What Bears Teach Us

By Sarah Elmeligi and John E. Marriott

A lavishly illustrated book that explores the complex behavioural characteristics of North America’s largest land carnivores by examining the bear–human relationship from the bear’s perspective.

From the first moment Sarah Elmeligi came eye to eye with a grizzly bear, her life changed. In a moment that lasted mere seconds, she began to question everything she thought she knew about bears. How could this docile creature be the same one with a fearsome reputation for vicious attacks? Through years of research, Elmeligi grew to appreciate that bears are so much more than data points, stunning photos, and sensational online stories. Elmeligi expertly weaves the science of bear behaviour with her passionate account of personal encounters. Dive into the life of a bear biologist as Sarah’s colleagues recount their own “stories from the field” – intimate moments with bears where they were connected to an animal with personality, decision-making capabilities, and a host of engaging behaviours.

Join Elmeligi and Marriott on a journey that examines and shares the behaviour of black, grizzly, and polar bears in North America in a way you’ve never seen before. What Bears Teach Us will surprise you, inspire you, foster your curiosity, and teach you something new about bears and maybe even yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RMB Rocky Mountain Books
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781771603942

Sarah Elmeligi

Sarah Elmeligi has been working with bears for nearly 20 years. After completing her Masters research examining the impacts of bear-viewing tourism on bear behaviour in the K’tzim-a-deen Grizzly Bear Sanctuary on the northern tip of the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, she completed her PhD studying grizzly bear habitat use of hiking trails in the Canadian Rocky Mountain national parks. Sarah is truly an interdisciplinary researcher and values incorporating the human dimension in her understanding of the bear–human relationship. Her research has been published in books, magazines, and scientific journals and presented at conferences around the world. Away from research, Sarah has worked tirelessly to increase protection of bear habitats and move communities towards successfully coexisting with bears. She has represented bears and their conservation as a scientist, environmentalist, and government land use planner. She currently lives in Canmore, Alberta, with her husband and daughters. For more information about Sarah’s work, please visit www.saraheconsulting.com.

Book preview

The silhouette of a bear standing up in shallow water, mist coming off of the surface of the still lake, obscuring the bear's features.

What Bears Teach Us

Text by Sarah Elmeligi

Photography by John E. Marriott

Foreword by Kevin Van Tighem

Rocky Mountain Books logoThree fluffy baby black bears sitting on a ledge of a sheer rock face, looking down at something. They are all cuddled together.A beautiful white-beige bear walking across a fallen log over a surging river. It's a wet day in the rainforest, and everything looks lush and green.

For all my teachers, human and bear alike.

For Scruffy, Blondie and Lucy, Darkie, 72, 135, 122, 148, and all the bears who have taught me so many things over the years.

A large bear walks across a lush field at the base of a mountain range. Mist swirls above the pine trees on the mountain, obscuring its peaks.

An adult male grizzly bear in the Khutzeymateen, BC

A stark photo of a dark lake (almost black) with a barely discernable background, only broken by a thin strip of sunlit land extending into the water, with a bear walking toward the along it.

A grizzly bear on the shores of the Khutzeymateen, BC

A bear holds up a fish to its mouth as it sits submerged in a grey, icy-looking river. Seagulls and other birds sit on the surface and on rocks jutting out of the water in the distance. In the background are snow covered pine trees on mountain slopes.

Female grizzly bear dining on salmon in the Chilcotin, BC

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Bears and People in North America: An Ever-Evolving Dynamic

Chapter 1: Patience and Tolerance

Seafood or Berries for Dinner?

Life on the British Columbia Coast

Life in Alberta’s Mountains

Management Conundrums

Stories from the Field

Mating Season in the Khutz

Chapter 2: Adaptation and Coexistence

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bear? It Depends…

Predictability as the Mother of Adaptation

Coexistence

Stories from the Field

There’s a Bear in My Parking Lot!

