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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:22:54 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. One way to define grizzlies would be a big, hairy, eye-popping opportunities to get your heart rate up and start thinking fast. But what are the animals truly like? All kinds of people seem to believe that they know. In reality, nobody does. And nobody will until we gain more insight into the species' complex suite of behaviors and learning abilities. That's not a criticism of our efforts. It's a tribute to a potent mammal that, like us, is able to operate on many levels and in many different environments. It's also an open-ended invitation to discovery. In a remote and pitiless desert on the other side of the world from North America lives a bear that science understands only poorly so far and the general public isn't aware of at all. One of the scarcest creatures on the planet, it is a type of grizzly so extraordinary that its existence is hard to imagine even after you get to its homeland; in fact, especially after you get to its homeland. Traders, bandits, holy men, and warriors have passed through over the centuries, adding legends and layers of history. But they didn't stay, and this setting was never tamed. It still isn't. Not yet, although.... Oh, hell. Let's just go on so I can show you.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:23:25 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. Gobi, in Mongolian, means "waterless place." Half a million square miles in size, the Great Gobi is one of the Earth's five largest deserts ( outside the frozen polar expanses receiving so little fresh precipitation that they, too, technically qualify as deserts ). The drylands stretch for a thousand miles east and west and as many as six hundred miles north and south, taking in the southern third of Mongolia and much of northern China. This is right at the center of the Asian land mass, so far from any ocean that clouds bearing moisture drop nearly all of it over other landscapes before they get here. Rainfall in the Gobi averages just four to six inches annually. Some years, parts of the countryside never see a drop. Temperatures can reach 122 degrees Fahrenheit in summer and sink to minus 40 in winter. If you imagine the result to be a vast realm of shifting sands, well, you shouldn't. The Gobi is mostly stone.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:24:00 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. What we wanted to find in these live traps were bears. Big, unruly, long-eared, bed-hair-shaggy, chocolate-colored, bronze, or golden Gobi grizzly bears. Ursus arctos, found across much of the Northern Hemisphere, is commonly called the brown bear or grizzly. Gobi bears are a unique variety or subspecies, Ursus arctos gobiensis. Mongolians call them mazaalai. Scientists weren't even able to confirm their existence until 1943, and not many details about their lives have been uncovered since. During the second half of the twentieth century, portions of the Gobi were hit by a combination of expanded livestock grazing and drought, both of which reduced the deserts already sparse vegetation. The bears lost half to two-thirds of their range, and their numbers fell sharply. Today, no more than three to four dozen individuals remain. Gobi grizzlies have become the rarest bears in the world. There are none in captivity. All the known survivors inhabit outlying ranges of the Gobi-Altai Mountains in southwestern Mongolia, keeping almost entirely to three of the tallest, most rugged portions of a reserve established there in 1976. This is the Great Gobi Strictly Protected Area-A. Called the GGSPA for short, and it covers roughly 18,000 square miles, an area slightly larger than Israel and Kuwait combined. Since 2005, the Gobi Bear Project team of Mongolian biologists, GGSPA personnel, and lead scientist Harry Reynolds, an American bear expert who started this study in his mid-sixties, has been working together to catch and radio-collar mazaalai. They continue to do this for a month every spring between the time most bears emerge from hibernation and the start of searing temperatures that bring with them a risk of fatal heat stress for a captured animal.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:26:46 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. Ten thousand years ago, the planet's human population was around 5 million. As of 1930, there were 400,000 times that many folks - about 2 billion. The total hit 3.5 billion by 1970. Between then and 2012, it doubled to 7 billion. During that forty-two-year interval, Earth's total population of vertebrate wildlife - fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals - fell by more than half, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature predicts that one of every four species of mammals will vanish in the near future. A third of all species presently known, and possibly more, may be gone by the end of the century. ............ The existence of grizzlies in the Gobi Desert defies long odds to begin with. If the project proved able to help them rebound, that wouldn't change the world. But it would keep Gobi bears in it - and perhaps raise hope for other implausible-seeming efforts to provide fellow Earthlings with a future. I picture the team climbing a nearby peak to stand on the summit with middle fingers raised, flipping off the forces denaturing the only living planet we know.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:27:35 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. On the floor of the gorge, the bear's trail merged with the scat and tracks of wolves, black-tailed gazelles, wild camels, wild asses, and the region's wild cliff-dwelling goats with horns like knobby-scimitars - Siberian ibex. It was a reminder that the reserve was established to protect not just mazaalai but an entire community of desert fauna whose rich variety of big mammals had been a revelation ever since my first trip to the Gobi. ...........The remains of a black-tailed gazelle lay among the tamarisk stems at one side. More bones and scraps of hide were scattered in the powdery white alkali dust that forms around the evaporating edges of the Gobi's rare springs. On the scree slope just above, an ibex skull and horns rested facing the water hole as if placed there to keep watch. At least two of the sets of bear tracks looked relatively fresh. A compact pile of scat among them consisted almost entirely of darkling beetle remains - further evidence, perhaps, of how Gobi bears adapt when a rainless spell, such as the desert had experienced for months now, suppresses early springtime plant growth. ...........We called a halt to our trek after coming upon the body of an ibex surrounded by torn-off tufts of its fur and bear droppings packed with more of the hairs. This was the narrowest part of the canyon so far - a bottleneck ideal for ambush by a predator. In the movie running through my brain, it was wolves that had made the kill; their scat lay very close by. After them came gimlet-eyed ravens and vultures. Next, the bear, arriving at the gorge to slake its thirst, followed its nose to the carcass and chased off the birds to take its turn scavenging. In reality, the carcass was too dismembered to reveal how the animal died. The marrow in its leg bones, normally white and fatty, was red and runny, a sign of malnutrition. The ibex might have been easy prey, and the killer wasn't necessarily either wolves or bear. It could have been microscopic disease organisms. Or it could have been one of the snow leopards living among the Gobi's mountains, which include summits close to 9,000 feet high. These nocturnal hunters with a whisper-soft tread descend to many of the same oases used by the rest of the area's wildlife. Nor could we rule out the possibility that the ibex was brought down by a similar predator within the reserve: the Eurasian lynx. Weighing as much as sixty-five pounds, this larger cousin of the Canadian lynx is a successful ungulate predator as well as a hunter of smaller mammals and birds.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:28:00 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. Then we reached the alkali flats - the series of takyrs. Conditions went from bad to stupid-bad to raging, blinding, Captain-we've-landed-on-the-wrong-planet! movie-bad. With the air coming at us like a reddish-brown landslide, swirling in the headlamps, crashing relentlessly against the front of the van, I remember the expression "It'll be a cold day in hell when..." Now I knew what a cold day in hell must be like. Our inbound tracks were lost altogether. We tried to navigate instead by keeping a constant angle relative to the direction of the oncoming waves of dust. It reminded me of night voyages on boats trying to maintain a fixed bearing in a maelstrom at sea.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:29:28 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. Ursus arctos, the brown, or grizzly bear, first arose in Central Asia between half a million and a million years ago. Some genetic evidence suggests that mazaalai are closely related to those ancestral Ursus arctos and may in fact be the oldest continuous line of grizzlies among the subspecies present today. Some taxonomists have classified Gobi bears together with the Tibetan bear, also known as the blue bear, Ursus arctos pruinosus. The widespread range of the Himalayan brown bear, Ursus arctos isabellinus, includes north-western China's Tian Shan Mountains, which top out at 24,406 feet. Since eastern extensions of the Tian Shan Range approach Mongolia's Gobi-Altai Mountains where the last Gobi bears are found, this has led other experts to suspect that mazaalai might be a relict enclave of isabellinus.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:29:49 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. When geneticists analyzed samples of hair said to have come from Yetis, the famed Abominable Snowmen of the Himalayas, the fur turned out to belong to isabellinus. One reason early Gobi scientist-explorers were never able to vouch for the existence of bears in this desert is that the information they gathered from herders included confusing reports of another big, hairy, somewhat human-like-creature roaming the place. This was the Mongolians' version of the Yeti, or Bigfoot. They called it Alma. No one knows how long mazaalai have lived isolated from other types of grizzlies in Asia. It might not have taken very long for inbreeding within a relatively small population confined to an extreme environment to transform the bears of the Gobi into Ursus arctos something else. It's also possible that Gobi bears became different by remaining largely unchanged through time while grizzly bears elsewhere, able to wander and exchange genes more freely, evolved along different lines.