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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:03:19 GMT -5
The grizzly managed to survive the end of the Pleistocene when the saber-toothed cats and the giant short-faced bears could not. Why? There are a number of factors. First on the list is the grizzlies ability to go into a form of hibernation during the long cold winter months when food is most difficult to obtain. It is doubtful that the short-faced bears shared this ability. Both the grizzly and the short-faced bear were omnivores, meaning that they ate a large variety of foods. This gave them a tremendous advantage over the wolves, hyenas, and big cats. But, it is very likely that the grizzly had a wider range of options over his distant relative the short-faced bear. Could the giant catch fish? Could the giant feast upon ants, termites, and bees? Could the giant dig for burrowing rodents? Could the giant crack open clam shells? Bears have another advantage over other predators. A bear's sense of smell is quite possible the keenest in the animal kingdom. A grizzly's sense of smell is seven-times better than that of a bloodhound. Another quality of bears, perhaps the least known to all but to those who study bears, is their high intelligence. The measuring of intelligence is not an exact science. Many experts, which include wildlife management, biologists, hunters, and animal trainers agree that the level of a bear's intelligence ranks right up there with the higher primates. IMO - I would rank the grizzly on an even keel with the great apes and elephants. A good example of bear intelligence can be seen at the La Brea tar pits to those who pay attention. Thousands of bones have been discovered of wolves and big cats while only a handful of bear bones have found. Why? With his keen sense of smell, the bear remains should have been numbered high. However, a bear has the ability to observe and perceive the situation thus avoiding the natural trap.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:07:44 GMT -5
The Bear Almanac by Gary Brown - Brown bears, native to the Old and New Worlds, live in a temperate climate and are found from the Arctic tundra to the edge of the Gobi Desert.
The Grizzly Almanac by Robert H. Busch.
In 1964, when Alaska experienced the worst earthquake in its history, grizzlies were noticed heading for the hills prior to the event. Many biologists believe that the animals could detect the tiny tremors in the earth that preceded the big quake and left the lowlands as a result.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:08:59 GMT -5
The Beast that walks like Man by Harold McCracken. The grizzly bear is certainly the most pugnacious and extraordinary survivor of that prehistoric era. Just why and how the mastodons and the saber-toothed tigers, and all of those other mighty creatures of the bygone past, became doomed to complete extinction by nature's inexorable laws of survival is still one of the many unsolved mysteries which man would like to understand. It is not that the grizzly was smarter or that he clawed the others into the dust. Such things have repeatedly happened through the eons of time; and there is no evident rhyme, reason, or plan in the pattern by which species have been wiped from the face of the earth.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:10:46 GMT -5
Bears of the World by Paul Ward and Suzanne Kynaston.
The relative importance of meat, however, should not be underestimated; in terms of energy, meat has a greater yield on a weight for weight basis than plants. In Tibet, brown bears are more actively predacious than in other areas and meat forms a greater proportion of the diet. In contrast, Japanese brown bears eat almost no meat; one study showed that 98.7% of the diet was made up of vegetative material, particularly fruits, berries, acorns and hogs funnel. The remaining 1.3% comprised flying insects that aggregate under rocks around lake shores and an occasional sample of local livestock. Brown bears living along coastlines have access to the stranded bodies of sea mammals, invertebrates ( e.g. molluscs and crabs ), and vegetation ( e.g. seaweed ).
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:11:12 GMT -5
Yellowstone Bears in the Wild by James C. Halfpenny.
Hyperphagia is the intense biological drive to find and consume food that bears experience in the fall. Hyperphagia is the season of fat accumulation. The duration and rate of food intake increases dramatically. Bears will often go days without sleeping in order to eat. They gain significant weight, primarily fat. Weight gain may be as much as three pounds per day. A bear might gain 100 pounds during the month of September alone. Roadside ursophiles notice behavioral changes that indicate hyperphagia. Bears may feed all day without sleeping or resting. Day after day, a bear may be in the same spot, often moving only a few yards but constantly eating. Almost nothing distracts the feeding bear. The search for high energy, high quality foods is paramount, and this unrelenting drive often leads bears away from protected areas. Bears are drawn to food sources such as garbage, bird feeders, hunting areas, and hunting camps. Leaving the remote reaches of the ecosystem often leads to negative encounters with people.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:11:36 GMT -5
Yellowstone Bears in the Wild by James C. Halfpenny.