A Human Perspective by Courtney Hughes, PhD

Chapter 3: Knowing When to Walk Away

Bears That Stand Their Ground

The Role People Play

What We Learn

Stories from the Field

A Quiet Run-In by Dan Rafla

Chapter 4: Resilience

Arctic Living

Resilience in the Face of Climate Change

What, Where and When to Eat

Human–Bear Conflict

A Future for Polar Bears

Stories from the Field

Arctic Non-Adventures by Andrew Derocher

Chapter 5: Living in the Present Based on Lessons from the Past

How Bears Learn

Lessons Learned From and Around People

The Story of Bear 148

Stories from the Field

Personality Shapes Who You Are by Sydney R. Stephens

Chapter 6: Just Being Yourself

Stories from the Field

Swimming is for the Birds, not the Bears

Being Born Different – The Story of Booboo and Yogi by Julia McKay

Bibliography

Notes

Landmarks

Foreword

There is no mention of bears in the Bible story of the Garden of Eden. But they must have been there. They have accompanied us on every step of our human journey through the ages. In fact, in many Indigenous cultures they have always been our teachers. Bears taught us what foods are edible, how to travel through complex terrain and how to be humble, alert, intelligent – in short: truly human. There are those who believe that human beings are the end point and highest achievement of the evolutionary process. Bears have a way of letting us know we aren’t, and that that’s okay.

After all, evolution hasn’t achieved any final outcome because it’s always in play and will never end until life itself ends. We think of evolution as a process of genetic change and the selection of new forms of life through selection – natural and otherwise. But human culture evolves, too. And so does bear culture. Because through our interactions we continue to select behaviours and survival strategies in one another. When we stopped hunting grizzly bears, grizzly behaviours began to change in response; some mother bears even began raising their young near our communities, evidently by choice. When we invented capsaicin bear sprays, human culture, at least in bear country, evolved too. And so it goes.

There is a school of interpretation that suggests humans were never banished from Eden – that we live in it today but that our banishment is simply a product of our own hubris. We lock ourselves out daily simply because we think of ourselves as superior to the rest of nature, and hence separate from it. That sense of separateness deprives us of the ability to truly integrate with and be one with the living Creation of which we are really only one part. What a loss – because that living world is the ultimate source of our humanness. Like the bear, we have been shaped by Nature.

In today’s troubled times, when the threads of biodiversity are coming unravelled and the very climate is increasingly something we don’t recognize, it might be that the bear’s role as teacher is more important than ever before. It could even be that there is still a way back into that mythic garden, if we would simply stop assuming we can find our way there on our own. There is nothing wrong with turning to a guide for help. Just as Ursa Major, in its slow arc around the night sky, always points unerringly to the North Star, perhaps the earthly ursines with whom we share the mountains, forests, coastal estuaries and river bottoms can point us to a sustaining and better relationship with the living world of Nature that is not just our home, but the source of all our being. After all, they sure know their way around.

If so, then Sarah Elmeligi and John Marriott are timely intermediaries. Learning from the bear can begin, for all of us, with learning about the bear. And about ourselves. Because it’s a two-way relationship – and that’s one of the most important points of this book.

Even just for practical reasons, learning about bears in a respectful way is a worthwhile project. Because, perhaps more so than at any time in the past century and a half, humans and bears occupy the same spaces. Prosperity, recreational technology, selfie culture and a growing yearning for connection to what is real all conspire to put humans everywhere in bear country. We live in bear country. We recreate there. We work there. At the same time, as some bear populations begin to recover from a century of mismanagement, bears are turning up in places we never expected to see them again. Grizzly bears sometimes surprise pheasant hunters and farmers well out on the prairie now. Black bears wander into Vancouver and Calgary and other urban places.

We’re stuck with each other, like it or not. We need to figure out how to get along. But it’s more than that: we need to find new ways of thinking about and knowing one another. The bears are actually doing pretty well at that. Some of us are too. But the rest of us could use some help. And that’s what this exceptional book offers.

In metaphorically locking ourselves out of Eden – by trading humble coexistence with other beings for an isolated, human-centred objectification of Nature and a redefining of what many Indigenous people call all our relations into bundles of resources to be exploited – we lost our ability to understand Nature. Instead, we began to fear it. Fear is founded on ignorance. We fear what we do not know. And fear is what gives rise to violence and hatred.

The best antidote to fear is knowledge and understanding. And knowledge and understanding are part of the foundation of love and joy. People sometimes ask me if I’m not scared to be around bears. No, I’m not; I love being around them. They bring me joy. And they continue to teach me.

By learning to know bears better, and by studying in order to understand our own responsibilities as fellow citizens of what may well be the only living planet in the Universe, we can replace the fear and hatred that too often, in the past, characterized our view of these large carnivores with respect and trust. For some, that might seem hard to imagine. To them, I can only say: read on. And spend time with the photographs; gaze deeply. Bears don’t only live on the land; they live in our heads. Let’s give them better homes there by getting to know them better; it can only help both us and them.

