One thing I find fascinating about bears is the complexity of their behaviors. Bears are intelligent and mentally flexible. They understand who can be friendly and who is not. They recognize each other as individuals and, despite their asocial reputation, bears can also be quite social when the right mood and circumstances strike.
In 2022, I, along with millions of bearcam viewers, watched two sister bears, each with their own cub, form their own version of a bonded, extended family.
Although this was not unprecedented among brown bears, the bonding between bears 909, 910, and their cubs was something that I had never seen before. I was fascinated by the story—so much so that I wrote a paper for the peer-review journal Ursus. Please head over to explore.org’s blog to read more and check out the paper in Ursus.
Bears 909 and 910 sit next to Brooks River in 2019, which was their second year of independence.
One of the difficulties that the NPS, among many federal agencies, is facing is the presidential administration’s freezing of funding that Congress has already appropriated. This is on top of the loss of thousands of employees already this year due to (often coerced) resignations and unjust firings. None of those actions were approved by Congress. Congressman Jared Golden, who represents my congressional district, has recently introduced the Protect our Parks Act of 2025 which would require the Secretary of the Interior to use funds that were already appropriated to complete NPS projects and fully staff national parks and reinstate employees that were unjustifiably fired. It is good legislation. A stop gap, for sure, but worth urging your member of Congress to vote for.
I want to write about people if you’ll indulge me. This is a topic that I almost never delve into, since I find the human realm less interesting than the non-human and the overall behavior of my fellow humans to be disappointing. (“Hey let’s start another war.” “Hey, I don’t care if the climate gets warmer.” “The suffering of others isn’t something that affects me.” etc.) I’ll touch on politics too, which I loathe. Not that I don’t remain engaged on issues that matter, and I always vote, but I find politics exhausting. The rhetoric from elected leaders and pundits is often disingenuous at best and too often purposefully deceitful. Our media industry, especially social media platforms, uses it to monetize outrage and divisiveness. I want to avoid adding to the cycle that got us here if that is at all possible.
But to be blunt, we’re experiencing a purge of national park staff that threatens the stability of parks.
I worked in nine U.S. national parks, mostly as an interpretive ranger. Those are the rangers that lead programs, staff the visitor centers, and generally try to give people meaningful experiences. Although I no longer work for the National Park Service (NPS), I maintain close ties to parks across the country through family, friends, colleagues, the Katmai Conservancy, and my work for explore.org. Parks survive as places of significance through the support of the public and the work of NPS employees. The ability, however, of the NPS and other federal agencies to manage our public lands is facing a demanding, unnecessary challenge that will cause harm to these irreplaceable spaces.
By now, you’ve likely heard of the Fork in the Road, an attempt led by Elon Musk at the behest of the President to reduce the size of the U.S. federal workforce. Almost all federal civilian employees were offered a deferred resignation. Setting aside the confusion it sowed, its uncertain legality, and its ignorance of established regulations, the Fork was a not-so-subtle attempt to strong-arm employees into making a hasty decision about their careers. Those who didn’t take the offer were in no small way threatened that their jobs were not secure. “We cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency,” as the Fork in the Road email stated in reference to those who do not accept the resignation offer.
The total number of employees who took the offer hasn’t been fully tallied, but it is likely that a few tens of thousands of people did resign across the entire federal government. As part of his justification, Musk argues that unelected bureaucrats have too much power, even as he fails to understand that he is now the quintessential example of an unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat. It is the Spiderman meme for real.
The Fork in the Road window is over, so to further reduce the federal workforce the administration is firing thousands of employees who were within a probationary period—a generally 1 – 2 year window that acts as an employment trial. Here is a good primer if you’re interested. During that time, your supervisor can decide whether your performance is acceptable. If it is, then great. Good work. Continue. We’re glad to have you. If it isn’t, then you could be fired due to poor performance. At least that is how it is supposed to work.
