretty uh they're pretty easygoing. They're not very aggressive species.

They occasionally kill cattle, but there's really not a large number of conflicts between people and engine bears necessarily. Do panda bears ever kill people? Is that known to happen? To my knowledge, I'm not sure. They have no reason to kill livestock or anything, right? No, no, no um you know panda bears are you know they're bivers right yeah i mean they they almost all of their diet

is is bamboo so um yeah of course very unique so they can still can they move fast or not move fast uh they can um but but their home ranges tend to be relatively small. Their movements tend to be relatively small too. They kind of basically set up shop in a good bamboo patch and basically wear it out and move on to the next patch. That's their

typical mode of operation. Almost like the way a porcupine uses his landscape. Move on when the resources are getting to the point where you're just not efficient anymore. So then you did all that. Now, how did it come to be that you were – okay, I guess now at this point, explain your job now, your title now. So I'm currently – my official title with the USGS is I'm a supervisory wildlife, no, what is it? Research wildlife biologist.

With the interagency. Yeah, so I'm the team leader of the interagency grizzly bear study team. And by interagency, that means US Geological Survey. Yeah. Who do you work for,gs usgs so eight different entities all together so the usgs fish and wildlife service national park service force service and then the three state agencies for montana wyoming and idaho and then we also work with the tribal agencies of the northern arapaho and the Eastern Shoshone tribes.

And the only thing under your purview then is the grizzly bears in the greater Yellowstone area. That's correct, yeah. So this team was established back in 1973. So we've got a long history, more than four decades. What year did they get listed? Two years, it was 75 75 yeah and uh and so we were actually in existence before the the official listing of of uh grizzly bears in the

lower 48s under the endangered species act i read the the the the interagency group now i guess we should explain too so you're not involved in policy no that's involved in pure research correct giving information providing accurate non presumably non-biased information to policymakers to inform their decision making and you guys got started though right i think i feel like i read this you guys got started with involved just like closing dumps that's right right. That was sort of a strange, somewhat, you know, like a not very hot-button topic I'm imagining at the time. It was like the closing of dumps for attracting bears in the park or something, right? Yeah, so there were open-pit garbage dumps throughout the Yellowstone ecosystem,

including Yellowstone National Park. Which is where people used to do their bear viewing. That's right. Yeah, I mean, they literally had what they call bear counters, where bears would just be fed the garbage from the hotels. And then people would, they would have basically a gallery for people to sit and watch these bears feed on their lunch counter. And so

the National Park Service had done some, had asked for some reports, and there's this famous Leopold report that determined that they made a recommendation that the Park Service move to

a more natural management of wildlife in general. Leopold Report, not Aldo. No, Starker. Starker. Yeah. I'd say that was after his time, well after his time. Right. But made a report that...

That changed policies in the national parks in terms of their management and taking a more natural management approach to all wildlife management, including bears. And so I think Yellowstone has been on the forefront of that right from the beginning. And so – Yeah, I don't think enough people realize some of the things about Yellowstone. Like people who don't have a deep background in wildlife

and wildlife management, wildlife politics, they kind of like to think of Yellowstone as this sort of thing that's always existed in this static form. Right, yeah. Well, they don't realize that like all the buffalo or all the bison that are in Yellowstone used to be in a fence and were fed hay and straw. Exactly.

You know, that the bear viewing was like you said fed bears basically you watch you would observe bait stations yeah you know but people have this image of it as like this is like the the pristine area where we all we get to watch everything play out in its natural form you know without realizing what a sort of conscious like that there that there was a conscious act to create this exactly you know i mean it doesn't mean? It doesn't exist just because it's been hands-off. It exists because people have pursued a sort of vision there. Right. Yeah.

And management in the parks has always been pretty heavy. And in some cases, there's really no way around that. I think managers will have to be pretty heavy-handed in some instances, in some small parks, for example. Yeah. And in this way, management has kind of come down to almost non-management, but making decisions to do these things. Yeah, exactly. Because even if you decide not to do something, you could still call that a management decision. Yeah.

So they got rid of the bait stations? Or what are the launch counters? The open pit garbage dumps, yeah. Was there resistance to that from park visitors who wanted to see bears right now? Yeah, so there was resistance from visitors that were worried that they wouldn't be able to see bears anymore. And there was resistance at that time from the two prominent researchers on grizzly bears in Yellowstone. Why did they have a problem?

John and Frank Craig had, of course. Oh. The pioneers of bear research. But what was their concern? That they wouldn't be able to find their bears very easily anymore? No, their concern was that, so the park service proposed to close the dumps

basically all at once, not phase it out. And so that was the major disagreement. Did it lead to displacement? Exactly. Did they strike off across the country and have no idea what they were... And that did happen. Is that right? But the Park Service's argument at the time was that if we phase it out,

there's going to be generations and generations of bears that still know how to use that resource, and it's better to just wean them off right off you know right away and and deal with with the consequences and i think you know cold turkey basically yeah yeah we got a friend uh i don't think he's downstairs right now but he's trying to quit chew and he needs to do like they did with the park bears just shut it down turkey yeah he needs to shut it down yeah so the you know the there was a major disagreement um and and the consequence of it was that that there was high mortality of grizzly bears after that indeed just like just like you said that's that's exactly what happened bears started moving all over the place looking

for foods. Previously, they'd gotten all these easy handouts, and now they had to kind of fetch for themselves. Turn it up in people's yards and livestock, roadways. Campgrounds. So a large number had to be removed because of problem issues and conflicts. And so that probably put a dent in the population at the time. And the closing those open dumps happened in the park and out of the park.

Yeah, so the ones out of the park were a little bit later, but by the early 70s, the ones in the park had been closed. Now, how many grizzlies were there in the... I know this isn't something you can... You could probably have no comment to this. But I think it was like a strategic – this is just me talking. I think it was a strategic miscalculation to call the greater Yellowstone ecosystem the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Because the name is built around the park.

Sure. And so people have a – it messes with people. They can't separate and they think of it around the park. Sure. And so people have a hard, like messes with people. They can't separate and they think of it as the park. Yeah. I would have called it something totally different. Like? I don't know. Name you, I don't know.

The upper. Rocky Mountain Tri-State area. Just out of the something, I don't know. The area. The area with a lot of animals. Because. The greater area. animals because the greater area yeah greater area because you do there's like we have i think that you know again it's just me talking personally but i think we uh collectively in the west there's like a thing that we we suffer from

yellowstone syndrome and it's really hard for people to like sort out the differences of the park and the not park you know and what the challenges are within the park, how challenges in the park affect people surrounding the park, and it just becomes. And so when they call it the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, I think people, you know, have a hard time realizing that that's like a little piece of something. Yeah, it's. It's the size of Indiana.

Yeah. But people hear, oh, they're going to, the Yellowstone Bears. They associate it with the park. When we're talking about a fairly large region. But at that time, so go back to the inception of your interagency group. How many Grizzlies were there? In the GYE or in the actual Yellowstone or whatever?

Yeah, so the area of occupancy at the time was much smaller than it is now. Probably. So it was basically Yellowstone National Park and a little bit of area around it. Would it be fair to say back then most bears were probably coming in and out of the park? Yes, oh, absolutely. At some point in their life.

Yeah. And so after all those bears had been removed from the system in the early 70s because of conflicts, there's really no good estimates. And there's some numbers out there that people have a number of like 136. Well, I don't think we can get it that exact. And your specialty is dynamics.

Right, looking at population dynamics. So you're probably extra cautious. I am extra cautious. So when you hear 136? It's possible that there might have been you know around 200 maybe a little fewer than that but that's probably where we were 48 um at that time so let's go back you know let's let's do this let's go to the year of the year of listing now when people say listing just for listeners when people say listing what we're talking about is that the the that they got protection as a threatened species not as an

endangered species but the grizzly bears in the lower 48 were afforded protection under the endangered species act listed as threatened so not listed as endangered but listening as threatened like possible for them to become endangered. Exactly. And that happened in 1975. So at that point, how many were in what's now the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and how many in the lower 48 in total?

So in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, there probably would have been around 200 is our best estimate, and it's pretty much a guess, but even based on some of the earlier work, there were just no really, really solid numbers. But that's a pretty reasonable assumption. Estimates for any of the other ecosystems were pretty poor, too, at the time. So it's basically some big guesswork here.

I'm just throwing out a number. It was probably fewer than 1,000 at the time. So it's basically some big guesswork. I'm just throwing out a number. It was probably fewer than 1,000 at the time. So how were they counting them then? Like one, two, three, four, five, six? Or using models? No, a lot of it was just based on observational work. So the Craig heads had done some work starting through the 50s and 60s.

And so based on the animals that they had marked and observations from those studies, there were some indications of what population size might be. But they didn't study all bears. They studied primarily around the dump sites. So there were probably a lot of other bears that were never observed. So that's why some of the low numbers that I've heard, we kind of wonder whether the population really was that low or whether a lot of bears were actually missed

in those kind of assessments. And those were, I would call them, kind of qualitative population assessments at the time. Let's say we just knew, for whatever reason, we knew that 200 was accurate. Let's just say there was 200. Yeah. Can there be 200 for a long time? Or is that a number that just doesn't work?

