Grizzlies in the mist – An Irishwoman’s Diary on reintroducing bears to California’s wilderness

Wait a minute. Are they kidding us? Leonardo Di Caprio's mauling in The Revenant wasn't scary enough? Or are they trying to solve the Malthusian population dilemma?

News that the state is thinking of bringing back the grizzly "brown" bear or ursus arctus to the Golden State's wilderness came as a shock. Yet it's drawn almost no debate. Reintroducing the grizzly isn't as crazy as it sounds, and comes up regularly.

The last Californian grizzly went to its maker at the business end of a Winchester barrel in 1926, accused of stealing apples. Jacob Rice, the rancher who shot it, reportedly regretted it. A disturbing photo survives. “Far as we know that was the last grizzly killed in California,” said his grandson Wally. “Grandpa never liked that because he was a bear guy.”

We’re all bear guys. Our state flag still sports a slouching grizzly, from back when American settlers christened California “the Bear Republic”.

They were numbered in the ten thousands throughout post-Gold Rush decades in the West, until harsh treatment by the ranchers finished them off.

Grizzlies continue to arouse intense fascination because they’re intelligent, charismatic, magnificent and the fiercest of mammals, seeming near-human with their habit of standing on hind legs.

As official state animal, the grizzly adorns things everywhere: flag and seal, T-shirts, backpacks. A huge stuffed grizzly called Mammoth graces Sacramento’s California Museum. Eight feet tall and 2,000 pounds, he’s part of “Bear In Mind”, a cultural legacy exhibit.

Once upon a time grizzlies roamed all over the West as far south as Mexico, but they’ve been on the endangered list decades in the “Lower 48”. And they’re lonesome animals these days, roaming up to a thousand square miles in search of mates and food, often cut off by fires and starvation, their forests dwindling and numbers threatened. Even Canada is running out. Alaska’s Katmai is one of their few last havens, along with Glacier and Yellowstone parks, where they are resurging, thanks to careful conservation management.

As for the 2105 death of Lance Crosby in Yellowstone, he was hiking alone without bear spray when he surprised a mother grizzly with cubs. His partly eaten body was found next day. After DNA testing, the bear was sedated, anaesthetised and put down.

Not so cuddly

The cuddliness of bears is a fond mirage, shared by President Theodore Roosevelt, the “Teddy Bear” originator who refused to shoot a bear cub while hunting, regarding it as “unsportsmanlike”.

Is this nostalgia datable back to the dancing bears of Woodward Gardens in San Francisco, and other early amusement parks? Or to the bear that Irish-born courtesan Lola Montez kept in her garden shed, whom she taught her trademark “Spider Dance.” You can still visit her bear shed up in Grass Valley.

Or is it for those notorious bull-and-bear fights that the Mexican cowboys of yore indulged in, whirling lassos to catch bears in mountain meadows?

Marc Kenyon is the bear biologist and director of California’s Human-Wildlife Conflict programme. Hirsute and bearded, he knows everything there is to know about bears. Kenyon is part of a meta-debate going on among wildlife keepers in the West about our and their futures.

Conflicts

While there is still a huge amount of wilderness in the West, the building surge and warming climate has caused all kind of odd human-wildlife conflicts for Kenyon to referee.

His work is mostly relocating the naughty black bears who pick up bad habits from humans.

A popular pastime in the Sierras used to be watching bears picking over garbage, and it corrupted them.

But like other conservationists, his argument is that this apex mammal, this keystone of all species, is part of a long line of development that keeps other species in manageable numbers – elk, moose, wolves – since without them, we are potentially overrun. There are already signs of this.

One thing we’re not overstocked with is salmon, the bear favourite. Critics point out that if you reintroduce bears in a wilderness, they’ll naturally be drawn to food sources.

“Bears like to roam, and they roam for very long distances,” says Kenyon. Up to a thousand miles, critics of overpopulation may delight to hear.

They're not onto a winner yet. Grizzly or brown bears kill only two people a year on average. The movie Grizzly Man relates the real-life tale of the delusional bear-fancier Timothy Treadwell – a one-time wannabe barman on TV series Cheers who ended up as bear chow, identified by his watch.

Director Werner Herzog believed that Treadwell was a depressive who suffered from a death wish.

Grizzly Man is grisly indeed – a chilling self-recorded account of how Treadwell spent his vacations in Katmai National Park in Alaska. He sweet-talked his favourite grizzly, "Miss Chocolate", until Bear 141 began angling for his pre-hibernation protein bonanza.

Most Alaskans are on Bear 141’s side, and scorn Treadwell for having brought his girlfriend into the fray.

And in San Francisco we have another “bear” – a furry, bearded, gay guy with a tendency to wear leather vests and haunt “leather” bear bars. Gay Pride is coming up, so we’re expecting big teddy bear picnics. And there were plenty of bears at large over the recent Gay Pride weekend.