Mother Bear, True Grit

Thank You Bear. I’m walking away now.   28 June 2009

Miigwetch Makwa.  Indanimose’ noongoom. 

The average assumption about a field ornithologist is that the person would be…, well,….sorry… scratch that thought.  I don’t really know what the average assumption would be.  I AM a field ornithologist, and I’m in no position to judge what others would think.   I know what I am.  For the month of June, I am rugged, muddy, stinky, tough-and-tumble, unshaven, sleep deprived, and driven…downright driven…absolutely DRIVEN to be successful at everything I set out to do.  This drive accompanies my work seven days per week, from pre-dawn to the end of protocol and through the scouting and confirming work that follows.  Birds are my passion.  Conservation is my vision.  Hours spent observing Neotropical birds become my dream.   I take the term “Nerd” as a compliment.  If someone has the insight to recognize me as a “Geeky Nerd” I am deeply impressed.  To be called “Geeky Super-Nerd” is to have met somebody who really understands.   To reach such a level, one must be able to smirk at 90,000 mosquito bites (the number I estimate have stolen a blood meal from me in four years’ field seasons), the 500 linear miles walked and 125 linear miles of data collected in four years’ field seasons, and the 1000 ten-minute bird surveys completed in those field seasons.    My hope is that the work never ends and that my body, mind, and ears are able to do this for an eternity.  It is true grit, spectacular living.  Sometimes, full stride into a scientific pursuit afield, things go in the unexpected direction.  This is, after all, the wild.  This unfolding story is just one of those days…

First, I’d like to introduce you to some feelings:  Riveted, so alive, adrenaline glands freakishly destroyed, mind overjoyed, elevated and crushed at once, humbled, relieved, want to leave, want to return, to see more, to remember everything, knees shaking, courageous, conflicted…conflicted… totally alive in the moment of the wild.  She was a mother bear, and I was a backcountry human, wet, full of stink.  She wanted safety for her cubs.  I didn’t know.

What do you do when you don’t know the right direction in a timeless wild?  What do you do when you have all of the answers except the one you really need?  Which tree holds her cubs?  You hang in there and find the answers out the hard way. 

It was about 9 PM when I called Cindy from my tent.  A gentle rain fell, and I missed her.  I had a strange and absurd adrenaline rush going.  It was insane.  It was like something that would happen if somebody fell asleep dispensing anhydrous caffeine at a beverage company while working on the batch I had purchased.  I don’t know what it was, but I have proof it was real.  Cindy remembers.   I called her and I told her, “I feel like I’m going to meet a bear tomorrow, and this time it’s going to get serious.  I’m sorry if I’m worrying you, but I want you to know.”   I didn’t hit the pillow and go “lights out”.  I stayed up.  I turned on my laptop. I watched an epic, sweeping drama on DVD, a story about a man finding his life amid war and times of turmoil, a film with the kinds of battle scenes that build false courage.  I barely slept, but I was now prepared to meet my destiny.  

“I believe a man does all he can until his destiny is revealed to him.”  The words echoed in my head.  It was good, dramatic stuff.  Epic.

I awoke at "O-Dark-Thirty" to the sound of delays afield.  Gusts of wind joined the hard pattering of rain on my tent.  A real soaker, the rain kept falling.  I reset the alarm for 4:30 AM…for 5:15 AM…for  6 AM…for 6:45 AM.  The rain had eased to a gentle drizzle, and the winds had calmed.  I put in my contact lenses and slipped into my boots and polar fleece at 7 AM and headed afield.   The rain had stopped as I entered the cold soak of waist-high grasses and ferns.  I slipped into a forest of middle-aged aspen and maple and moved far from the fragment edge, into the middle of contiguous habitat.   I punched the first GPS point and began my first bird survey of the morning.   Data flowed from birdsong to brain, from brain to pencil.  The community of birds moved onto the paper, their moment preserved for an eternity.  Just two minutes into the survey, I heard a loud pop of a breaking branch.  It was close.  “Bear,” I told myself.

I leaned back and craned my neck around.  No bear.  I continued collecting data.  A second branch popped, this time very close.  I looked over my left shoulder and saw, as if a dream, a large, mature bear stepping into a small clearing less than thirty yards away.    She strolled up to me, sat within twenty yards, and she began to pop her jaws at me.

I reached into my pocket, turned on my digital point-and-shoot camera, set it to video, and began recording the bird chorus.   I guess, at that moment, I was bound and determined to finish the bird survey, and the video evidence later would help me to fish out any birds I had missed when my nervous system was acting under less-than-optimal conditions.   I finished the ten-minute survey.  She was still there, popping her jaws and raising her head.  I finished the brief habitat survey.  She was still there.  By this time, I had been less than twenty yards from a 200-plus pound bear for more than ten minutes, and she had been sharing her absolute displeasure with me all the while.  But I really had no idea which direction through the woods held salvation and which held disaster.  Every effort I had made to detect her cubs had failed.  She knew something important, and I didn’t have any way to learn the answer except by trial and error.  Oh, well.  This left only one recourse.  Pull out 300mm of lens, underexpose for “black” -2/3 stop, and shoot as many pictures as possible while the getting was great.  Shoot many exposures and hope for some that aren’t blurry.  Get a good one. Don't get mauled.

A bear, chomping her jaws at you, is very imposing, unnerving, daunting.   For a while.  Then, it starts to become sort of silly.  A big dog has peanut butter stuck to the roof of her mouth and can’t lick it away.   Then, the lack of fences, the sense of place and space, the size of the animal in close quarters brings reality home.  “This could be medically embarrassing,” is the next thought.  If she does charge, she could really hurt me.  I’ll have holes in me, bone-scraping gouges.  I’ll need all kinds of stitches, irrigations, boosters, antibiotics.  This is really going to suck.

 

I put the camera away, cinched up the pack, and lifted my metal clipboard.  I turned the edge to an aspen tree, and I slammed the clipboard into the tree repeatedly.  She turned and took a single hesitant step before running off through the bracken fern.  Thirty or forty yards later, she stopped.   As I took my first step, she turned back to me and walked toward me, getting even closer.  Again, she began popping her jaws.    Now, it was serious.  I had to choose the next move.   I chose North-west.  I chose wrong.  In a splinter of time, she sneered, hissed and exploded through the forest green, straight at me, a black blur.  My own instincts kicked in at that moment and I found myself charging back, stomping a foot and yelling, deeply, gruffly, “…AY!”  Less than ten yards away, she was suddenly a twisting, writhing, leaping form, hovering above the ferns, cat-like in the air.  She landed facing the other direction, running away, full speed ahead. 

She stopped abruptly.  She turned.  She began to walk back to me.  She sat down in the same place, her launching point for the first attack. She kept raising her chin up, up, up, as if sniffing for her cubs.  Under my breath, I swore.  I looked away from her, tearing my eyes away, lifting my head skyward into the aspen canopy.  There, high above me, I could see two beautiful little bear cubs, clinging for safety so precariously high.  I had my answer.  I was suddenly aware of feelings of guilt, remorse and sadness for a dedicated, patient, courageous, worried mother bear.    I had caused her nothing but trouble.    I spoke to her, calmly.  I thanked her and backed away from her.  When I was a hundred yards away, I turned my back to her.  I sang, for reasons still unknown to me, “This old man came rolling home,” all the while walking on, out of her life, out of her way.  My song was her beacon, her reassurance that I was history. 

I completed some great bird surveys that day and saw some spectacular country.  As is so often the case, it was a very, very good day!