Oh, there can be 200 for a long time. You don't run into problems. I don't think it was actually necessarily that long anyway. Because, and we'll probably talk about this but getting at like they say like with passenger pigeons right right there had to be millions if you didn't have millions you wouldn't have any do you mean they rely like just their whole system relied on there being many yeah and that's that's not really the case with with bear populations you know i'm there's some bear populations in europe for example that for decades have now

existed in the range of a dozen or so in the Pyrenees for example they're amazing animals you know they can just hang on for a long time and as long as you have a couple of females

that still reproduce every now and then it can actually stay at that level And as long as you have a couple of females that still reproduce every now and then, it can actually stay at that level unless there's additional threats. But it can stay at that level for a long time. Of course, those are not by any means sustainable, viable population levels in the long run, of course. But there's populations in northern Italy, in central Italy, in western Spain, and in Pyrenees, that are all around that size of somewhere between a dozen

for some populations to 40, for others to up to maybe 80 or so for other populations. And they have been like that for probably decades. And with no foreseeable change in the future that those populations would get a whole lot bigger. Are there genetic variations in those populations?

That's been one concern, especially for the Pyrenees. That's Nicole Qualtieri. I was just going to ask if you had any questions so far. I have a couple that I've been writing down. So they actually augmented the population in the Pyrenees with some bears from Slovenia, where there are very healthy populations. And that's the other thing about genetics.

And I hope we get to talk about that a little bit later on as well, about the genetics of the Yellowstone population. There's a lot of discussion about the genetics issues. And there's a potential concern for these really small populations. Like if you only have a dozen animals or so, yeah, genetics is obviously a concern. But it doesn't take much to reverse the effects of that. So an augmentation of moving some animals from another genetic background into a new area is incredibly effective.

Yeah, did you follow the debate? I don't want to get us too off topic, but did you follow the debate about the Florida panther? Yeah. Well, I did some work on Florida panthers, actually. Yeah, down to, you know, like we're talking about dozens of animals in Florida, and there being a debate of,

okay, well, let's bring in some from the West, where we got plenty of them. From Texas, yeah. And people are like, yeah, but this is the Florida panther. We're going to sort of destroy a genetic line. Right. But then like, okay, sure, but you're just going to lose the whole damn deal if you don't do something. The choice to me seemed pretty clear. Either you risk the population, the only population you have in the East, or you bring in eight Texas cougars and introduce a new genetics.

And that's what they ended up doing, of course. And that population, I'm convinced that was the saving grace for that population. It was the right move. Yeah, absolutely. People have said about the Texas cougars coming in. Were they like super cougars? Oh, yeah. Like, yeah, there's livestock interest in Florida, but they brought in super cougars.

No, at the time, I... The meanest, nastiest Texas cougars. I don't think there was a real concern at the time because the cattle depredations weren't a real big deal at the time. In recent years, they've become somewhat of an issue. But it is amazing how well that works. A lot of the genetic defects that were obvious in the resident population, king tails and something called cryptorchidism,

where only one testes descends in the male, which is definitely a sign that these are not vigorous animals. All that really was reversed. And just the introduction of eight Texas cougars did the job. Did they bring in males or females or both? I don't know what both is, I recall, but I don't know exactly what the sex ratio was. And did they pull them from an area? Now we're getting way off topic, man. One last question.

Did they pull them from a wet area? No, not that I remember. It seems like you're putting them in a tough situation. If you're getting out of West Texas, right, and all of a sudden you're like, welcome to the Everglades, buddy. Well, true, but I think we underestimate how well animals can survive. It's the same.

We've seen that with bears too. You reintroduce bears to new areas, and they tend to do very well. They're incredibly adaptable. I got a friend who's working on a project where they're looking at taking coyotes that live, like let's say there's a coyote that lives in an alpine environment. Yeah. And when you move them, where does he set up shop?

Does he travel long ways to find what he recognizes as home? Right. Or does he just go, well, I'm here now, and now I'm going to figure this out. Yeah. You know, displacement issues. So, all right, so back to the main subject. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Now, they got ESA right 1975 now we've got in in your area the area under your um under your review under you know where you do your research we've now got four times as many about 800 right yeah yeah okay let's talk about that number first. Because a lot of people like to say probably many more, or they like to say probably less. Why is it hard to tell? Why is it hard to tell us how many there are? And how accurate do you think, whatever the fashionable number is right now, how accurate is the number?

Yeah. So the estimate for 2016 is 690 bears. Okay. That's down a little bit from last year and from the year before that. But the population has been pretty stable, pretty much the same level since the early 2000s. Now, that number, we know, is likely an underestimate. Likely an underestimate.

Yes, and that's because the method that we use basically has an underestimation bias built in. Because you'd rather be wrong that way than wrong the other way. Well, it wasn't necessarily by design. It just so happened because of the type of methodology that we use is based on looking at unique females with cubs of the year and separating sightings of those individuals out from one family group to another. And some of the criteria that were established early on were distance criteria to separate them out.

So if you have two observations of a female with two cubs, you don't know whether they're the same animal or not. And so to separate them out, in the beginning, they used distance rule. When they established this technique, they used a distance

rule of 30 kilometers. And so if they were more than 30 kilometers apart, they had to be different females. Well, as... So, 15 miles, not even. Yeah, not even then, yeah. No, more like 20 miles. Yeah, 1.7 kilometers per mile. So say roughly 20 miles or so.

And so what happened as the population grew and densities became higher, that rule set wasn't necessarily as applicable anymore as it was in the beginning. I'm with you. And so as the population grew, that bias became stronger, that underestimation bias. And so we may be underestimating by as much as 40% to 50% right now based on— You want to know why I think you're off? Because this spring we glassed up seven in a couple of days.

And I'm like, how could we have seen such a significant percentage of the bears just in one drainage? No, absolutely. I'm joking, of course, but it is like—I can imagine it's difficult. Yeah, it is. And so historically, when they started developing this technique, it was at a time when the population was in its first stages of recovery. So there was a lot of reasons to be conservative. Now that, from a biological standpoint, we've reached recovery, it makes sense to move to to a technique that's uh that is just accurate

um and doesn't have that built-in uh underestimation but what about when you check so let's say you take the number well tell me the number again 656 uh 690 for for 2016 okay but when you look at so you got your method to use now Now, when you look at hair trapping and genetics, does that wind up giving you some other wildly off number, or does it sort of back up the figure? I mean, aren't there multiple ways to look at it and see if they sort of line up and correlate? Well, so, yeah, a couple of points there.

So we have not done a DNA sampling study for the entire ecosystem. Why? Is it expensive and hard? We calculated at the time. So what Kate Kendall did in the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem was a sampling that really covered the entire ecosystem with DNA sampling.

That was a hugely expensive effort. It was valuable information, but there was only one estimate. It's an estimate for the population size that's very reliable. Did it refine the understanding in that area or did it back it up? It refined the understanding of that area for 2004, and that's what the estimate was for. We decided in Yellowstone not to do that. But I got a question for you.

What was the estimate before that work, Kate Kendall? What was the estimate before that work, and did that work make it go up or down? I'm not sure that there was truly a reliable estimate prior to that. It was a question mark. That was really kind of a benchmark number. I see. And so that number has now been used by Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, prior to that. That was really kind of a benchmark number. And so that number has now been used by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks

to, based on the information they have, they can make population projections on what level of population growth that population has experienced. And you can use that 2004 number to kind of extrapolate into the future where the population might be now. So people liked that work and generally accepted that work?

Yes. Accepted that number? Yeah. We, and I wasn't in Yellowstone at the time, but at the time the study team made the decision or discussed whether they should be pursuing something like that. Can you explain the process real quick, what we're talking about? Yeah, so what that involves is basically setting up what we call hair snare corrals. So it's basically barbed wire

that's basically a single or two strands of barbed wire that's stretched around four corner trees. It's a pretty small area you know by a little you know 15 by let's see now i'm getting my metric and english messed up because i'm trying to be no no don't worry about it so it's about five to five by five meters and um and so with a with a lure in the middle and the idea is that the bear will be attracted to the lure it goes typically under the the barbed wire to to get to the lure so that the height of the barbed wire is pretty critical but it goes under the barbed wire leaves a tuft of hair on the barbed wire you can collect that yeah and if anyone who's ever walked along a barbed wire fence looking at the bottom strand or top strand knows that there's a hell of a lot of hair.

Exactly. And so it's really a great technique. It's non-invasive. It doesn't affect the design. They don't even know what happened. They don't even know. What do you use to bring them in? Blood lure typically mix, and in some cases people have mixed it up with fish remains and stuff like that.

So it's a pretty stinky mess, and that's the whole point, of course. So it attracts, just by scent, it attracts grizzly bears. So you catch some of his hair. Yeah. So we get the hair. The roots of the hairs have DNA in them, and that's sufficient if you get five to ten hairs typically. That's sufficient to actually get a DNA sample and get basically a DNA fingerprint of that individual.

