Digger drags his kill ashore/YouTube

Joyous “Fat Bear Week” turns ugly

As was inevitable, Fat Bear Week – the National Park Service’s promotional effort to portray the brown/grizzly bears of Katmai National Park as big, cuddly, lovable creatures – has been sabotaged by the nature of nature.

A headline in the national newspaper US Today about said it all: “Fat Bear Week takes gruesome turn.”

This would be “gruesome” as defined by the civilized world where human standards provide a thin veneer that, at least in these times in this country, modifies the fundamental laws of evolution that dictate that the strong and/or lucky survive and the weak and/or unlucky die.

Forget all that animal-rights nonsense about humans being the only members of the animal kingdom who kill their own, and that silly idea that predators exist only to help maintain some sort of balance of nature by “killing only the sickest and weakest individuals” as the fantasists of People for the Ethical Treatment (PETA) like to believe. 

That isn’t how nature works. First off, there is no real balance, but instead a roller coaster of abundance and scarcity through time governed by the simple spatial realities. As predators kill ever more of their prey, prey becomes harder to find.

As a result, predators die of starvation or turn on each other, as wolves often do, to help reduce the competition for the prey that is left. Predators thus decline, either through warfare or starvation, enabling prey to increase, and the cycle starts over again.

And sometimes, just as with pathologically disturbed humans, animals just kill because they can. Something, who knows what, sets them off and they attack, which is what happened at Katmai.

“This morning bear #469 attacked and killed bear #402 at Brooks River, downriver from Brooks Falls, in Katmai National Park,” the National Park Service said in a public statement. “The incident was witnessed live on the webcams in the park.”

Cameras change everything

Somehow missing from that statement were the cute names with which the federal agency and its Fat Bear partner, Explore.org, usually tag the bears.

So what really happened here is that “Digger”, aka Patches, murdered Beauty, aka Brooke, aka plain, old 402,  whose human-given names for some reason never stuck. Some folks were so upset the park service sent park rangers to engage in a live chat about how the natural world actually works.

This is what happens when live webcams are placed in the wilderness.

There wasn’t any fuss in 2011 when 402 and one of her cubs became separated off-camera, and the cub was subsequently killed.

“In July 2011, after a prolonged confrontation with 856, 402 and her smallest cub became separated,” the Katmai Bearcams Wiki records. “During this time, the cub was completely defenseless.  856 later returned to the falls and killed the cub. (The video below does not show 856 killing the cub.)

Sans video, the death sparked no human drama or trauma. But it is different when people grounded in the comforts of the modern, urban world see how nature works.

Then the death is so traumatic that the Park Service and Explore.org decide they need to go online to try to explain it and maintain the modern myth of nature as that place better and purer than the civilized world.

“It know it’s been a stressful day for all of us, especially if you were watching the cams earlier today,” is how Explore.org naturalist Mike Fitz opened his online chat with rangers.

“Yeah, um, it’s still stressful,” answered Naomi Boak of the Katmai Conservancy, who doubles as the “media ranger” at Katmai. “We all have to figure out how to cope, and I’m glad we can try.”

What followed was an attempt to explain what is unexplainable in any terms other than bears being bears, but Fitz, Boak and park ranger Sarah Bruce spent more than 45 minutes trying to rationalize what had happened after Fitz warned viewers that “if you feel like maybe this isn’t the day where you want to see a bear get attacked and injured and eventually killed by another bear, then maybe step away from the cameras.

“There are other cameras on Explore.org that are really great to watch that is just Alaskan scenery for example, Like I love the Redwood River camera and, uh, I think it is still daylight out there on the West Coast right now.”

The Redwood River cam is not Alaskan scenery. It’s a webcam in California where the only grizzly bear around is the image of one on the California state flag, all of the once-living bears having long ago been exterminated in the interest of making California safe for people.

The human problem with brown/grizzly bears is that they sometimes – very rarely – do to people what they do to each other with some regularity. In the latest case of the latter behavior, nobody will ever know why it happened.  But anyone who wants can go online and listen to Fitz, Boak and Bruce speculate at length as the recording of the attack plays.

“Unfortunately,” Fitz says, “we were unable to see from the cam footage maybe what precipitated the encounter between these bears if there was anything.”

And it is quite possible, bears being bears, that there was nothing, though Bruce does raise the interesting subject of hyperphagia, a feeling of extreme, insatiable hunger. Some have linked this to two notable deaths of humans – Timmy Treadwell and girlfriend Amie Huguenard = in the Katmai National Park and Preserve in 2003.

A California resident and celebrity wannabe, Treadwell spent 13 summers hanging out with and filming the brown/grizzly bears in and around Hallo Bay on the Pacific Ocean coast of Katmai. Over the course of those years, he learned enough about the bears that after one of them killed and largely ate him and Huguenard, the Associated Press referred to him as an “amateur expert” on the subject of bears.