Homing - Another, almost legendary behavior of bears is their homing ability. As soon as managers started trapping and moving bears, they learned that bears could quickly find their way home. One such event of his youth impressed Lance Craighead, executivec director of the Craighead Environmental Research Institute. About 1963 an orphan grizzly cub appeared along the road in Hayden Valley. Lance doesn't remember if they even knew what happened to the cub's mother. The cub created major traffic jams so rangers trapped it and moved it deeper into Hayden Valley. The cub quickly returned and was trapped again, with the same result. Now it was constantly on the road and Lance and others feared for its life. The cub was captured again. This time it was taken by boat across Yellowstone Lake and released on the Promontory. One week later the cub was back in Hayden Valley. Even today Lance doesn't know how the cub found its way back. Maybe it involved a visual clue such as Mount Washburn. A bear's innate homing ability is powerful and obviously develops at a young age.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:11:58 GMT -5
Published April 17, 2014
The Gobi is Earth’s fifth largest desert, sprawling across half a million square miles of southern Mongolia and northern China. It sees temperatures of minus 40°F in winter and 120 in summer, and gets just two to eight inches of annual rainfall. Some years parts of the region receive no rain at all. Windstorms sweep through day and night, with gusts strong enough to send a tent sailing away over the horizon. When winds are calm, the Gobi’s immense silence can feel as overwhelming as the heat.
Signs of life come as a surprise in this sun-blasted, wind-scoured landscape. Peering through binoculars, I at first see just barren rock rising in ranks of mountains. The only things that move are dust devils and the shimmering heat.
Slowly, as I discover where to look, animal forms emerge: A lizard rests in the thin shade of a saxaul shrub. A saker falcon lifts off from a distant cliffside. Gerbils poke their heads from burrows.
But many days pass before I finally lay eyes on the animal I crossed half a world to see: a Gobi bear, among the rarest and least known large mammals on Earth. There are perhaps no more than two or three dozen left in the wild, and none live in captivity anywhere.
This male stops at an oasis to sip water, then rests nearby. Elated by our good luck and mesmerized by the sight, my companions and I watch the bear for two hours, from late afternoon to nightfall. Most bears become active toward day’s end, but this one remains oddly still. When he finally attempts to walk, his gait seems pained and slow. He must have traveled a great distance to reach water, I tell myself, and the journey might have left him exhausted and temporarily lame.
In reality, the bear is dying. A week later a ranger finds his body near the same oasis. The old male had likely emerged from hibernation in poor condition at a time when food plants were just starting to grow.
For those working to bolster the Gobi bear’s alarmingly low numbers, the death of even one individual underscores the urgency of their task. So too do the clear signs that boom times are at hand in Mongolia. Vast deposits of minerals, precious metals, and fossil fuels are being uncovered in the country, especially in its desert. Nearly a third of the nation’s income may soon come from a massive new copper and gold mine in the Gobi. What may one day rank as the world’s largest coal mine is under development in the desert as well. The suspected mineral wealth here is so great that industry players have taken to calling this land “Minegolia.”
While storm clouds darken the Gobi bear’s horizon, there are flickers of hope. The Mongolian government declared 2013 the “Year of Protecting the Gobi Bear,” with a promise of more money for conserving the species. The Mongolian public has embraced the beleaguered bear as a national treasure, all the more precious for its rarity. Not long ago a gold-mining comThe people of southwestern Mongolia have long known of the mysterious animal they called mazaalai, but credible reports were mixed with tall tales of a shaggy, humanlike creature roaming the wildest reaches of the desert. Not until 1943 did a Russian scientist-explorer confirm for the outside world that Gobi bears actually exist. Although they belong to the species Ursus arctos, commonly known as the brown bear or grizzly, their coats are often more bronze than brown and show blazes of white on the forequarters and neck. They also tend to be smaller than most North American grizzlies, whose living conditions are plush by comparison.pany sought access to protected land crucial to the bear’s survival. The government turned down the request, at least for now. One genetic study suggests that the Gobi lineage is an ancient one, closer than any other to the ancestral brown bear, which first arose in Asia. Experts originally considered Gobi bears a distinct subspecies, gobiensis. However, they may turn out to be an isolated group of the subspecies isabellinus, still found in China’s Tien Shan mountains and the Himalaya.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:12:25 GMT -5
“They’ve found a way to live in one of the most extreme environments on the planet.” —Harry Reynolds, Gobi bear expert
“Bears are a kind of umbrella species. You save them, you save big chunks of habitat.” —Harry Reynolds, Gobi bear expert
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:12:47 GMT -5
California's Day of the Grizzly by William B. Secrest.