And then the idea is that you then can calculate not only the number of unique individuals that are visited, but you can also do what we call capture-recapture analysis, where you catch that individual once, and then how many times do you catch it in future sampling periods? And that will tell you how effective you are at detecting them. Yeah, like if you catch every bear's hair 20 times, you'd probably get the feeling that you're catching most bears. But if you have a lot of bears, you only caught their hair once, the assumption is probably that you're missing some.

Exactly, yeah. And the statistical techniques are based on estimating the proportion you're not sampling, essentially. Yeah, that's the hard part. That's right. And so the DNA sampling has really been great for a lot of wildlife populations. And that was actually invented by some of my colleagues in Canada The DNA sampling has really been great for a lot of wildlife populations.

And that was actually invented by some of my colleagues in Canada working on brown bears. So that's really where the original idea came from for this DNA sampling. And it's changed wildlife management. So why decide against it? I mean, I don't care. I mean, I'm not saying like that, like I think it was the wrong decision, but what was the argument? There was a lot of discussion within the study team on that. We calculated to do something similar to what was done in the northern continental divide,

it would cost probably close to $11 million. Is that a lot? That's a lot, yeah. For your agency, that's a lot. way beyond any budgets that we could deal with. It would require something like some sort of congressional funding source to really make that happen. And that's like what they did in the Northern Continental Divide. And I just don't see that as a reasonable way to move forward.

So the cost was a major issue. The logistics of covering such a large ecosystem were a major issue. Because the area here, just as we talk about this, so correct me if any part of this I'm wrong, grizzly bears in the lower 48 are divided into six distinct population segments. Yeah, which – Five have bears, one does not. Exactly.

Yeah. One of these distinct populations. So you have the northern Cascades. Yeah, we got northern Cascades. It has some small number of bears or not. Who knows how many. Probably fewer than – maybe fewer than six. And they're flirting with the border in BC.

Exactly. And then you have East Central Idaho. Selkirk's. Selkirk's has. Is what you're referring to, right? Is that, okay. No, I guess I'm asking. Oh, Bitterroot.

Oh, you're talking about Bitterroot Selway. What's the one that the Bitterroot Selway does not have them, but it's regarded as a potential location for them? Yeah, and there were reintroduction plans back in the late 90s, early 2000s that eventually were not implemented. But they're going to wind up there. Well, things are looking as good now as they have in a long time for bears to actually get there. But the reality is that it's going to take quite a bit of time.

And the first bears that would get there are probably going to be males only. So for females to actually make it down there, it's still probably going to need some management. So that means translocating animals. And that's for the foreseeable future. I don't see that happen for the ecosystem. So there's one distinct population segment in Washington. The one we're just talking

about that does not have bears is idaho montana northern continental divide yep is which is by all means uh a healthy population bob that's bob marshall scapegoat uh glacier national park is really kind of the core for for that. And then the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming. Yep. And then we have the Cabinet Jack ecosystem. Which also has bears. Which also has bears. About 45 is the best guess.

That's extreme northwest Montana and Idaho. Yep. Idaho, Panhandle, extreme northwest Montana. Yeah. And, you know, there's researchers, Fish and Wildlife Service is doing a lot of research there, and they have a good handle on the population. And some recent DNA work there confirmed that that population is around 45 or so animals.

Okay. So when you were looking at doing the hair trapping count, was it just that your area was so much bigger than the north? Is it bigger than the northern continental divide area um you know it's that currently the distribution is is a little bit more i think um it's it's also i think parts of it are are more inaccessible there's there's probably i mean we i know we have the bob marshall wilderness in northern continental divide but we've there's a lot of wilderness areas on the eastern portion of Yellowstone. So accessibility, logistics is a big part of it.

The other issue that led the team to decide against it was that it only gives you a single estimate. It just gives you an estimate for one year. And the feeling was that what the team was already doing was actually sufficient to keep track of the population. What do they call the system you do use? Well, so the one method that we rely on primarily is something that we refer to as the Chow-2 method.

It's basically, it's based on those sightings. What's the word? Chow-2, it's the, the Chow refers to the researchers, the statistician whose techniques are behind some of these, the statistical techniques that we use. And so that technique is based on identifying unique females with cubs.

Then we have another one that we developed to address the issue with that underestimation bias. That's what we call a mark-resight technique where we're actually doing systematic aerial surveys twice a year for all the areas in the ecosystem and try to observe females with cubs again. It's still based on females with cubs. What's a good time of year to do that? That's basically summer. Mid to late summer is when we do those surveys.

That's got to be hit and miss. And it is. And so that technique is based on observing females with radio collars. And it is a little bit hit and miss. And so the problem is that on an annual basis, our sample sizes are not really large. And so the estimate is more accurate. So it's more on target, but it's not very precise. So you can have a confidence interval that's way bigger than any manager would want to use. So it makes it really difficult to look at trend detection over time. And that's what that Chow 2 estimator does a better job at. So for the time being, we're sticking with that Chow 2 estimator,

but we're still exploring ways to improve it. But no one would say that you potentially know about every female with Cubs. Like if I went out and saw a female with Cubs, someone would... Oh, no. So no one's going to say, oh yeah, that's Barr. We know about a lot of them because they're very... People

report them to us. We have a lot of agency people out there. We observe them from our aerial surveys. So we do get sightings of the vast majority, I think. But we do use a statistical estimator to, again, estimate how many we have not observed. But that proportion is relatively small. We do observe a lot of them,

but we miss a lot too. So what is the guess? What's the percentage that you guys think you're missing? Up to 40%? Well, yeah, and that actually matches with when we do that Mark Reside technique. Again, that's still based on females with cubs. The total number would actually almost double from what we typically have with that other technique, the Chow-2 estimator. So not quite double,

but it would put us in the range of 90 to 95 females with cubs for this past year, for example. And if you extrapolate that out, you easily come at a total population estimate well over 1,000, over 1,100 actually. And so the real estimate for the population is certainly much higher than what our official estimate of 690 is. So if you absolutely had to say, right, imagine the most catastrophic thing that could happen to you

if you got the number wrong, involving death and injury and every bad thing in the world, and you had to say a number, what would you say? Or just are you not comfortable saying it because you just don't know? Well, yeah. I would have to still stick with the 690 number.

Okay. I would have to still stick with the 690 number. And with the caveat that we know that that is certainly, by all means, going to be an underestimate. I'm not trying to be leading here, but do you know it's not less? Is there a way you're wrong and you have too many? There is always uncertainty with any of these type of data. There is always, yes, I think it's fair to say

that there is always a statistical probability that it's below 690. That's not as strong as that it's above 690. Exactly, yeah. Because everything else is pointing at that. And this is the difficult situation that we're in with our science. We have a technique that the managers still want to use and is being used in how we move forward with the delisting,

how the agencies move forward with the delisting that is now language in what is called the conservation strategy, which will be the guiding document after delisting, if that goes through. And so the managers have chosen to stick with this conservative estimator. That does not keep us, of course, from trying to come up with a better estimator in the future. And for me, as a scientist, we have to have that desire to do better than what we have now. You can always read a journalist. You can always tell where a journalist stands on the issues. Because if the journalist fails to mention the caveat that there's likely more,

you know that they have a vested interest in there being not that many. If the journalist mentions likely more, then you know where they stand politically. It's a trick you can use. Sure. And so the one thing that's important with that too, we have that number of 690, right? And then we have a 95% confidence interval around that. That's a statistical estimate of how confident we are in those numbers.

So that number is plus or minus 75 bears. And so some people will take that number and then say, so it's really not 690, but it's 690 minus 75. That's not right. All these estimates, the central tendency of the data would lead us to 690 more than it would lead us to the lower end of that or the higher end.

Now, the only added thing here is that we know, we've demonstrated in the past with simulation studies, that that 690 is an underestimate. That most likely it's much closer to probably over a thousand individuals. And so I'm totally confident saying that.

it also makes it very confusing to the public, of course. We have an official estimate of 690, but at the same time we keep saying, well, we know that's an underestimate. People hate that kind of stuff. They want to know how many bears.

That's the first thing I ask you. Science is messy, and that's frustrating for us as well. We would like to have the perfect estimator, but that just doesn't exist. What was your question, Nicole? I was just wondering, you'd have to know some populations, like the park populations a lot better than, or I don't know, this is just my guess as someone who doesn't know,

but would you know those park populations a lot better than the Madison populations and the Centennial populations and the Absaroka? No, not necessarily, actually. That's one thing that I really like about how we've structured our research and our sampling. There's really, the effort is pretty equal throughout the entire ecosystem. So it's pretty well distributed and it's not like that we have a much better handle on bear numbers for Yellowstone National Park.

And in fact, when we're asked, we often are asked, what is the actual population estimate for Yellowstone or for this national forest? We don't provide those because we actually don't have those. We have them truly as an ecosystem number, and that's because these animals, they cross boundaries all the time. And so there is really no such thing as strictly Yellowstone National Park population. A lot of those bears do cross the boundaries.