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:31:21 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. Taxonomy is the professional chore of assigning Latin names to lifeforms and trying to fit them into fixed categories, the better to organize our understanding of nature, even though the essence of life is change. No wonder the correct classification of creatures is a source of continuous debate. Whatever label Gobi bears eventually end up with won't alter their essence as a unique population of bruins with a unique way of life at the outermost edge of the outer edge of possibility for their kind. They are not huge, they are not white, and they don't inhabit the snowbound heights of the greatest mountains on Earth. But they are big and tousle-furred and call for a serious stretch of the imagination on our part. The Himalayan brown bear qualifies as a Yeti you can prove you saw. Mazaalai may or may not have originally been connected to that subspecies. Call Gobi bears gobiensis, isabellinus, pruinosus, or improbabilis. It doesn't matter to me. They are my Yetis. They're my Bigfoot, my Mongolian Alma, my lost tribe of powerful hairy beings, rearing up to walk on two legs at times, roaming a landscape as remote and mysterious, demanding, and beautiful in its own way as the Himalayas. And although no one tracking down rumors of them managed to prove their existence to the world at large until almost the middle of the twentieth century, they are as real as warm breath and a beating heart. At the same time, they are in danger of not being real for much longer.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:31:41 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. Knowing that the drug had rendered the bear unable to react but by no means unconscious, everyone made an effort to avoid making loud noises. Nevertheless, the crew's adrenaline level generated a steady rush of whispered conversations that proved impossible to damp down. Amgaa and Nyamaa got busy with a measuring tape and calipers, and Boyoko began jotting down the animal's overall length and girth, muzzle size, neck circumference, and so forth on a data sheet. I was intrigued by the animal's ears. Like those of the other Gobi bears I'd seen, they struck me as larger and longer than those of typical grizzlies. Tufts of hair sticking straight up from the top made them appear longer still, as if a dab of desert jackrabbit had somehow made its way into the gene pool.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:32:08 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. The bear was a female. Though missing a patch of fur along one shoulder and part of her neck, she showed no obvious signs of recent injury or infection. This Gobi bear, like others I'd seen up close after capture, showed an astonishing amount of wear on her teeth. If she were a North American grizzly, I'd have guessed her age at more than twenty years. By Harry's estimate, she was about six years old. As I ran my fingers over the blunt fangs and ground-down molars, she growled as she exhaled. The sound wasn't fierce; more of a bearish sigh. Who could say what this grizzly's mind was processing as she lay there helpless, unable to connect any messages from her nerves to the muscles that had always overpowered whatever stood in her way? She couldn't even blink, so we had squeezed lubricant drops into her eyes to prevent them from drying out and covered them to keep out the dust. When her blindfold slipped off, I bent down to readjust it and felt her breath moisten my skin. Her body gave off all kinds of fragrances - some musty, some sharp, others rich and gamely. The sum of them smelled sweet.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:33:30 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. Once the crowd hovering over the bear had the measurements and samples it needed, I took a turn at her side and put my hands on her fur - that strange, shaggy, distinctive mazaalai coat that doesn't drape over the body so much as stick out in all directions, wildly mussed-looking. From the layer of light brown outer guard hairs, I worked my fingers down into the bear's second coat, consisting of fine, densely interwoven hairs. Unlike that of the North American grizzly, the mazaalai inner layer of fur is brilliant white, as if borrowed from a polar bear. It is also remarkably thick. I could feel the warmth trapped within. How a desert-dwelling bruin coped with summer's heat wearing this woolen underwear was hard to imagine, but then I couldn't imagine dealing with the unobstructed icy winds and bitter cold that grip this part of the world from fall through spring without extra insulation. Odko spied a camel tick crawling through the fur and nabbed it - not for science but simply because this bear's life might be a little more comfortable with one less tick on its hide. It was the least we could do to make up for all our pulling and probing.