[HN Gopher] In the Northern Rockies, grizzly bears are on the move
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In the Northern Rockies, grizzly bears are on the move
Author : gmays
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-07-14 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hcn.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hcn.org)
| dogman144 wrote:
| I live in the expansion zone for grizzlies they're discussing.
|
| The article covers some facts well. The bears are expanding range
| and interacting with humans more often.
|
| I cannot recall specifics, but there are some valid arguments
| across multiple stakeholders and incentives for removing them
| from the endangered species list and allowing more hunting.
|
| When I hike out here, I have bear spray and a 10mm. Grizzlies are
| dangerous animals, you can surprise them in odd areas and
| distances, and it's fairly windy in many of the risk areas which
| impacts spray.
|
| That said, the article felt a bit disingenuous in how it
| described the bears as a vicious mankiller.
|
| Standard knowledge is 90% of the interactions are when you
| surprise a grizzly bear. The odds further lower that you'd
| surprise a bear leading to an interaction vs seeing the bear over
| a valley. If it happens, play dead on your stomach. They'll swipe
| at you and walk away. *edit, should say the odds of getting to
| this are even more low, as they'll usually huff/puff, and then
| "bluff charge", and then worst case it could get to an attack to
| "end the threat" but not "eat you." You can get hurt badly this
| way, but not a man-eater attack by no means. The other 10% are
| when they hunt after you, and then I yes I carry a 10mm and hike
| with a dog. But the odds of getting that far vs bear spray
| working are low too.
|
| If the author is making a narrative around nature as to get
| people to read about mature, I can def respect that. But bears
| shouldn't be feared beyond a healthy fear/respect border,
| especially if further interaction is likely.
|
| This is a good resource to learn about bears from NOLS in
| Wyoming:
|
| https://youtu.be/1KWSJ3piSfM
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > I have [...] a 10mm
|
| Is that a gun in your pocket or are you pleased to see me but
| underwhelmingly endowed?
|
| More seriously, I assume that's the bore of a gun. Coming from
| a nation without guns (or bears), I don't know what that says
| about it. Clarification welcome.
| mindcrime wrote:
| There are a few different methods for denoting ammunition,
| but mostly you'll see sizes expressed in mm's, or decimal
| portions of an inch. Often (usually) there will be qualifiers
| (often the brand name of the first manufacturer of a given
| round, or the inventor of it). Qualifiers like "Auto",
| "Magnum" etc are also common and have specific meanings.
|
| Colloquially in the US, "10mm" corresponds to "10mm Auto"[1]
| which is a moderately popular handgun cartridge. 10mm rounds
| are towards the larger / more powerful end of the popular
| range for handguns, but are still far from what most people
| would consider "packing for bear". Guns chambered for larger
| and more powerful rounds are available, but as with
| everything there are tradeoffs. With 10mm you sacrifice some
| "stopping power" (a simplistic calculation would be speed in
| feet-per-second times the mass of the projectile) per-shot,
| but can probably carry more total rounds, than something
| larger like, say, .44 Magnum[2] of .454 Casull[3]. So one
| weighs "would I be better off with n shots with x stopping
| power, or n+s shots with x*q stopping power, for some number
| of additional shots s, and some additional power (as a ratio)
| q"?
|
| Other factors that come into play are cost, recoil, weight of
| the weapon itself (besides the cartridges), etc. Anyway, net-
| net, for people who live in bear country, from what I've
| seen, 10mm is often seen as a good compromise for bear
| protection. But I'm sure plenty of people prefer the .44
| Magnum, the .454 Casull, or even something like .50AE[4].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10mm_Auto
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.44_Magnum
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.454_Casull
|
| [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.50_Action_Express
| icouldntresist wrote:
| I'd use a 10mm in cougar country and get a .454 for griz TBH.
|
| /$.02
| dogman144 wrote:
| * guns aren't fun, they're a tool, do your research and don't
| screw around with safety
|
| Ya I was leaning to a s&w .44 initially. Generally I think
| there's a school of thought of handcannon and 1-2 shots vs
| more rounds off and good enough load. Reports of encounters
| where the handgun mattered tend to vary b/t .357, .44, 10mm
| bear load, etc.
|
| But, there's a guy in an Alaska on YouTube who did a
| comparison of all the usual rd/weapon combos suggested, 10mm
| bear load + Glock 20 (what I use) did the best. I was
| comfortable with Glocks already so that'd wrapped it.