You mentioned earlier that the drop you've seen in the last couple of years, is that just part of a normal rise and fall, or is that linked to some occurrence? Yeah, and additional years of data will tell us. Some people have argued that since two years ago it was 757, last year it was 717, and now it's 690. And some people would argue that we're in a decline. But we don't look at trends in grizzly bear populations

over short time periods like that. You really have to look at it over longer time periods. I mean, they can live up to 30 years. Their generation time is close to 14 years now. So to look at it on a three-year time frame is potentially dangerous because you can kind of overreact. So you have to really look at a longer time frame. If you look at the variation of that estimate

since the early 2000s, this still fits within that realm of variation that we have observed in the past. And by all means, all the data are indicating that the population has basically remained pretty constant since the early 2000s, after several decades of increase. What factors? This is another thing you can't answer in a definitive way, but what factors allowed their,

in 19, so they have 200 in 1975 to having the 690. Like what factors are most, is it most safe to say like, thanks to blank measure, the bears were able to increase? Or do you think that would have happened outside of federal influence? Or did it have to do with ESA protections? Or if you can't answer it in that way, how would you answer that question? Well, I think ESA protections have helped a lot.

Yeah. It led to – well, so there's a number of factors. I think the fact that there was an independent study team that collected all the data and had all the information to give managers the good scientific data to make decisions on. Like that in and of itself is helpful. It's very helpful, I think, yeah.

Then the establishment of the Interagency Crucibier Committee, which is a policy group that is informed by our science. They make decisions based on our science. That was established in the early 1980s. And this committee still exists. It deals with all the lower 48 populations. But they exist of high-ranking officials, and they are the type of people that can make changes on the ground.

They can direct a national forest or a national park to do this and that to help grizzly bear conservation, and that's actually exactly what happened. What would be an example of something they would ask? Yeah, a good example. So the one thing that the study team identified at the time was that adult female survival, which is the driving engine of any bear population, was too low. And how do you define an adult female? Breeding age?

Yes. Like they're sexually viable then? Sexually mature. Typically starting at four or five years of age. Oh, man, really? Yeah. Typically, starting at four or five years of age. Oh man, really? Yeah. So they have relatively low reproduction because of, first of all, there's a three-year reproductive cycle and they don't produce their first litter of cubs, typically on average around age 5.8 actually.

Meanwhile, white-tailed deer would have cranked out eight. Yeah. So there's a big difference there. And black bears are only two years, right? That's correct. Yeah. So that's why black bear populations can, when their numbers are down,

they can recover from that quicker than a grizzly bear population. That's just pure demographic differences. So you identify the importance of those breeding age females. Right. And because the importance of those breeding age females. Right. And because the mortality of those was really too high for sustainable levels. What was causing the mortality?

Well, in those early days, some of it was poaching and conflicts with livestock. So one of the things that the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee did was to start closing down livestock allotments within the recovery zone and start to deal with bears accessing garbage. So bear-proof dumpsters, bear-proof garbage cans, all that started in those early days. To limit conflict. To limit conflict to limit conflict and and i think those are the type of actions forcers um you know put a lot of effort into closing roads because we know that that road

access typically means lower survival of grizzly bears um that's that's that's just a given like a road creates a higher likelihood that that bear is going to wind up mixing it up with a person and the bear is going to be the one that ends up dead. Yeah. So it's not necessarily a roadkill situation, but it's just access into grizzly bear habitat by humans tends to reduce survival because of higher likelihood of poaching or conflicts and things like that. So closing down roads and reducing road densities

was another big aspect of this. So all those actions combined, there's no hard data to show a direct cause and effect here, but there's no doubt in my mind that all those actions really made a difference, and that's what helped start the recovery of the population, which, interestingly, after listing in 1975, the population still kept declining

because some of those actions had not been implemented at that time. It didn't really start until the early 80s, mid-80s, that they started to implement those. And sure enough, we saw the population started to pick back up in the mid-'80s, late-'80s, and then started increasing with very rigorous growth through the 90s, and then started leveling off in the early 2000s. And some of our recent research has indicated that that might simply be a result of bears kind of reaching social carrying capacity within their own population.

That's what I wanted to ask about, but just for a little background for people. So at the time of listing, they didn't sketch out what recovery would look like, if I understand right. Well, other than setting some recovery criteria, like a minimum of 500 grizzly bears, for example, within the Yellowstone ecosystem. They did do that at the time. I thought that only came later once the distinct population segments came into existence. Well, the numbers have changed over time. What recovery

might look like has changed over time? A little bit. The initial numbers in the 80s were a little bit different than the one in 1993. There was a revision and a supplement to the recovery plan, and that's where some of the recovery criteria were ultimately based on. So one was related to population size, one was related to sustainable mortality limits,

and one recovery criterion was related to occupancy of reproductive females. So not just females with cubs, but also females with yearlings or two-year-olds. And they've met, the bears in the Greater Yellowstone have been at what's been defined as recovery levels. They've been at that for a number of years, right? Yes.

How long has that been? Basically since the early 2000s. Since the early 2000s. defined as recovery levels. They've been at that for a number of years, right? Yes. How long has that been? Basically since the early 2000s. Yeah, since the early 2000s. They have been at, they've met all those criteria. And what was the first attempt that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made where they first proposed delisting was 2007? That's correct, yeah.

And at that time, when they did their findings, when people sort of reviewed all the available data, some suggested that they had not accounted for, I think it was two things at the time. One was cutthroat trout. And then the White Park Pine epidemic hadn't happened yet, right? Or was it going on? No, it was going on.

It was going on. Yeah, so that was actually the bigger one, the White Park Pine epidemic hadn't happened yet, right? Or was it going on? No, it was going on. It was going on. Yeah, so that was actually the bigger one, the White Buck Pine. You know, changes in food resources in general, but especially White Buck Pine. Now, let's touch on the trout thing because that always, to me, has felt a little bit like BS. Like, that cannot have been enough of a resource to be what was propping up grizzly bears in the lower 48 was eating spawning cutthroats. I'll never accept that that could have been. I don't disagree. I think you hit an excellent point.

People love that story so much, but it's not like salmon runs on the Pacific Coast. No, it's not at all. I mean, it's, and so in 2013, we did this big comprehensive project. We call it the Food Synthesis Report. And that was in response to the Ninth Circuit Court ruling, which is an appellate court that indeed brought up that argument that the Fish and Wildlife

Service had not adequately considered the effects of climate change and especially whitebuck pine as a food source and the effects of other changes in other food resources as well. So we had a very comprehensive look at that. And I would agree with you because uh it's it's one of many good resources that bears have access to and and as we as we found out um it sure it's it's it's a resource that is high calorie uh it's available to some that is available to some bears. At the time, the estimate was that might have been around 10-15% of the population at the time. Might have actually been fewer

depending on... That actually had access to the fish. That actually had access to the fish, that's right. One thing to keep in mind is we refer to it as a provincial resource. It's only those bears residing near yellowstone lake that that historically took advantage of that resource and it was a month or so long every year yeah um and and sure for those bears that had access to it

it's it's a great source of calories but people fall in love with that story i think it's because part of the thing is like, it's part of this, it's like this thinking, like this Malcolm Gladwellian thinking where it's like, you can always find these little surprise elements that actually explain the whole planet. You know?

Like, oh, if you want to understand that, all you need to do is understand, you know, these here trout. And as we see with anything in nature, and certainly with grizzly bears, it's not that simple. And for a species that we've documented more than 260 different types of food that grizzly bears consume in this ecosystem, that's an astonishing number of different food. Rattle a few off. Yeah, I was going to say, can you you name some of the more interesting?

Certainly you have the high-calorie ones like cutthroat trout, whitebuck pine, army cutthroat moths, and ungulates. By all means, those are valuable resources. But I think somehow in the minds of some folks, they've been constructed as essential resources, that every bear has to have access to those. And that's not true by any means. Not all bears have access to those four resources in every part of the ecosystem. It varies depending on where you are.

So what people forget is that we have things like biscuit root and yampa. Wild caraway. It's an exotic species that bears are consuming in Tom Miner Basin. That's where they're congregating from. I mean you see a hell of a lot of them digging for various species of ground squirrels and marmots and whatnot. Yeah, so you've got that. Small mammals, they're eating algae in some cases. They're eating mud.

That is kind of a totally unique situation. Like a mineral-rich mud? Yes, like in some of the thermal areas. In the past, we've documented them consuming this. It's called geophagy. And it's probably for searching for

particular minerals. Is this true? Is this true? I was just wondering if it's true that the Tom Miner Basin, I've heard that it's the largest grouping of bears when they're going for the wild carrier way in the lower 48?

Actually, I would say that Army Cuthbert Moths is probably the larger grouping because some of those sites can have like 25 bears at one time. I've seen them out at Tom Miner. At Tom Miner, it is pretty amazing. I mean, that's a vegetative resource that they're after, the roots of wild caraway, and they're digging for some other stuff while they're at it too. But that seems to be the driving food source they were looking for.