Bears and humans: we may seem like very different creatures but we’re in this thing together. If we can get it right, we will continue that age-old journey together through time, space and life. Who knows where that journey might lead? Perhaps back to a garden we never left, but simply forgot how to recognize. Perhaps once we see bears more clearly for who they actually are, we will find that those ancient teachers can guide us back to some of what we’ve lost.

Or perhaps not. But it would certainly be worth finding out.

KVT December 2019

Acknowledgements

As with all projects in my career, this book is a culmination of efforts and support from many people. I would like to thank all of my graduate supervisors from both my master’s and PhD programs who have always challenged me by asking the right questions. Each of them has made my work stronger and more robust and I am eternally grateful for their guidance. Thank you, John Shultis, Pam Wright, Michael Gillingham, Owen Nevin, Ian Convery, Gordon Stenhouse and David Gummer.

I would also like to thank all of the contributors to this book: Sydney R. Stephens, Julia McKay, Dan Rafla and Andrew Derocher. Your stories make this book better, more interesting.

Thank you to all of my bear biologist colleagues who have philosophized, hypothesized, mused and chatted with me about bears over the years. Your stories, perspectives, advice, experience and thoughts have helped shape how I see bears and approaching working with them. I truly believe that together we can recover and conserve bears across North America.

Thank you to every biologist and manager who researched and wrote every reference in this book. Your work is invaluable, and I am grateful that you shared it with the world.

Thank you to Kevin Van Tighem for writing the foreword and for the many conversations about landscape management over the years.

Thank you to Jamie Hahn for bringing bears into my life, and also to Megan Baker for proving that you can go home again, especially when home is the magical Khutzeymateen Wilderness Lodge floating in K’tzim-a-deen Inlet.

Finally, thank you to John E. Marriott, my partner in crime on this venture. John and I have been friends for a long time. It has been my absolute honour to work with him to put this book together. His images inspire me.

A sunlit grizzly bear walks through a golden field at the base of a dark, shaded mountain. The bear's face is close to the ground as if it's sniffing.

Large male grizzly bear, Khutzeymateen, BC

A close up of a huge grizzly with a mouthful of long blades of grass, chewing calmly in a grassy field.

Grizzly bear, Khutzeymateen, BC

Introduction

The first time I looked into the deep brown eyes of a grizzly bear, I think I stopped breathing. For a moment, all was still. I was doing something I had been told never to do. I was sitting mere metres away from one of North America’s largest carnivores – looking him right in the eyes. He looked back at me with a lazy, quizzical expression. A lazy strand of water dripped from his lips as he munched on long blades of sedge grass from the estuary shore. I just stared.

Thoughts raced through my mind: What would happen now? What would he do? What would I do? Was this safe? This was crazy. Nobody should be this close to a bear. What am I even doing here?

I was stranded in space and time. Unable to move and unable to speak. But then I exhaled and relaxed. The bear just kept chewing grass as if he didn’t even care I was there. I could hear his tongue and saliva processing the grass and swallowing it. I could hear him breathing. Even though I was in a small Zodiac boat with several other people, in that moment it was just me and this big, beautiful bear.

His eyes were … soft, quiet, and relaxed. I was not confronted by the vicious man-eating carnivore I had grown up to believe grizzly bears were. Although he was massive, with long claws and long teeth, I felt no fear, just wonder and a little confusion. Was everything I assumed to be true about bears wrong?

After a few minutes, I was drawn out of my reverie by the sound of the water lapping on the sides of our boat as we slowly manoeuvred away, leaving this beautiful bear to eat and laze about in the long grasses of the K’tzim-a-deen (Khutzeymateen) Grizzly Bear Sanctuary in northern British Columbia. I was forever changed.

Since that moment, I have devoted my career to researching and understanding a misunderstood species of the Canadian wilderness. It started with my master’s in the K’tzim-a-deen Inlet in northern BC and eventually led to a PhD in Banff, Yoho and Kootenay National Parks in Alberta and BC. Working with environmental organizations, I have campaigned to protect important grizzly bear habitat. Working with government, I have written plans that focus human use away from bear habitat. I don’t always have opportunities to stare into the eyes of a grizzly bear, but those moments are the ones that drive me forward professionally. Most biologists who work with bears have similar experiences, moments where their breath was taken away by watching a bear be a bear. These animals surprise us, inspire us, foster our curiosity and teach us.