| icouldntresist wrote:
| I don't necessarily disagree, 10mm has better range,
| capacity and recoil characteristics, but I figure in most
| scenarios with a grizzly charging you, you're only getting
| off a couple of shots at close range anyway.
|
| I'm not a gun expert by any means btw.
| type0 wrote:
| My grandma used to pick raspberries in the woods as a child,
| sometimes a brown bear would show up to eat the berries, it
| would stay on their spot and didn't try to scare people away.
| Unless you disturb them during hibernation or come between the
| mom and her cubs they're fairly peaceful.
| COGlory wrote:
| I had an encounter with a grizzly just north of West
| Yellowstone last fall. We had a huge snow storm on opening
| weekend and I was trying to find friends who had made camp in
| the Snowcrest range, and were severely snowed in. After a few
| days they decided to walk out and sent me a message over the
| satelleite phone where to meet them. They then left the
| satelleite phone at the camp with others, and headed to the
| meetup point.
|
| The meetup point was ~12 miles off the main dirt road, and I
| got permanently stuck about 10 miles in. I got out and hiked
| the rest of the distance through a couple feet of snow, along a
| creek bed with a large draw on my other side. Once I got to the
| spot, I waited for them, but they didn't show up. After two
| hours, I turned back (to get somewhere with signal if possible)
| and after about 1/4 mile, realized there were large bear tracks
| criss-crossed all over my tracks.
|
| I put my head on a swivel and after about a half mile, finally
| spotted the large brown bear, up on the draw (now to my left).
| It was about 200 yards behind me. It was cautiously following
| me, and we proceeded this way for probably another quarter
| mile. I was still at least a mile from my vehicle, and there
| were no humans around for who knows how far, let alone mobile
| considering how much snow we got.
|
| At that point, the bear started coming down the draw, and my
| nervousness turned into all out panic. I was shaking like a
| leaf and lost my nerve. I gave it a warning shot with my .357
| and thankfully, it decided I was scary enough to not be worth
| the curiosity. The .357 has a 1.8" barrel and is unfathomably
| loud, so despite not being a great bear gun, it did the trick
| there. I do have a 10mm, but I had sent it up to hunting camp
| with my friends.
|
| My personal unscientific take, largelt biased from that
| experience is that we should kill 5-10 of the most human
| adapted bears every year, and not leave it to chance that they
| will ignore us.
|
| The article portrayed what's going on with livestock ranching,
| hunting, and tourism quite well, but it left out the fact that
| these bears are just getting less afraid of humans in general
| as interaction increases. It would be wise to select against
| that if we can.
| dogman144 wrote:
| That's a great story, sounds intense. Even with out the bear
| that's dicey getting stuck in snow in the backcountry.
|
| I hike with a gun for basically those scenarios. I stay fresh
| with a range but it seems that warning shots are mostly as
| far as it goes. There is a bad story of a hunting guide
| getting killed near an elk carcass though, either Dubois or
| Cody area I can't recall. So it can def go south if they're
| looking at you more deliberately. Glad you made it!
|
| Thanks for sharing! I'm on that side less often, more the
| Absarokas.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "but it left out the fact that these bears are just getting
| less afraid of humans in general as interaction increases."
|
| Isn't it also possible, that the interactions are increasing,
| because simply more people (without a clue) are going into
| bear territory?
|
| Otherwise yes, the bears should not forget to avoid humans.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I've been a few feet away from the Kodiak subspecies ( _Ursus
| arctos middendorff_ ). It was a grizzly-watching trip conducted
| by licensed guides, who carried a rifle. I don't actually know
| how comparable these are to the Lower 48 bears -- my impression
| is that on Kodiak there is so much salmon and so few people
| that the bears are less aggressive:
|
| https://photos.app.goo.gl/mXMHAjDyQNDjFqjw8
|
| What you said about playing dead does resonate: I remember one
| episode where about five of us were sitting _very_ still, and
| the bear was nosing around about five feet from us. I don 't
| think it was at all curious about us. In other cases, the
| guides would just raise their hands and shout at the bears and
| scare them away.
|
| On the other hand, I watched a nature TV show, also shot on
| Kodiak, where the guy noticed one bear that was giving him the
| stink-eye. Occasionally one will take a dislike to you and you
| don't want to stick around.
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| A good overview of the modern grizzly story. Especially good to
| see an article focused on the complexity of restoring large,
| culturally important predators to the landscape. It's a real
| minefield of federal regulations, Native American rights,
| hunters, agricultural communities, and more. I appreciate the
| detail this article chooses to use.
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