Dangerous Animals I have been asked more than once about hazards of the wilds. We humans seem fascinated, even titillated, by scary stuff, including animals that can hurt us. Given that I’ve spent most of my professional life working around free-ranging grizzly bears and mountain lions—certainly large, certainly well-able to kill an average human—people seem to expect stories from me about hair-raising encounters. Better yet, scars. By objectives standards, I probably have more than my share of such stories, although no scars, especially when it comes to grizzly bears. Mountain lions are comparative pussy cats. But in the final analysis, I would have to reckon tree squirrels as being the mos
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) with Crow Tribal Chairman A.J. Not Afraid Summer is exploding in Yellowstone with new life. Orange baby buffalo chase each other as watchful moms look on, wolf pups discover the big wide world outside their dens, and grizzly bear cubs imitate their mothers digging for biscuitroot. Families are flocking to Yellowstone to partake of this exuberance – and one of the animals they most hope to see are grizzlies. Most of these families do not yet know that any day now, the federal government is expected to strip protections from Yellowstone’s grizzlies (“delisting”), allowing sport hunting right up to the Park borders. With bears’ huge home ranges, killing Park grizzl
Yellowstone National Park is the only place on Earth where bison and grizzly bears coexist in significant numbers. Most people, inured to the on-going ecological holocaust of recent centuries, probably think this 2-million-acre area is huge. Yet the current joint distribution of bison and grizzlies comprises only around 2% of what we once had in this country; 1% of what we once had on this continent; and a truly miniscule fraction of what we once had in the Northern Hemisphere. Bison and brown or grizzly bears of some sort coexisted in close relationship for 10s of thousands of years in a 11,000-mile-long swath from Europe, across Siberia, through northwestern North America, to northeastern