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:34:30 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. The claws told the same story of life in this environment as the teeth did. On a typical Ursus arctos, those nails would be three inches longer and tapered to a sharp point. But this bear's were cracked, chipped, and stubby, and less than half the usual length. They can keep growing back of course, but I wasn't expecting mazaalai claws to be long and sharp anymore, not on animals that spend a lifetime walking over stone and digging through gravel to get plant roots and burrowing rodents. An adult's teeth look as they do because they don't grow back even though the bear goes through the rest of its life unavoidably chewing on chunks of sand and mineral grit along with much of its food from the desert's floor. The foot pads that had carried this female across so many miles of sharply eroded stones and burning hot gravels were cracked and worn smooth in places, yet surprisingly soft and supple. The more I examined them, the closer I felt to her, because of the resemblance of the bottoms of her front feet to human palms and the way the elongated soles of her rear feet reminded me of my own.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:34:55 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. Looking around, I saw that my window for close-up observation was about to close. The crew was preparing to hoist the female off the ground with a rope tied to a scale. We didn't have a lot of time to squander. It can take an hour and a half for an immobilized bear to get up. Then again, it can take as little as thirty minutes, depending on the individual animal's metabolism and the precision of the dosage it received. Whenever a grizzly starts coming out of its stupor, you don't want to be playing with its toes. The scale gave a reading of 207 pounds, a heavy April weight for a young but sexually mature female mazaalai that had spent a long winter in a den living off her fat reserves. Enlarged nipples indicated that she had been nursing cubs. We saw no sign of the offspring. If two-year olds, they might have become independent of her early in the spring. If they were new cubs or yearlings, they had more likely perished. Then again, it was possible that the female had somehow hidden them away while she alone visited the trap. We'd been wondering how the drought that began the previous year might be affecting bears. Although it may have reduced this one's ability to provide enough milk to nourish her young, she seemed in good overall condition - solid with muscle, rather than bony.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:36:14 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. The normal collaring protocol calls for keeping a continuous watch over a bear coming out of the drug's effects until the animal regains enough strength and coordination to amble off. The reason we tucked the stirring but still-groggy female into her makeshift blanket and left her to wake up alone is that Puji had come hurrying back on his motorcycle from checking trap site number three - Tsagaan Burgas ( White Willow ). We had a bear in the box there, too. When Harry had told me to get my lazy ass out of bed because we had bears to collar, he only knew about the one at Tsagaan Tokhoi. No one imagined that we really did have bears - plural - to deal with, or that we would, within the space of a few hours, match our yearly average of two successful captures.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:36:35 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. With Odko translating, Puji said, "I didn't get a good look into the trap because I didn't want to bother the bear, but I think that it is a small one." He was wrong. It was a male, maybe eight years old, taller and a good foot longer than the female. By the time we arrived, he had torn away part of the metal ventilation grate welded onto one side of the box. He carried 231 pounds on a rangy frame, and that was his low, post-hibernation weight. His general condition, like the female's appeared good. The double-layered coat he wore was luxuriantly thick. We found a number of ticks burrowed into it and a recent scar running down one side of his head. Nobody, it seems, gets by completely unscathed in the Gobi. And yet this pitiless environment had produced two large, beautiful mammals contoured with belts of powerful muscles and wrapped in plush fur. Two lives that, if granted the usual span for their kind, would continue for fifteen to twenty years. Or longer.