Over the years since my first encounter, I have learned many things about bears. My research and that of many others has helped me understand how bears use habitat around people and how they access all the resources they need for survival. This book will share some of that scientific knowledge. Spending hours in the field, I’ve learned about and witnessed their individual character traits, and I’ve seen how that individuality affects the data we collect and the recommendations that stem from it. Like people, bears are unique. How one bear responds to people may be completely different from the way another bear in the same situation would. As a biologist, I find this individuality challenging to reconcile with statistical analyses, but as a nature lover I find it an inspiring and beautiful thing to witness.

Over the years, I’ve also learned many things from bears. When watching a bear surrounded by the nature paparazzi while doing nothing more than eating in peace, I’ve learned patience and tolerance (Chapter 1). Most of the time in these instances, the bear walks away or continues eating as if throngs of people weren’t there. Working with bears on Canada’s west coast and in the Rocky Mountains, I’ve learned the importance of adapting to your surroundings and making the best of what you have. Through these adaptations, bears have taught me the meaning of coexistence and how it varies based on where you are (Chapter 2). Even though we are drawn to stories of bear attacks, bears usually avoid conflict with people and other bears. Each time I encounter a bear, I attempt to first understand what the bear is thinking or feeling. These moments have taught me to identify the things that are worth standing up for, and the things that just aren’t worth the fight (Chapter 3). In this time of a rapidly changing climate, I’ve watched bears adapt, or not, to their changing habitats. Polar bears need to adapt to irreversible habitat changes, which has taught me about resilience (Chapter 4). Adaptation and resilience are essential behavioural traits that are based on bears’ ability to learn. I’ve witnessed bears learning from their mothers, each other, and humans, yet they still live their day-to-day lives the best way they can. These moments have taught me how to live in the present using lessons from the past (Chapter 5). Finally, watching bears be bears and studying their data has given me a glimpse into their behaviour patterns. They are individual and can change their minds based on new information in the moment. A bear isn’t just a bear. One of the most critical things bears have taught me is the importance of being myself, each and every day (Chapter 6).

A polar bear looks up at the back of a tall, white buggy suspended above the gorund by about a meter, with three people peering down at the bear over the edge of the buggy.

Viewing a polar bear from a Tundra Buggy® near Churchill, MB

A majestic polar bear stands with head held high, sniffing the air in a field of jagged ice.

Polar bear on the floe edge off the north coast of Baffin Island, NU

Three bears rip into a large salmon as they sit half submerged in a river.

A grizzly bear family shares a fresh sockeye salmon, Chilcotin, BC

A white bear sits on a mossy ledge that leads down to a shallow rainforest river. There are two smaller black bears around the white bear, sniffing around the river and forest.

Ma’ah, a well-known Kermode bear on the BC Coast, and her two black cubs giving way to a large male black bear cruising the creek for salmon.

Bears have taught me to slow down, examine my surroundings, and then decide what to do next. Bears are complex animals – they think, process events and make decisions on stimuli. How they react changes as they learn or adapt over time. This makes them a fascinating species to study, because the more time you spend with them, the more you see their complexity and know that standard management approaches don’t always work. The more you look into their eyes, the deeper they go, and the more you understand how little we know about bears. This book contains science, musings, opinions and stories. Through Stories from the Field my colleagues and I share special moments with bears that influenced how we perceive them. Contributions from my colleagues are in their own words and are meant to share some of the diversity in how people who work with bears interpret their behaviours. There are many different views and perspectives on bears, and not everyone, even among my colleagues, will agree with some of my opinions and perspectives. And that is great. When working with complex animals like bears, we will never all agree, and we should not aspire to. We should aspire to think, research, discuss, examine and share. I hope reading this book, and the stories and science contained in its pages, will inspire you to ask different questions and think about your relationship with bears differently.

Bears and People in North America: An Ever-Evolving Dynamic

There are three species of bears living in North America: grizzly bears (Ursus arctos, also known as brown bears in the United States), black bears (Ursus americanus) and polar bears (Ursus maritimus). Grizzly bears were once globally abundant, ranging throughout Asia, Europe and North America, but today this animal is classified as threatened, endangered or vulnerable in most parts of its range.¹ Historically, North American grizzly bear populations ranged from the Arctic to central Mexico, and from the Pacific coast to Hudson Bay. Unrelenting persecution by settlers with modern weapons caused grizzly bear populations to collapse rapidly from 1850