Fresno Morning Republican, Dec 7, 1919.
Here was an animal of omnivorous habit and hence well prepared for getting some sort of usable food almost anywhere he might go. Of tremendous strength which enabled a larger individual bear to kill a horse or an ox at one blow and to drag it away for storage. Of astonishing dexterity, which enabled him to pick up with claws as if with chop sticks, individual ants from beneath an overturned log or boulder. Of such quickness that he could catch trout from a stream or ground squirrels from a burrow. Of such speed that he could outrun a horse for short distances on level ground and long distances on rough ground. And of such tenacity of life that he has been repeatedly reported as fighting for some time after being shot through the heart. Having all these things in his favor, why should he disappear from earth in less than half a century? There are several reasons, the most important of which center on that enemy of nature, civilized man.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:13:07 GMT -5
BEARS of the last frontier by Chris Morgan... Bears are among the most intelligent mammals on earth, but they are wildly misunderstood. We set out to immerse ourselves in their world and to further understand these majestic animals on their own ground. Our journey covered more than 3,000 miles by road and many thousands more by bush plane. Alaska harbors all three of North America's bear species, from 300 pound blacki bears to polar and brown bears weighing well over half a ton. It is home to the highest mountains on the continent, vast glaciers, immense forests, and a level of isolation to be found nowhere else in the United States.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:13:25 GMT -5
BEARS of the last frontier... My college years provided an opportunity to aid a research team led by grizzly bear and wolf biologist Peter Clarkson for six months in the Canadian Arctic to study the needs of barren ground grizzly bears. Helping to tranquilize bears from a helicopter in the open tundra of the Northwest Territories gave me an incredible respect for bears and their ability to thrive in a myriad of different habitats. The species was the same as the one I had become familiar with, but in no way did these arctic bears have anything in common with their Spanish cousins. In this harsh landscape, they had to rely upon their intelligence, memory, and ingenuity when it came to finding sufficient food - mostly in the form of roots, berries, and the occasional caribou carcass. It was a tough life sustained by tough animals.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:13:47 GMT -5
BEARS of the last frontier... The Deosai Plateau, one of the highest plateaus in the world, nestled among giant Himalayan peaks, harbors one of the world's least known bear populations. Like their relatives in Spain and the Canadian Arctic, these bears are well adapted to their local environment: in this case, an incredibly hostile treeless plain at 14,000 feet where a diet of sedges and whistling marmots makes life possible. My time here ( northern Pakistan ) opened my eyes to the passion people from different walks of life have for bears.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:14:15 GMT -5
BEARS of the last frontier... The bears here are certainly a hardy breed, but even they have to avoid the harshness of winter by denning for as long as seven months of the year. Despite the fact that Denali has a reasonable supply of meat in the form of caribou, moose, and sheep. Bears here still depend most heavily on vegetation. Around 80 or even 90 percent of their diet comes from plants, among them crowberry, blueberry, hedysarum roots, grasses, fireweed shoots, horsetail, sedge, and soapberry, an important diet item that bears can consume at the rate of 200,000 per day.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:14:37 GMT -5
BEARS of the last frontier... Thankfully for the grizzly bear, the arctic ground squirrel also successfully made it across the land bridge to the new world and continues to thrive in Denali. These insignificant-looking little creatures play an important role in the ecosystem. Preyed upon by everything from snowy owls and gyrfalcons to red foxes, wolves, and grizzly bears, they have every right to be a little nervous. Weighing in at a mere one and a half pounds, the ground squirrel lives on the edge. It's probably a good thing they sleep for eight months of the year as they really have to have their wits about them for the other four.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:15:02 GMT -5