And, yeah, you can see sometimes up to a dozen or more bears there in an evening, which is pretty remarkable. That's a pretty small basin. And for that many bears to show up in that one place, that leads you observation, did strike me as a legitimate concern. Because if you've spent any amount of time on those ridgetops that are coated in whitebark pine, it's like you've never seen anything like it when it comes to how many animals are, when you go from black bears, pine squirrels, grizzly bears clark's nut hatches uh stellars grays right yeah clark's nutcrackers i mean it's just kind of amazing who shows up in those places it is i mean it's it's a bonanza yeah when those trees started to die off and also i hunted i bow hunted elk a

lot in whitebark pines so i wound up having like a view of it as the same way if you spend a lot of time along a stream and you see bears eat salmon, you start to think that all bears eat salmon. I had in my head like, man, if this collapses, it's the death of these bears. But again, it's just very personal, anecdotal thing. And as it turns out, it isn't. So what are they all like, so all those bears, what are they doing instead?

And that's one of the questions that we addressed with that research back in 2013 in response to and by the request of the Interagency Crazy Bear Committee. So a couple of things we looked at. First of all, whitebuck pine did decline.

In some of our transects that we've been monitoring since the early 2000s, we've seen 75% of the adult mature trees dying. So that's pretty substantial. That's a pretty good nut. You ever eat that nut? You have to collect them and roast them. It's a pain in the ass, but they're good, man. Yeah, I mean, humans can consume them. There's not a real

market for it or anything. It's very sticky work. And it's funny, you see when we capture grizzly bears during that time period, they have their hair on their paws. It's kind of matted down and sticky from eating

the white buck pine. So one thing we found was their hair on their paws is kind of matted down and sticky from the pitch from eating yeah eating the white buck pine um so one thing we found was that that bears did respond and and use white buck pine habitat less over the over the last decade so basically the decade from the early 2000s to the early you know 2010s and uh so there was a response response where initially they were really selecting for those habitats. That selection just gradually went down and now they're basically using it in proportion to availability. But they're still using it. And so still in good whitebuck pine years, they're still taking advantage of that resource. source and even even though uh and you know we have such we've had such high mortality of white buck pine there's still a large number of of viable healthy trees out there that that do produce

for whatever reason we're resistant we don't know if they're if they're resistant um you know there's a couple of factors you know that the mortality of white buck pine was really primarily a mountain pine beetle there's a little bit of blister rust, and some trees may have natural resistance to that, and some may not. But it's really mountain pine beetle, and also wildfire have something to do with it. So with mountain pine beetle, I think some stands eventually just weren't reached by mountain pine beetles. So not necessarily that they were resistant to it. They got lucky.

Basically, yeah. And so bears were used to a system of, even before this whole mountain pine beetle epidemic, it was still annually annually very unpredictable resource. So in some years, you had a bumper crop. So it's a masting species, which means that the tree puts out, throughout the ecosystem, just massive amounts of seeds in one year and almost nothing the next year. Yeah, I think anyone who's got an oak tree in their yard,

some years there's shitloads of acorns yard is like, some years there's shitloads of acorns in the yard, some years there's two. Yeah, and it's the strategy of the trees, of course, to kind of make sure that they reproduce, and if you produce just a little bit every year, all the squirrels and everybody else is going to eat

all the seeds, and you're not going to be able to reproduce. So, the strategy of the tree is to in one year, just produce nothing, and the next year, overproduce so that you have small populations of rodents that cannot hammer all the seeds. It's a pretty smart strategy, of course. But bears were used to that. That system has been in existence for a long time, of course,

where you get a good crop maybe about every two to three years. So a 30-year-old bear has seen a hell of a lot of years when he didn't starve to death because there's no way back. and body fat and also consumption of animal resources, what we found was in a year of poor whitebuck pine crops, they would simply eat more animal matter. And what we're seeing is that as the whitebuck pine has declined, they have switched because it's a fall resource. You know, it's the period of what we call hyperphagia, where they're just consuming calories,

something like 20,000 calories a day. And so they're just switching to other alternative resources, and ungulates are one of them. Ungulates. And that includes ungulates left from hunter kills, gut piles, and things like that, at which they're incredibly efficient locating those. Are they good at, like in the fall months,

when you don't have young on the ground, are they very adept at killing adult ungulates in the fall months when they're not depleted by bad weather, there's there's no young around or is it during the ruts primarily yeah so during the bison rut and during the elk rut that bears do take advantage of of um you know the injuries that some of these animals uh ungulates sustain during the rut oh i see. And so that's when we kind of see an uptick in ungulate ewes. So you're right, though. And, you know, what we see in the spring, of course, is the elk calving season.

That's black bears and grizzly bears will take advantage of that. They're really pretty efficient predators on elk calves. But it's a pretty short season. It only lasts, it's really only the first 10 days of an elk calf that a grizzly bear has a reasonable chance of obtaining. So around Memorial Day into early June, it's good picking. Yeah. Do you have an idea of how many elk calves one grizzly will eat in a season?

Oh, in a season, oh in a season i um i don't have any numbers right off but um i mean it's you know it it could it's possible for a grizzly bear or even a black bear population to to affect population growth of elk populations based on predation on elk casts. There can be an influence of that. And sometimes if it maybe is in combination with having other predators there. So I'm glad you asked that question because what's really interesting,

if you look at the northern range, the elk population in Yellowstone's northern range has changed dramatically yeah from I think at the peak it was somewhere around 17,000 20,000 and that number has dropped and of course there were a lot more wolves out there a number of years ago than there are now I think Yellowstone Park now has about 100 wolves now. So it looks like we might be reaching kind of some sort of stable system where there was also maybe some overharvest

in terms of hunting of that population. A lot of cow hunts. Yeah, so that number has dropped. The wolf population, the reintroduction of wolves have certainly had something to do with that. And then as the grizzly bear population grew and especially how they affected elk calves, that probably has added to that mix as well.

And that's probably what led the elk population to do what it's done and drop in numbers and maybe stabilizing a little bit now. I imagine it's also to a large degree, it's just them learning how to deal with that predator.

Right now, people haven't been allowed to hunt Yellowstone for 100 years. If you all of't been allowed to hunt Yellowstone for 100 years, right? If you all of a sudden open hunting in Yellowstone, you're going to see a hell of a lot of elk get shot real quick. And then in about 10 years, you're going to find it becomes real hard to shoot elk in Yellowstone. Yeah, right. And then so elk have also responded to the presence of wolves and bears that way.

That's what I'm saying, yeah. They just get used to it. In the early days, they might drop a calf out in the open, and now they're going to be more in forested areas, and they're going to be hidden a little bit more because of the pressures of bears, for example, and wolves as well. So yeah, elk behavior is changing because of that. Do you know how long they've actively, because they haze bears, don't they, every spring?

In order to essentially get them to change their behavior around people. Because animals in the park are still habituated, whether people are walking up to them or not. Yeah, but the typical, unless a bear is really causing problems the the typical response to that is is not hazing um that's really kind of used and as a last resort um so in terms of the hazing what you know the management agencies will will use that in some instances but but its effectiveness is is really kind of limited. And so what Yellowstone Park, for example, has the policy that they have adopted with grizzly bears near roadsides

is that as long as they're showing natural behavior and they're not keying in on human foods, they just let it be. And I think that was another really good management decision, I think, is to let that habituation just take place. And you can do that in a national park. Now, that's different in areas outside the national park. You may not necessarily want that type of habituation. So we make a distinct difference between food conditioning and habituation.

And so if we're talking about habituated bears, typically hazing is not a tool that's needed. Now for food conditioned bears, it might be. And eventually if that doesn't work, then removal of that individual is really your only last choice over the last 20 years say how many um how many people have been mauled killed by grizzly bears it averages about one or two a year right yeah and in recent years but you know we we went a long time without uh without any without any at all yeah um well maulings. Let's just say death.

Fatalities. In recent years, we've averaged close to at least one a year. But like I said, there was a time period where there really weren't any much at all. You're dealing with such small sample size, it's always kind of hard to put a specific number on it. Yeah, but it's such an acute psychological fear. Yeah, it is. It's like everyone talking about it always likes to point out, oh, you know, they always go to like,

they compare it to dying by falling off a ladder. They compare it to dying by getting stung by a bee yeah it's just like go-tos the same way you want to make something seem small in landmass you compare it to rhode island yeah right or like if you want to seem big like texas yeah it's like two texases um but but i think that the other thing that plays into it and i've thought about this in the past it's like it's a psychological fear and it's like when people look at what are the odds it's going to happen to you they're sort of looking at right the human population in the gye or wherever most of whom don't engage in high-risk activities right but

when you get down to the individuals who engage in very high-risk activities right but when you get down to the individuals who engage in very high-risk activities such as bow hunters yes absolutely it winds up being that you know someone or your buddy knows someone who got scratched up by a bear yep and it starts to feel very different so on one hand people are telling you like oh you got more chance of getting a killed by a cat a house cat you know but they're you got more chance of getting killed by a cat, a house cat. But on the other hand, like, well, you know, I happen to know a lot of people who've been scratched up or

run over by bears because I belong to the high risk segment. I think that's actually the point. It's like talking about venereal diseases with people who hang out in brothels all the time. They probably have a very different view of venereal diseases than people in a monastery. Yeah. so it's like it really is like i don't like the trick that's an interesting analogy but yeah well i don't like to trivialize i i find myself and

sometimes i'm pointing out you're not gonna get mauled by a bear then sometimes i want to point out like man i sure do know a lot of people who've been charged by bears or run over by them absolutely know of a lot of people yeah Yeah. The context is everything there. No, you yourself, I mean, have you had some run-ins? No, no. But as I indicated in the bear spray, we had the discussion about use of bear spray versus firearms. In our work, we try to do everything we can to avoid encounters.

