Grizzly bears interactions with humans
Slogging through stinging rain and trying to stay upright in a whipping wind might seem punishment for some. But for me, even at age 66, it’s part of how I choose to travel — in a tent, in wild places. There’s nothing like these hardships to deepen my sense of connection to the natural world.
Usually, I travel solo with everything I need stuffed in a backpack. Often, I don’t see anyone for 20 miles at a stretch. I pull off the road and sleep in the back seat of my car. I can subsist on a bag of nuts and dried fruit for days. When an icy front comes blasting in, I’ll have to put on every piece of clothing I’ve packed. My adult daughter is the only person I know who puts up with my spartan ways, so sometimes she tags along on these trips.
Like the time we camped on a lake in Alaska and a grizzly bear came sauntering by. We’d parked the car on a side road and walked a mile down a trail, carrying our camping things for a quick overnight side trip. So especially no food — everyone knows you should never keep food if you’re worried about bears. I did take along a half bottle of wine. I was pretty sure grizzlies don’t drink.
Advertisement
We set up our tent in the brush. Not a soul anywhere. Just the beautiful, vast lake, the rustle of trees and, I noted without thinking much about the kind of food bears like to eat, fish carcasses everywhere. We sat propped up against a log for a while, taking in the water lapping along the shore and the ospreys whooshing off the water. Then we poured ourselves a paper cup of wine and pulled out our notebooks to read under the late afternoon sun, the breeze brushing our skin. A few minutes later, my daughter nudged me and said in a whisper, “Mom, there’s a bear.”
I looked up. He was maybe 15 feet away. The blondish fur and humped neck were disconcerting to see at such close range. The grizzly was compact, not like those oversized monster creatures in the movies who mash their victims to death with a single paw. I guessed he must have been a yearling or 2 years old at the most. He’d rounded a corner and was clearly as surprised as we were to see us, since he stopped in his tracks.
Nature is not benign, but it puts you in touch with something primordial. You battle rain, dense fog or a howling wind. You get soaked, your skin freezes, your clothing blows off. You might run out of water under a blistering sun. You might even get lost and wonder if you’ll ever find your way out of the woods. Yet you keep going back. You go because every step into the wild leads you closer to the beauty of a vast, uninhabited land. You go to surrender to that feeling of amplitude.
Advertisement
So yes, that sense of wonder and awe might be worth a few risks. As my daughter said later, her first thought on spotting the grizzly when he rounded the bend was how her friends would tell the story back home, that she’d been ripped to shreds by a bear. His eyes were beady and wary. They seemed downright mean, the way they seemed to pierce us aggressively, at least from our uncomfortably close perspective.
Like people, bears size up their situation. And as with humans, their reactions are both instinctual and socialized.
There are signs everywhere in Alaska describing the different categories of bears: the wary bear, who has had little human contact; the curious bear; the bear who has come to expect food; the aggressive bear protecting cubs or a kill; and even the pathological bear who tears you apart for no reason.
Advertisement
Of course, no warnings quite match that critical moment when you’re face-to-face with an animal who might kill you.
This grizzly was a wary one. He stopped and seemed to be deciding what he should do. He — I assumed the lone bear was male, maybe because I assumed a female his age would already have cubs — then turned around and disappeared behind a patch of bushes, close to where we’d pitched our tent.
My daughter and I saw our chance and slowly rose from the log to retreat backward, away from the shore, both of us quivering at our very cores. At that moment, we heard the grizzly start to stomp and roar. From behind the bushes we could hear him tearing the foliage and ripping branches from trees.
Uncertain what to do, we cowered at the forest’s verge. I had in my hand a can of pepper spray. Friends had given it to us. They said it was old and they didn’t know how much liquid was left, and, frankly, I wasn’t even sure if I knew how to use it.
Advertisement
A few moments later, the bear reemerged from the brush. He was now about 40 feet away from us; the extra distance we had put between him and us seemed to satisfy him. He padded by along the shore, glancing at us in brief disdain.
My daughter and I stood watching him until he was far, far away and finally disappeared on the other side of the lake.
Share this articleShare“He won’t be back,” I said. How did I know? The animal had made himself clear. He had demonstrated the havoc he could wreak with us, should we provoke him. But he had done so hypothetically. He had performed his theater out of sight, to show us he could kill us — instead of actually killing us. And after the show, he came out to see how we had taken it: apparently well enough for his purposes. He had concluded we would cause him no harm. He saw how afraid we were of him.
Advertisement
I’m not a bear mind-reader, but I felt sure in the course of this encounter that the bear and I were communicating — not with words, obviously, but in some sort of basic primordial way.
Later, consulting an excellent educational video on the Denali National Park website, “You can tell that [the bears] are thinking about things,” the video’s narrator says, noting that the animals are complex and will size up “each individual situation.” Lance Craighead, a bear biologist and director of the Craighead Institute, a conservation biology organization focused on grizzlies, agrees. Bears are very intelligent, he says, smarter than dogs.
The bear who ran into us exhibited what experts call “displacement activity.” He was probably conflicted, Craighead says. Going into the bushes allowed the animal to deal with the unpleasant surprise he experienced meeting us unexpectedly, and to act out his aggressive instincts while deciding what he should do.
Advertisement
In general, Craighead says, bears want to avoid conflict.
“If you give them an opportunity to leave gracefully, they’ll do it,” Craighead says. Turning slowly sideways, so you’re not looking at the bear, can be an effective strategy. The bear thinks: “They backed down, now I can leave.” It gives the bear a chance to save face, Craighead says
Craighead advises hikers to be alert and make noise. Don’t go around texting while you’re in the wilderness. It’s always a good idea to carry pepper spray. Craighead, however, says he has never had to use it. If you carry the can in your hand, cocked and ready to spray, some bears even recognize what it is and avoid you. In any case, pepper spray only works at close range, and even when a bear moves toward you, he may be bluffing and stop short of an actual charge, so using the spray isn’t necessary or even appropriate.
Advertisement
Bears rarely kill people. All they want is to eat and sleep and reproduce. There’s a bigger chance of getting hit twice by lightning, Craighead says, than being mauled by a bear.
Deaths of course make the headlines and become part of grizzly lore: A hiker died because he got too close to the bear he was trying to capture on camera; a girl on a bike was critically injured when she surprised a sow protecting her cubs; a forester carrying a load of food was mauled on a remote beach where he’d pulled up his boat.
These stories stoke our fears, which is good for inspiring caution, but they shouldn’t make us forget that the majority of bear encounters end happily.
As I had assumed, the grizzly that surprised my daughter and me didn’t come back. Cozy in our tent, I slept well, though I can’t say the same for my daughter.
Advertisement
The next morning, we watched a flock of white trumpet swans fly off from a nearby lagoon. We packed up our things and lugged them back to our car.
The sky was blue, the breeze mild and we were ecstatic to be alive in this unkempt wilderness.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMCktcSnmp5nn6q%2FbsDOqGScpJ%2Bosm6xzZymrqakmr9uw8itn2aZXZy%2FqsbZpbBmpalisaLBxqGrnqpdlrulechmrp6qlWLAtr7Pq6CsnZRirq%2BwjKymZq%2BRqHqpsY5rZ2toX2WAcH2SaJtpmZOahnp8jG6cbG5dZn6mrYybaXKaXW6xo4CRn25xaGOWhKC%2F06ipsmaYqbqt