[HN Gopher] Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee
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       Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee
        
       Author : mooreds
       Score  : 19 points
       Date   : 2025-05-10 13:40 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (igbconline.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (igbconline.org)
        
       | skeeter2020 wrote:
       | it's convenient for us Canadians that US Grizzly Bears adhere to
       | a geo-political, largely unpoliced, sparsely populated border.
        
         | RandallBrown wrote:
         | I wonder why only the Selkirk Recovery Zone crosses borders,
         | especially when BC and Alberta are listed among the partner
         | agencies.
         | 
         | I think all of the recent (last 15 or so years) grizzly
         | sightings in the North Cascades are speculated to be visiting
         | bears from Canada.
        
           | codeduck wrote:
           | I think one of those bears just dined on the parent poster.
           | Rest in peace, RandallBrown
        
           | jjulius wrote:
           | This is why the whole discussion around reintroducing them
           | into the North Cascades in Washington has fascinated me (I
           | take no sides, though as a backpacker in that area, I'd kinda
           | prefer not to have to deal with them - black bears trend
           | afraid of us, I've never minded spotting them!). British
           | Columbia has them, and the border doesn't prevent them from
           | making their way down here. I've yet to understand why that
           | is the case - what keeps them from actually coming into the
           | Washington Cascades and making themselves at home?
        
             | dogman144 wrote:
             | Layman's understanding, but the only real prevention is
             | time and if there's an existing grizzly pop down there.
             | Reason grizzs are expanding is the males have very large
             | roaming territory, and each new adolescent male needs to
             | find its own or face conflict. If you're backpacking in an
             | area with a pop, good odds there's 1x grizz per 6 square
             | miles.
             | 
             | Hunting and environmental damage could play a role, but I
             | don't think modern hunting/F&G policies could do much. They
             | are very adaptable creatures and eat a variety of stuff, so
             | I speculate you'd have to have real ecosystem collapse to
             | cause them to bow out of an area.
             | 
             | End of the day for me - grizzlies ranged the entire country
             | in 1776 times, and then by the 1970's got boxed into
             | Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming basically. If that bear
             | disappeared/disappears, it'd be a tragedy. Meet a bear or
             | see one skinned and they're pretty darn close to human-
             | looking. The Montana pop in glacier is about to join with
             | the Wyoming pop in Yellowstone, they're now in the bighorns
             | in WY, and get spotted in eastern plains Montana now.
             | 
             | If you're not hunting and dressing game, as most hikers are
             | not, the main danger comes from surprising them, so just
             | keep head on a swivel and carry bear spray. Carry a 10mm or
             | .44 and up for if you get stalked by one. NOLS Lander has a
             | good YouTube video on grizzly safety. After long enough
             | accounting for this, I realized I wasn't really "hiking" in
             | non-bear areas much as marching around woods acting like I
             | was, and I haven't looked at the non-bear areas the same.
        
         | bee_rider wrote:
         | It is inconvenient for us Grizzly Bears that all these stupid
         | monkeys invented a line and started hassling everybody about
         | it. Unfortunately, you never know which monkey knows the "pop!
         | You die." trick.
        
           | nick3443 wrote:
           | We should be taking a measured approach to shooting them (by
           | that I mean we should be shooting them). So that they know to
           | leave people alone.
        
       | pavel_lishin wrote:
       | Sometimes I really regret whatever turns my life took, that
       | resulted in me _not_ having a business card with  "Interagency
       | Grizzly Bear Committee" on it.
        
         | aaronbaugher wrote:
         | It's not too late. I had 100 business cards made that have
         | (among other things) "Lumberjack" listed as one of my
         | professions. I gave one to my girlfriend when we first met, and
         | it got me the date.
        
           | pavel_lishin wrote:
           | Oh, sure, but I could not possibly dream of stealing this
           | particular valor.
        
           | smithkl42 wrote:
           | Did you sleep all night, and work all day?
        
       | rdtsc wrote:
       | I recently rewatched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man.
       | It's a Werner Herzog film about Timothy Treadwell's story. It's a
       | classic story of "well, his heart was definitely in the right
       | place" kind of a situation.
       | 
       | Charlie Russell, a Canadian naturalist who worked with Treadwell
       | offered a different perspective on it
       | http://cloudline.org/treadwell.html. He is a bit critical of how
       | Herzog presented Treadwell and the bears in the documentary.
        
       | MiguelVieira wrote:
       | Related: Recovering Grizzly Bears in California
       | 
       | https://docs.calgrizzly.org/docs/CGA-Feasibility-Study-2025....
        
       | smithkl42 wrote:
       | Heading out on Friday to do a black bear hunt in two of those
       | Grizzly recovery zones...
        
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       (page generated 2025-05-12 23:01 UTC)