And we can do things that hunter doesn't have the luxury of doing you know like shouting and and and things like that as a prophylactic or like like right preventative preventative measure yeah like shouting before it's before you're actually shouting at the making our presence known basically and you know as a as a hunter you don't have those options. Yeah, what you do is just hard to exercise. Well, yeah. Strategically, no.

Yeah. So you've cut loose with pepper spray on a bear, though, right? Or no? No, I have. People on our team have, yeah. For example, sometimes in trapping situations, you're working up a bear, and other bears are inevitably hanging around, might be attracted to that and come in. What do you mean inevitably hanging around? Because in our traps, we use bait.

I see. So they're lured. There's always that attract. And there's also any time, you know, I think there's a lot more social interactions among bears than we realize. And so just having a bear in a trap and being handled might actually attract other animals as well. So we've had situations where our field personnel have had to use empty a number of of bear spray cans on on bears that were getting too close now my brother's a researcher

in alaska and he works for a federal agency in alaska and they he used to work for university and their the policy there was i i believe he had to have, you had the option between lethal or non-lethal. Because he spends a lot of time in aircraft. He tended to carry lethal because dealing with the pepper spray, when you're flying on scheduled flights, so scheduled flights, you can't have it. Right. And then you often land in a place where you're not going to go down to Walmart or whoever the hell sells bear spray. So you're on scheduled flights to remote areas. Or if you're in a helicopter or in an airplane and that thing cuts loose, you're dead.

Oh, yeah. So they tape it to the outside. They tape it to the struts. But anyways, various complications made it that he would generally carry lethal means. And what he carried was probably the standard. He carried an 870 with slugs. Now where he works, he's at a federal agency now, and they carry lethal and nonlethal. Yes, we do too.

So everything he does, he's got to have that. Yeah. He's got to go through whatever he's got to go through to get that spray there it's funny because him living in alaska he has boxes of spray because everyone comes to alaska to visit they buy spray they can't leave it there and so he it's like it looks like a little disposal area in his garage you know bear spray so that's what they do now is lethal and non-lethal and you're obviously encouraged to exercise the non-lethal first even though they're in an area where there's no serious talk about there being any kind of shortage of bears i mean they occupy 90 some percent of their historic range right in the state of alaska and here they occupy what five or six percent of their historic

it's really close to the two percent two percent low 48ss. So it's pretty low. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit on X maps dot com slash meet on X maps dot com slash meet welcome to the on X club y'all but yeah we carry boats too and like you said what's the lethal

thing you guys carry handguns or like the shotgun we slow we carry handguns or like the shotgun was slow? We carry handguns, but we also carry shotguns in the 4570s. How do you tote your spray? Like are you real good about just keeping it right handy? Yes, yeah. What do you like to do personally? Like where do you go?

Well, you know, I have, if you're asking about like... No, sorry, like actually how do you handle your bear spray? I typically have it just on my belt. On your waist belt. Yeah, but you know, when I'm hunting, I actually prefer to have the chest halter, where it's on your chest. You won't actually have to take it out.

You just shoot straight through, which I prefer. Who makes that? You can get them at any place. It's basically the same system, but it's just a chest halter. FHF, he doesn't make those? Well, maybe his holster could fit.

But you attach it to your backpack strap then? No, I just – I put that on first, and then I put my backpack over it. So you always have it on you. Not from the hip, but from the chest. Even if you take your pack off, you still have the bear spray on you, and that's one thing what I like about it. Have you been injured by bear spray? No.

I've seen two, like not serious injuries. It's not pretty, yeah. But we were getting ready to go bear hunting one hunting black bears and my brother had his pack laid out and he stepped on the busted the nozzle hosed everything down with bear spray then i got i got pickpocketed going through a thicket in bc and hosed myself down it's not awful but it's not good your pack is done yeah you got to replace your pack. I got a friend up in Alaska

that had it cut loose in her car and it totaled her car. There's nothing you can do. It just got punctured. Everything in the car. I know that there have been instances with other federal agencies where people left it on the front dash in the sun.

Burst in the heat. Is it true? There's a rumor that floats It bursted, yeah. Is it true? There's a rumor that floats around, and maybe you know. Is it true that a woman, a tourist, I think it was in Yellowstone, bought some spray and sprayed it on her kid as though it was mosquito repellent? I have not heard that one. I've heard people spraying it around their tent. I've heard that one.

Oh, you have heard people spraying it around their tent? Yeah, yeah. As it first came out. As a heard that one. Oh, you have heard people spraying it around their tent? Yeah, yeah. When it first came out. As a repellent. Yeah, as a repellent, you know. That's a rough night's sleep. I know. So if you, let's say the goal, let's say you weren't dealing with a population that,

let's say grizzly bears are white-tailed deer, okay? No one's talking about there not being enough of them. There's just no question about their stability. And your thing was that you were just going to protect yourself from bears. And you could pick, lethal or not lethal. You could pick shotgun with slugs or a handgun, or you could pick pepper spray. And nothing to do with preserving the animal or helping the animal out.

It just had to do with your personal safety. Based on the people you've conversed with and your own personal experiences what what would you pick i would pick bear spray yeah yeah because i think um you know the the key thing about bear spray is you can be really poor at aiming and still have a good chance of of deterring a bear and whereas with with a, you really have to keep your composure and hit that animal because if you don't, it's too late. And so with bear spray, you increase those chances. And the research has shown that.

I think it's shown in a pretty convincing way when you look at when they do it. But then again, you're dealing with such small sample sizes, and it's hard to get real excited about it. And then people like to point out, like, you'll hear, oh, a guy sprayed a bear with bear spray, and it still scratched him up. Sure. But then there's a hell of a lot of people that shot guns at grizzlies and shot their buddy, and people don't talk about that nearly as much

as they talk about a feller spraying a bear and still getting scratched. It's like people like one story more than the other story. So I think there's a thing like if you're a badass, a gun, there's just sort of this feeling. There's maybe a bit of a macho thing there. When in reality, I would feel a lot safer with bear spray alone. For me, I think just because so much time I spend outdoors, so much time I spend in grizzly hunting, I'm actively hunting, I'm quite often carrying both anyway.

Right. Not counting bow hunting. I mean, if you have time to shoot a bear with a bow, he wasn't a threat. That's right. Or you're one hell of a bow hunter. Yeah, or you're real good. You're a long bow hunter maybe would have time to get a shot off. So what do you think, like, what's the future hold?

I mean, do you think we're there? Like, do you think that this is about the number of bears we could hope to have? Barring some huge change, some huge societal shift that welcomed bears into areas where they had a high risk of conflict. Exactly. We're probably about where we're going to be. Yeah. I think all the data that we have, and we actually talked about two ways of estimating population. We have several other ways of doing that.

We look at a lot of other things. And we never look at one single data set to draw our conclusions. All our conclusions are based on looking at a number of data sets and a number of different types of indicators. And you put all that together, the indication is that this population

is at a level where you know within the core of the area we we just can't have much higher numbers than what we have now we're seeing these what we call density dependent effects where this kind of this internal population regulation is starting to take place. So the only potential for this population to grow would be to expand, to keep expanding, and for people to allow that. And so that gets exactly what you were mentioning. As long as people were tolerant and able to accommodate that, there could still be growth. But then you have to deal with the realities of bears showing up in people's backyards.

Generally, most of us would not find that acceptable. Yeah, it's the thing I brought up in something I wrote once where these bears historically occupied a range you might think of from where the Missouri River hooks hooks south that westward to the pacific coast yep and when when the question of delisting in the greater yellowstone ecosystem comes up people will point out like well they're not recovered across their entire range and i point out well golden gate park is in a very different situation than yellowstone national park so when we're talking about range-wide recovery that would would include San Francisco and Los Angeles. Exactly, yeah.

So it's tricky. It's like you wind up getting stuck in these, I think a lot of people get stuck in these utopian views. Yeah, these ideologies of, you know, we need to have grizzly bears everywhere, there's suitable habitat. Well, there may be pockets of suitable habitat elsewhere in the West,

but they're not large enough. I mean, look at Yellowstone. It's a huge area, you know. We now have bears occupying more than 58,000 square kilometers. But very personally, I would like to see, very personally, I would probably draw, like if you if you mapped if you were able to put people's perceptions of suitable habitat on like a number line or some sort i would probably put it i would probably declare more areas suitable sure then then your average

american yes because of generally like wanting more bears around. I look at the Northern Cascades thing, and I know there's varying views on it. I look at the Northern Cascades area in the state where I live, and I'm like, yeah. I get it. There's conflict, but in my mind, if I was king of the world, I'd be like, let's go for it. There's a handful of places where I would say, let's go for it.