BEARS of the last frontier... "Love at first sight" were the words I entered in my journal after seeing the western Brooks Range for the very first time in the spring, and they stir the same emotions now as they did then. -Its reputation for wildlife is also impressive as it is home to perhaps the highest concentration of grizzly bears in the Alaskan Arctic, which along with wolves and wolverines benefit from the estimated 125 million pounds of caribou meat that traverses this area. -They are an ancient species completely at home on this northern landscape. The earliest fossil records were found in the Yukon Territory and date back 1.5 million years. They have shared this landscape with woolly mammoths, steppe bison, camels, and giant beavers measuring eight feet long and weighing two hundred pounds. Moose, musk ox, and grizzly bears survived alongside the caribou and, to this day, also call this place home. The caribou have become an essential component of the ecosystems here, aerating soils, providing nutrients in the form of thousands of tons of droppings, and even contributing insulation lining materials for the nests of lemmings and birds.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:15:22 GMT -5
BEARS of the last frontier... My sense of respect for bears soars here ( Brooks Range ). If I didn't know that this place could be at times packed with meat, I'd be seriously looking at it from a bear's perspective and saying, "No way, I'm off to the coast." After waking from a long winter sleep, of fasting, the bears are ravenous but have to be content with flowers, roots, sedges, and ground squirrels until the caribou flow across the land like life-giving blood during the calving season. Then, the feast begins.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:15:48 GMT -5
A Historic Grizzly... A retired B.L.M. ( Bureau of Land Management ) person I know did some trapping of grizzly bears to relocate them. They dif most of their trapping near the Canadian border and close to the North Fork of the Flathead River. He told me that one of the bears they trapped traveled almost two hundred miles back to its hangout. It took this bear only a couple of weeks to do so and over some of the worst terrain! I heard that the joke amonst the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks is that the released bear will be back to where it was trapped before the Department's personnel who trapped the bear will be home. The great bears have a sense of direction and the way God instilled this in them is just amazing!
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:16:07 GMT -5
National Geographic - Yellowstone - May 2016: Grizzly Bear: The Opportunist. According to studies, the Yellowstone grizzly consumes 162 plant species, 36 invertebrate species, 26 species of mammals, 26 kinds of cultivated plants and domestic animals, 7 mushrooms, 4 species of fish, 3 species of birds, 1 alga, and 1 amphibian.
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:16:27 GMT -5
California Grizzly - 1955. Grizzlies in more northerly parts of North America and those in the Rockies denned up and were dormant for varying periods during the winter, but those in the southern part of the original range, including California, were abroad throughout the year. According to Seton ( 1909 : 1046 ), the males were active through a longer season than females. Early newspapers contain reports of four encounters with grizzlies in each of the three winter months. Most of these were in the lowlands or warmer foothills, but two were in Shasta County during December. There are several reports of grizzlies active at higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada in winter. A bear was abroad at Leek Springs, El Dorado County, during the winter of 1851 when the snow was 8 feet deep and frozen on the surface ( N 19 ). Grizzly Adams caught or killed bears in the snow season in the central Sierra Nevada ( probably at 4,000 to 5,000 feet elevation )-some when they were abroad, others in their dens. A man was killed by a grizzly during December, 1874, in Sierra Valley, four miles west of Sierraville, while snow lay on the ground ( N 85 ).
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Post by brobear on Mar 22, 2017 11:16:54 GMT -5
California Grizzly - 1955. DEATH - The grizzly was so formidable that it probably had few real enemies. It seems likely that once a bear was fully mature, only the physical forces of nature, disease, or actual senility could cause its death. Of grizzlies in the Rockies, Enos Mills ( 1919 : 58 - 60 ) mentions individuals killed by a forest fire, a desert flood, a falling stone from a cliff, and a snowslide. He found one fat young grizzly which, though apparently healthy, had been frozen to death while hibernating during an extremely cold winter with little snow, and had a report of an old bear that perished similarly.
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