Prior to 2003, however, Treadwell had always left the Katmai coast with the coming of the fall in Alaska. His early departure is notable in that those who knew the Katmai bears better than Treadwell had observed that their behavior changed markedly as Alaska’s short fall transitioned quickly into winter.

Treadwell, who’d filmed himself petting and even kissing these bears, was experienced only with the behavior of the animals in the summer months when they congregate on the coast to graze the sedges and dig clams. They are then well fed and become tolerant not only of each other but of the significant numbers of tourists who now come to the area.

As is noted of the summer bears at the website Alaska.org, “it’s not uncommon for passing bears to wander within 20 feet of photographers here. Visitors might find themselves a little startled when a sow with young engages in the phenomenon of ‘cub parking,’ or leaving the young’uns close to people for protection from marauding male bears while mom wanders off to take a break.”

Brown/grizzly sows with cubs are normally considered among the more dangerous of bears humans are likely to encounter because of their often aggressive protection of their cubs.

In grizzly bear attacks involving adults for which the sex of the bear was known, 79 percent were females, well-known Canadian bear biologist Stephen Herrero and colleague Andrew Higgins reported after completing an analysis of almost 40 years of bear attacks in North America just before the end of the 20th Century.

But the conditions and the conditioning at Hallo Bay are such that some sows there behave largely the opposite of what might be considered “normal” because they are well aware of the risks other bears pose to their cubs.

Such is the world of bears.

Deadly realities

Bears, especially young bears, live in a very dangerous world.

“Sows with spring cubs also, when possible, avoid visiting areas where other adult bears may be lurking,” a Katmai bear explainer says. “Larger, more dominant boars and even sows have been known to prey on younger bears. The survival rate for COY’s (cubs of the year) is around 50 percent.”

That 50 percent death rate might be a little optimistic, too. A peer-reviewed study that was conducted in the 1990s and ran for eight years found that in that time about two-thirds of cubs died in their first year and of the survivors, 20 percent didn’t make it through their second year with their mother. 

“Survival rates of bears less than one year old were within the range reported for other populations, but the cub survival rate of 0.342 was lower than reported for all other populations in North America except for Denali National Park,” the study added.

Many of those cubs were killed by other bears. Adults had much higher survival rates, but the study noted bear-on-bear mortality was noticeable among adults as well.

“We followed 61 adult females during 210 bear-years and recorded 17 natural mortalities,” wildlife biologist Dick Sellers, the leader author on the study wrote. “Eight adult females were killed by other bears, and in two cases we identified the killers as adult males.

“Six females died during spring, three of which were killed and fed upon by other bears; one apparently died in a spring avalanche; and the cause of death was undetermined for
the other two. Three of six adult females that died during the summer were killed by other bears, and the rest died of unknown causes.

“Four bears died during the fall, and the only one for which we could determine the circumstances was killed by another bear.”

Another bear appeared to have fallen victim to wounds suffered in a fight. She “was last seen with two cubs in October (and) was emaciated when found dead on 11 April,” Sellers wrote. “She died of starvation that was attributed to injuries to her muzzle and tongue that were apparently sustained earlier in a fight with another bear.”

Male bears included in the study did appear to far better than female bears.

“Only one adult male and one subadult male were found dead and both appeared to have been killed during the spring by other bears,” Sellers wrote. He also reported a somewhat unique problem in studying Katmai bears.

In the process of radio-collaring the animals so they could be tracked, four tranquilized bears were killed “before they fully recovered from being tranquilized. Two of these (an adult female and a juvenile male) were killed by an adult male; and in the other two cases the identity of the attacker was unknown.

“These deaths occurred despite periodic monitoring of recovery (which typically takes two to three hours with Telazol) and a policy of airlifting estrus females to safe recovery sites so their scent trails could not be followed by courting males.”

These deaths were not unprecedented, but Sellers observed that in an earlier study at Black Lake and another on nearby “Kodiak Island, no case has been documented of a tranquilized bear being killed by another bear in 140 and approximately 600 captures, respectively. Two possible factors in the deaths at Katmai are: (1) the exceptionally high bear density and (the) high proportion of adult males and (2) Black Lake and Kodiak bears (particularly adult males) are hunted and may have more fear of human scent lingering on sedated bears.”

Ironically, the study found that the survival rate for young bears was higher in areas where bears were hunted by humans because hunters targeted big, old bears. Such is life in the wild where bears are sometimes prey for other bears as well as predators on all those salmon, the deaths of which no one much notices.

What happened in view of the camera at Katmai this year was just a reminder that life for the bears is not all stuff-yourself with salmon wonderfulness so you can win the fat bear competition before trundling off to a pleasant winter’s hibernation.

Correction: This is an edited version of the original story. It was changed to reflect 402’s previous aliases.