But I think that in other places, it's really like wyoming holds more of the bears than anybody else of the gye and i think that when the the the powers that be in wyoming look at the map i think they politically feel like they're kind of filled up you know they've got them where they can have them. Anywhere else is just going to lead to a lot of... Where they're socially acceptable. It's going to lead to a lot of conflict. And we're seeing that. The range expansion that we've seen,

and we've seen continued range expansion even with population level in the core kind of leveling out. But we're seeing more conflicts specifically in those areas so we're getting more livestock conflicts there like this year we we had a number of bears um you know that were just killed through accidental uh in accidental type situations like um in one area misidentification with black bear hunters you mean no in um? No, where they're encountering new dangerous situations. So in this case, it was an irrigation canal. We had three bears drown in an irrigation canal this year.

How the hell did that happen? Some of these canals, this is in Wyoming, so east of Cody. So well outside what we would call typical suitable habitat. And these irrigation canals are pretty large, have a really heavy high flow to it. Steep walls? Steep walls, yeah. So steep concrete banks.

Oh, I got you. And so bears got into it probably because there were other animals in there that they were ungulates or cattle that they were trying to go after, made it in there, then got sucked by the current and couldn't, you know, because the walls are concrete, couldn't get out. Three of them. Three of them. And I think it's an indication of the type of situations that we can expect more as their range keeps expanding.

And it's also an example of that we should expect higher mortality rates in those areas. And that's why we make a distinction between this central area, the core area where we have the suitable habitat, which we refer to as the demographic monitoring area, and areas outside. You know, we can expect a lot more mortalities outside of that core area of habitat simply because there's more situations where bears can get into trouble even accidental deaths like that or cattle predations and things like that so do you think it's possible that like in 50 years is it plausible or possible i guess I mean mostly the same thing, that in 50 years we could have a situation much like we have now?

That we have 600, 700 grizzly bears that live in this area and it's just kind of been that way? Yeah, I think that's very possible. It doesn't have to be moving in these wild oscillations. No, no. I mean, there will be some oscillations, as you can expect for a population that's kind of occupied most of the suitable habitat. There will be years that the population will kind of dip down.

There will be years that it will be higher than where we are now. But with proper management, scientifically-based, informed management, I'm convinced that this population can be maintained at this level for the foreseeable future. Do you feel that we're culturally doing a good job of scientific management from your perspective? Or do you feel that there's a lot of pressure, political and social pressure,

to sort of tell people certain things that they want to hear? Or do you feel like there's freedom to do your work in the way that you guys see fit? In terms of our work, I feel like we are allowed to be completely independent. And I strongly feel that the managers take what we say seriously.

They do not question our findings. I think we have a lot of credibility with the managers and the public at large about our data. And there's certainly individuals and groups that are critical of our work. That there's certainly individuals and groups that are critical of our work

that's going to happen with anything dealing with an iconic species as grizzly bears and yellowstone. But you don't feel that someone says, you tell me what I need to hear, I'll find some of the world to tell me. Oh, no, I would not be in this position if that were the case.

You'd go out there. Yeah, that would not be acceptable for me. Because as a scientist, I need to be able to be completely independent of any sort of political influence. I would not accept that at all. I would certainly let that

be known. It's nice to be working in a situation where you are working with the managers and the management agencies, but we're not getting directives other than, hey, investigate this particular thing because we need more information on this to make decisions. And when we come back with that information,

that information is seriously considered. And that's actually, for me as a researcher, the gratification of working here. A lot of times as researchers, we work in isolation from managers. And that's certainly, I would be the first to admit that was the case when I was working with black bears. And so working with this study team

and working with the interagency grizzly bear committee and the managers on that committee and the subcommittees of that has been really satisfying because for the first time in my career, I actually feel like the people that can make changes on the ground in terms of management and managing the population are actually listening to the scientific findings, which I think that's an ideal setup for doing good management.

And you've been at this how long? I've been at this for over 25 years now. Almost 30. And just in the last decade, when did you start? Basically the last five years. The last five years you feel like it's finally happening this way. Because of the system that was set up with the study team doing independent research, that research being informative for the decision makers

on the interagency grizzly bear committee who are able to implement it in the real world. That system was set up for for that reason and uh you know there's really not many species or populations where i can think of where where it's so structured you know it's by design it was it was done that way and in most other cases you know research is kind of like i said they you know we kind of tend to work in isolation from a lot of managers. Not always, but the way it was set up was really an ideal situation. What's the next bear you're going to work on?

This will be the last bear I'll probably... What are you going to do? Just stick around? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So you're into it now? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, if you look at it as far as sort of what has the – what sort of captured the popular imagination, you're there. Yeah. It's got a lot of relevance, man.

You know, there's not a lot of bear jobs in the world. And for a bear scientist like me to work on grizzly bears bears and yellowstone that's kind of the epitome of of what what i could have ever hoped for so uh there's every reason for me to to stay here until i retire yeah that's my intention yanni got anything you want to add well yeah it's like we're always like all you guys do all the biologists and scientists that we talk with you guys do such a good job of saying that like you know i'm in it for the research but obviously like you love the bears right oh absolutely love them so but i know that your goal is to first and foremost to get good research and

not let the emotions you know muddy the waters um so like is it a success now where it is and if in 50 years we're at the same level would you consider it a success or do you not even like rate what you do that way because you just you can't look at it in success and failure from a personal standpoint um no i think i i still look at it from a biological standpoint and so uh regardless of of what the legal status of the population is uh now versus the future and you're 50 years from now if we're if we are still at this at this level 50 years from now i would still i would say that that is a total success that would that would be an incredible success if if that can be done um because really, we have reached biological recovery, in my opinion. And that's just based on scientific data and nothing else.

So regardless of whether delisting happens or not, the biological fact is that everything indicates that we have a biologically recovered population of grizzly bears in yellowstone i guess that's kind of a follow-up i don't know it might take too much time but what's just can you give us like the latest on delisting and like where it's well let me quick point out what that means so um the u.s fish Wildlife Service has, for the second time, proposed that grizzly bears be delisted, that they're federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, that that end and they return to what's called state management. Yeah, the states have to come up with management plans that are acceptable to the feds. And that's part of the delisting process.

So when someone says delisting, what they mean is it would be one of very few. It would be one of about 2%, I think, of the species that make it onto the endangered species list that are then taken off because of recovery. Animals get taken off in various ways. Some have been removed from ESA protection because they simply went extinct. Some have been removed from ESA protection because they figured out that they didn't belong there in the first place. It's just they were operating off poor data. Some have been removed due to taxonomic lumping and splitting where they had listed a thing thinking it was you know its own

subspecies and then realized that it's part of a of a different population or that they went and found other unknown populations and realized in fact the animals were not as hard up and then some number of bald eels being one of them have been removed just simply from recovery right alligators so so yeah there's a proposal now to do with grizzlies what we do with alligators what we do with bald eagles and say the esa worked it functioned as the way it was meant to function it's a two-way street recovered species are meant to be removed from listing, and we're facing it now, but that will be litigated for, I don't know, a decade or more. They'll propose delisting and someone's going to sue them. Yeah, the delisting has been proposed.

The lawsuits are lining up. Presumably. And the agencies at this point are ready to sign what is called the conservation strategy. And so that will be the post-delisting management guidance, basically. And so most of the pieces are in place at this point now because of the administration change there might be some delays so we you know we might be looking at at the middle of next year before uh the final rule uh to delist would come out and then will that go through its own comment period uh no that will be the final one. So the middle of next year might be the final.

Yeah. So the comment periods have already occurred. And so the Fish and Wildlife Service is still working on addressing those comments because every substantive comment has to be addressed. So that's quite a task. And they tried it in the past and it was deferred. stancive comment has to be addressed. So that's quite a task. And they tried it in the past and it was deferred. In 2007, I guess it got deferred for eight or nine years while they looked into answering some more questions.

Yeah, well, eventually, I think the Ninth Circuit Court decision came out in 2011. So yeah, I expect any litigation on this, if a new delisting rule, final rule does come out, litigation will likely happen and that we might be looking at a similar time period of four to five years before any final decision comes out of that. I asked someone what one of the legal strategies might be. And they pointed out that, you know, there's some technical strategies you can take where the, the creation of distinct population segments happened after the listing. And so that if you're trying to delist, cause they're only like, like again, for listeners, they're not trying to delist, because they're only like, like again, for listeners,

they're not trying to delist the grizzly bear in the lower 48. They're trying to delist one population. So they're trying to delist a population of grizzly bears. So they're trying to delist grizzly bears in a, you know, in a definable geographic location about, you know, like we said earlier,

like maybe I consider like the size of Indiana. If one of the bears that lives there should take a major hike and wind up safely outside of that thing he's covered by the esa because the esa applies to because the distinct population segment is just one little spot now a strategy they're saying they might use to thwart this um there are a lot of people this is just me talking person it's us with our guest Now, a strategy they're saying they might use to thwart this, there are a lot of people, and this is just me talking personally, this is us with our guest. There are a lot of people who use the ESA as something called the Favorite Animal Protection Act.

And people who like to think of the ESA as the Favorite Animal Protection Act, one of the things that they'll do is they will question that distinct population, question the sort of legality of creating distinct population segments. So it might not even come down to like, are there enough bears or whatever. It might just come down to legal wrangling over definitions and procedural stuff.