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:37:06 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies - Douglas Chadwick - 2017. Growing up in the American West, I was fascinated by nature and never-tamed places. That didn't change as I got older. I majored in biology during college and did my graduate field research on the social behavior and ecology of mountain goats. Under heavy pressure from sport hunting combined with the expansion of road networks ever farther into the backcountry, the goats were in widespread decline. Grizzlies, whose numbers had fallen to perhaps fewer than 700 south of Canada by the 1970s, needed protection even more urgently. I carried out some small-scale surveys and follow-up lobbying that played a minor role in getting the bears listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Next, I went to work as a seasonal biologist for the National Park Service, studying the mountain goats along the continental divide in Glacier Park. In my spare time, I hiked to my favorite settings for watching grizzlies, because... I'm not sure why. I feared these great, humbling, electrifying master mammals; I admired them for their blend of power and playfulness directed by an obvious intelligence. I think I sought out their presense in part because it made me so fully alive, from the oldest compartments of my glands and senses and brain to the newest. Grizzlies can absolutely rip and tear stuff apart, but for me they made the world feel more whole.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:37:46 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. A handsome man in his fifties, Miji showed up freshly scrubbed and wearing a suit jacket. He sat in sharp contrast to our gang of rumpled travelers, but I knew from Harry that this man speaking to us in a soft voice with a direct gaze was as capable in the field and as passionate about Gobi bears as anybody in the room. In between his other responsibilities at this remote outpost, Miji had been making forays to gather information about mazaalai for three decades. More often than not, he was the only biologist in the world paying any real attention to Gobi bears. He also made a special effort to survey wild Bactrian camels. Only about 800 of these double-humped giants ( Camelus ferus ) were left on Earth. Some roamed China's portion of the Gobi. "But the majority of the species now relies mainly on habitats within this reserve," he said, with Odko translating. "This is a stronghold for khulan ( wild ass ) too - maybe 800 to 1,000. About 600 argali, 500 ibex. And maybe a 1,000 black-tailed gazelles."
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:38:10 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. Looking at grizzlies is like seeing creatures underwater through a face mask. They tend to appear larger than they really are. The logical part of my brain was resisting that effect, trying to tell me that this grizz wasn't large at all, especially for a male. In reality, it was closer in size to a black bear than to a North American Ursus arctos. One of the male's most striking characteristics was his golden brown fur with a blaze of white on the shoulders and neck. The fact that this hair was sticking out all over the place made a strong impression, as did the other mazaalai characteristics that I would later come to understand as typical - the long ears, the thick snow-white underfur, the beat-down-to-stubs claws, and, especially, the blunted ends of the teeth. The degree of wear on them was startling to me, for this animal had the relatively short muzzle of a youngish bear. Harry affirmed that it actually was a very young adult, most likely six years old. Dark hairs along with blackish skin around the eyes gave this male the look of someone who needed to think about cutting back on the late-night partying. I didn't know if the dark circles were a common Gobi bear trait or an appearance temporarily emphasized by early shedding of fur around the eyes. I'd seen a couple of grizzlies in the Rockies with a similar look during the early summer shedding period. There were two ticks embedded in the male's eye rings. While we removed them, Harry commented that he had handled individuals with ticks crowded all around the eyes. Our male also had several scars on his head, some of which seemed to be old bite marks. He weighed exactly 100 kilograms ( 220 pounds ), an impressive size for a male Gobi bear his age, in Harry's opinion. For comparison, a six-year-old male grizzly in Montana might weigh 300 pounds or more.
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Post by brobear on Mar 20, 2017 6:38:46 GMT -5
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies. Inspecting the bear, directing the crew's measurements and drawing blood samples, constantly checking the animal's breathing, pulse, and temperature, Harry was in his zone, genuinely cool now. He'd morphed into a stone-cold grizz pro, the man who had captured and collared more than 1,700 Ursus arctos in North America. Harry once had a drugged grizzly revive enough to turn its head and sink its teeth into his leg; he then stood in place, stifled the urge to howl, which risked further reviving the bear, and waited several minutes until the animal finally relaxed its jaws. Proctor, normally one of the more exuberant humans ever invented, was ice too, having handled hundreds of North American grizzlies himself. Watching the Reynolds-Proctor duo move through the process was tremendously reassuring. If we were going to subject the world's rarest bears to the impositions of science, it had to be done with all the calm and care and experience I was seeing.
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