Ursa major: lumbering among the grasses photo: Barry Gilbert

male grizzly bear, weighing around 1,100 pounds, ambles into the Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska, and catches twenty-three salmon in just an hour and a half. These are tired, spawned-out salmon drifting downstream in late autumn; nevertheless, they weigh a good five or six pounds each. Such feasting is comparable to a 180-pound man eating twenty pounds of food and then serving himself more.

The bear keeps eating for another hour, and another, for perhaps six hours, or maybe twelve, and so on the next day and the next, until it retreats well-fattened for its winter hibernation. It will sleep for six months without losing any muscle tissue.

Renowned grizzly expert Barrie K. Gilbert Ph.D. '69 has studied many such bears from observation towers built along rivers in Alaska and British Columbia. A behavioral ecologist at Utah State University for the past twenty-seven years, Gilbert tends to speak of his work in scientific terms, but much of his motivation clearly comes from the hope that his subjects--grizzlies, and bears in general--remain a strong and vital presence on the planet. What intrigues him, and has drawn him back to the nation's wilderness with grant money and graduate students, is that the bears share the river not only with each other but also with fishermen and bear-watchers. Everyone seems to be getting along pretty well.

Everything's Elemental

"It amazes me how differently bears respond to us depending on our treatment of them," Gilbert observes. "I think our eyes are being opened to how benign the relationship can be, how accommodating bears can be when we give them half a chance."

As a survivor of a bear attack himself, Gilbert might seem an unlikely ally. But his understanding of the interactions between bears and people is all the more valuable now that the popularity of bear-viewing tourism is growing. Over the last twenty years, the number of people gathering to watch grizzly bears in Alaska's Katmai National Park has tripled: More than 51,000 people came in 1999 alone. In British Columbia, where coastal grizzlies also gather during salmon runs, the steady supply of eco-tourists now supports around forty companies that offer such "bear-watching services" as small-plane flights over the fishing grounds. Some lodges and camps are booked months ahead of time. One especially popular reserve in Alaska, the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, has had to limit its visitors by issuing permits through a lottery.

Is this good for the bears? Perhaps, says Gilbert. It may motivate more people to support bear conservation, which involves touchy issues like hunting quotas, logging, road building, and development. It may also bring tourist dollars to local economies. However, he warns, unchecked tourism could also disturb bears, scaring them away from the rich salmon streams during the seasons when they most need the calories. With this in mind, tour guides and lodge owners have adopted voluntary guidelines much like those used by whale-watching boats.

Grizzlies are complex creatures. Gilbert and his students have found a great deal of variation among individual bears in terms of their response to people. Younger grizzlies, or "subadults," often move into areas where older bears have been displaced by people. Male grizzlies are usually more wary of people than females with cubs; some mothers may even try to be close to people.

Duke zoologist Peter Klopfer, who was Gilbert's major professor and remains a close friend, recalls with pleasure a bear-watching trip he and Gilbert made two years ago after they'd kayaked around Alaska's remote Aleutian Peninsula. "We finished a couple of days early, so Barrie arranged for a pilot to take us over to Brooks Falls in Katmai to see grizzlies. When we flew in, all the rangers welcomed him--they knew him--and then they explained that they needed him to solve what had become a huge problem. A female grizzly was parking her cubs on the main trail every day and then going off some distance to fish. Thus, the people trying to walk to the viewing platforms couldn't pass along the trail. It was causing all sorts of trouble. Barrie watched and studied this for about half an hour, and then he started laughing. 'That mother bear is smart,' he told them. 'She's figured out that her cubs are safe from male bears if they're near people, so she's using the crowd as her babysitter.' And he was absolutely right."

If coastal grizzlies of Alaska and British Columbia can thrive even as people join them during the salmon runs, what does this say about getting along better with grizzlies in places like Yellowstone and Glacier National Park? Every year aggressive "problem bears" in the Rockies have to be killed or moved because of conflicts with people. Some of them have acquired a taste for food found around campsites, especially during hunting season, and some are protecting cubs. Others are reacting defensively, like the Yellowstone grizzly that badly mauled Gilbert on a windy day in 1977. He was hiking in the park's backcountry with a graduate student when they surprised the bear; the student eventually managed to frighten it away.

Gilbert believes that the coastal bears of Alaska and British Columbia are more tolerant of people because there is "more food, fewer hungry bears, and thus less payoff to be aggressive." It doesn't seem to have much to do with bear numbers; the density of bears in Katmai is a hundred times higher than that of Yellowstone or Glacier. These latter remnant populations are surrounded by human settlement and human activity, and they are believed to be in trouble. Their gene pools are weakened by a lack of movement of bears in and out of the ecosystem. Their naturally low reproductive rate makes many biologists wonder if there is enough breeding in Yellowstone to keep the species from disappearing there. And the bears cannot seem to stay out of trouble. In years of low food, especially when the whitebark pine nut crop falls short, the bear's nose leads it to wander out of the wilderness and into conflict with people. And a problem bear is as good as dead. Humans, whether authorized or not, are by far the leading cause of death for bears.

Grizzlies are not particularly territorial. They do have home ranges, but the larger home ranges of males usually overlap with the ranges of as many as five females. Where food is plentiful, there are more bears per unit area and their home ranges are smaller. To Gilbert, this implies that bears "do not have inherent behavioral limitations to their densities," and that the key to restoring bears in places like Yellowstone is to enhance the food supply in the remote backcountry.