And thankfully, none of that affects you, right? No, not really. You do your job. You provide information. We provide information and we'll continue to do so. And the Fish and Wildlife Service has addressed that distinct population segment issue within their proposed rule and used all the biological information to make that argument. And I think by all means you could argue this is a distinct population segment.

It is still an isolated population. In order to have nuanced management, I mean, we do it all the time. Alaska's divided up into 30-some or 20-some game management units. It's a thing we do as humans when talking about animals is that we sort of

try to break up landscapes in the way that makes sense. Now, when we drew state lines, we drew state lines almost arbitrarily along latitudinal and longitudinal lines, but oftentimes when we're talking about animal populations, it's a little more informed and nuanced about landscape features.

But that's pretty new thinking, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it wasn't until like the early 80s until we kind of saids and so we kind of said okay we don't need to manage white-tailed deer by county anymore yeah we should be managing them by these landscape chunks or areas well i think it happens all the time frederick jackson turner he he i think it was him the environmental historian who proposed that we drew states all wrong and he thought we should have drawn our states as watersheds and he said like state

politics would have been a lot easier if we'd drawn them in a way instead of just like certainly in the west yeah these straight lines up and down and gritting off you know and he said it just makes it hard for for group cohesion yeah you know and different different things because imagine like even take it like we're sitting right now in montana where you have the the you have part of the state the great plains and part of the state, the Intermountain West, and just in his mind, we got it wrong. We drew it up. So, Nicole, anything?

Any last thoughts? Does the IGBST still stick around if the Bears are delisted? Yes. That's your agency. Yeah. So that is our group, our representatives, our interagency agency, our group of

different agencies that work together. So there's, and that's also kind of written into that conservation strategy. You'll still continue to? We will still continue to do basically what we do right now and at basically the same level.

And to my knowledge, my agency is committed to keep funding this effort because it's such a high-priority population. Well, I think it's really cool that you guys have so much transparency. I mean, when I go onto your website, I can look at the mortality of every single bear

that you guys have recovered. I had read about those bears that had been in the canal. And then you actually see how many are human-caused, how many are maybe bear-on-bear, where you don't know. Natural causes. And I would encourage, if people are interested in this, you can read the whole recovery plan. And I know around the time that the Bozeman commenting was going on,

we were talking about it in some groups that I volunteer in. And so I read the whole recovery plan and it gave me such a better idea of how bears would continue to be managed and how the states could take it over. And so if you actually just go onto their website, there's so much just incredible information there. People don't want to go learn a whole bunch of shit. I did.

It's a lot easier to just sit in the bar and be like, they don't know what they're doing. But you hear so many people around here just say stupid things. I mean, the reason that I, I don't know. You mean to tell me that people in Montana go spouting off about grizzly bears without knowing the full story? Come on. I think it's, I don't know the full story. You mean to tell me.

Well, for us as researchers, that's always the challenge when we get our inevitable critiques from some directions. And what people tend to focus on and what people tend to do is kind of cherry pick certain things and take it out of context. But as a team, our approach has always been we look at everything combined. We look at the big picture and we look at longer time frames and things like that that are relevant to the species that we're studying. And if you do that, you could come to different conclusions than when you look at a single data point like this idea that the population is declining because it's 27 bears fewer than last year. When you look at the confidence intervals, that conclusion doesn't make any sense and it's not supported by the data. But those are the type of ideas that you hear people throw out right now. And it's really not based on the best information that we have.

The best information that we have says that it's well within the type of variation that you expect over the last 15 years. Now, you could let that be your concluding thought or you could add a concluding thought of anything we haven't touched on. Well, the one thing that we haven't touched on uh well the one thing that we haven't touched on which um which i think is an important issue is is this whole idea

of of genetic connectivity that's been brought up oh man we didn't get into that yeah that's that's been brought up uh a lot in in the comments one of the things being that the bear that we need to have corridors yeah but that the Yeah. But that these bears, these different population segments are able to interchange, right? Right. And so we've done some genetic work in recent years and we have a huge sample size of bears

that we have genetic samples of and we know the history of those bears. And so what we were able to determine from that is that um even though genetic diversity is a little bit lower in in yellowstone than than other populations because it is an isolated population you cannot get more diversity in an isolated population you know your mutation doesn't doesn't take care of that um but what we found was that that it it hasn't declined over the last 25 years. There's no indication of a decline in genetic diversity.

There's a strong indication that the number of individuals that genetically are contributing to the population is increasing, has in fact increased three to fourfold over the last 25 years. So those are really good indications that genetically there are no major concerns right now at this population level. And so if you would ask me, do we need to have connectivity with other ecosystems? My answer would be, yes, it might be desirable for the long-term future.

But it's hard to argue based on what we know right now that it's essential before delisting or anything like that. Because genetically, things look pretty good right now. You know how you talk about how people cherry pick various part pieces of this to paint the picture they want to paint yeah i like the connectivity argument because it services my greater goal right be like oh sure i love the idea of establishing great wildlife corridors between the bob marshall complex and the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. And if that were to happen, because someone pointed out the importance of genetic exchange, I'm like, I don't care how it happens. I just want it to happen because I think it's a step in the right direction just generally for wildlife. I agree.

So that's a case where I would be guilty of cherry picking. Yeah. Because I'm like, if it's that reason, great. If not, I'll find a different one. Well, there have been sightings in the pintlers, and there are two sightings in the big hole this summer. And there haven't been bear sighted there since the early 1900s. Young males, right? Well, we don't even know that in some cases.

But presumably males and presumably younger ones those those are the the animals that are supposedly a mother with cubs was seen in the pintlers which is around where my family is at a cabin for a long time so it's a i don't know it's pretty that's right yeah and and so uh i mean that that would actually that that would be pretty amazing you know because that's that's the thing about range expansion and bears eventually getting into the cellway bitterroot. It's going to require those females. And female bears just expand their range pretty slowly compared to the males.

So much of the expansion that we've seen on the eastern portion of the ecosystem, for example, has been really driven by males. And what we see is that females will lag behind. It might be as many as 10 years behind. But it's still occurring. But the point is that with females, it's just going to take a much longer time period to eventually reach a place like a cell with a bitter root. And so having the, certainly, that's why I say it's desirable if the habitat connectivity was such that that was actually feasible.

But if you ask me, and this is where, again, where some people don't want to hear my answer simply because I'm just relaying a scientific fact, is if you ask me, is it essential for this population? No, right now, I can't say that. Just based on our data, I can't say that it is absolutely essential for this population to have that connectivity. I'm surprised that some enterprising young vigilante

hasn't culvert-trapped a sow with some cocks. And under the cloak of darkness, just dumped him in the bitterroot. You'd be in a hell of a lot of trouble. You would be, yeah. I'm not going to do that. And it's probably hard to hide that sort of thing. You know, the closest example i can come to that

is uh that that lynx populations in switzerland were actually uh reintroduced kind of clandestine really like bucket biologists you did lynx i i don't know who actually ended up doing it but i don't know if it was even biologists but but no that's a term i don't know yeah yeah like bucket biologists being like guys who like to ice fish, and they're like, hey, man, I like fishing northern pike. And they put a couple pike in a bucket and dump it into some other lake, and then major repercussions follow for the ecology of that lake. You know, the reintroductions in Arkansas were kind of the same. In the Ouachita and Ozark Mountains. Those are...

What animals? Black bears. Oh, really? Yeah, those are two reintroduced black bear populations doing great. But those initial efforts were done by the state agency at the time, but somewhat under...

Oh, really? They had to go through all the permit processes and everything? So in those days, you could do that. And that's, of course, not happening anymore. But it's interesting that some populations have benefited from basically clandestine activities. Yeah, what's almost close to that, I guess this would be my last thing to add,

what's almost close to that would be, guess this would be my last thing to add. What's almost close to that would be, I wrote about this in my, in my Buffalo book where the, you know, they had, they took some bison out of Northwest Montana and put them on a train and, you know, hauled them out to Seattle and put them on a boat and take them up to

Whittier, Alaska. And from Whittier, put them on a train, cut them loose and Delta Junction. Later, they had too many running around Delta Junction. They put in a military installation. They were causing all kinds of problems with landscaping

and they'd come into rut and cause problems with people. One day they took 13 of them and put them on a truck and drove them out to an abandoned mine, opened the door. Everyone assumed they were all dead because no one then saw them for a decade, at which point there's 100 of them turn up about 150 miles from there. And everyone's like, oh, that's what happened to them. Those kind of days seem to be a little bit over.

Because if you look at when they just tried to do the wood bison reintroduction in alaska that came on the tail end of about 25 years of fighting and arguing and quarantines and lawsuits you know and it used to be just all it took was one guy with a truck you know he could establish his own little population of animals somewhere you know he just asked like a guy named bob if it's okay and you says, yeah, then there you go. You got a population. All right, well, thanks for coming on, man. Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, thank you.

My pleasure. That was fun. All right. Hopefully the next time, well, I shouldn't say hopefully. Maybe the next time we talk, there will be big bear news. Yeah, that's right. At which point I'll have you back on and talk to you about what that's going to mean. Yeah.

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