On February 14, about 1000 people lost their jobs in the National Park Service. That number could grow. Other land management agencies are targeted too such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (which manages wildlife refuges and endangered species), the U.S. Forest Service (which manages national forests and employs the nation’s largest wildfire fighting force), and the Bureau of Land Management (which manages large swaths of public lands that aren’t refuges, parks, or national forests).
The Fork in the Road and mass firings are different from Bill Clinton’s methods to reduce the federal workforce in the 1990s. Namely, Clinton’s plan was approved by Congress and implemented over three years. The current administration’s plan is not Congressionally approved. Its tactics are different too. Probationary employees are being fired en masse without consideration of the value of their job, the benefits they provide to the public, the skills they possess, or their work performance. The justification for the firings is nothing more than “not in the public interest” according to the emails they’ve received. That’s not a rational justification. It is pure ideological fervor that harms real people.
How does this affect the national park that I am most connected with, Katmai? Although I’m hopeful that many of Katmai’s probationary staff may be exempted from the firings, a loss of just a few staff members at Katmai will have a disproportionately large negative impact. Katmai’s year-round staff includes perhaps 30 people. In contrast, Yellowstone has closer to 750 year-round staff. Absorbing staffing cuts is generally easier for parks with a larger staff. Additionally, the administration has implemented a hiring freeze for most seasonal positions. Reports indicate that the NPS is allowed to hire 5,000 seasonal staff, but the park staff that I’ve talked to remain unsure if they will be able to hire all the staff they need. Five thousand seasonal employees is well short of the typical 7,000 to 8,000 that are usually hired annually.
The delay jeopardizes the ability of supervisors to hire, train, and get seasonal rangers in parks for the busiest time of the year. Katmai and most national parks cannot function properly without their seasonal workforce.
The NPS at Katmai employs about 12 seasonal interpretive rangers for Brooks Camp. These rangers provide mandatory bear safety talks, manage access to the extremely popular Brooks Falls wildlife-viewing platform, help in bear management situations, operate the visitor center, and lead programs. Most of the maintenance, law enforcement, and bear technicians (rangers that manage bear and human conflict) are also seasonal employees. The federal hiring freeze has created extraordinary uncertainty regarding the NPS’s ability to hire seasonal staff and get them ready to run Brooks Camp. The purge of probationary employees may also lead to the loss of some supervisors for the seasonal staff. Due to the administration’s actions, we’re likely at a breaking point where park staff will not be able to keep up with the workload that already exists.
For decades, the National Park Service has coped with too few employees for the work. Congress also saddles the NPS with perpetual budget deficits. I don’t think I ever had a supervisor in the nine parks that I worked at who wasn’t nearly or actually overwhelmed with work. Both Republicans and Democrats are at fault for this.
I wonder if you visited a park site if you would have noticed, because the NPS is really good at doing more with less. The NPS hides the stress and low morale felt by their employees and crumbling infrastructure behind smiling rangers wearing flat hats. Most people who aren’t employees don’t see the struggle to keep parks functional, the efforts made to ensure that people have good experiences despite ever increasing visitation, the knowledge and commitment necessary to study and protect ecosystems, or feel the day to day stress that comes with never being able to keep up. This spring and summer are likely to be some of the most challenging seasons that NPS employees have ever faced. People will still want to visit parks. They’ll still go to parks, but the NPS will lack the staff to provide for the best, safest experience.
The NPS shouldn’t hide the ramifications of mass firings and the seasonal job hiring freeze.
Layoffs don’t make the work of rangers go away. The public will see the results in the form of shuttered visitor centers, damage to park infrastructure, vandalism, increased emergency response time, wildlife harassment, poaching, road damage, campground closures, overflowing parking areas, and unclean bathrooms. Those things are difficult enough to address when parks are fully staffed. It is easier, cheaper, and more efficient to prevent those issues from occurring than to deal with the aftermath, just like it is easier to prevent infection through proper hygiene than to clean a wound of gangrene. Neglecting public lands now is a tax on the future.
“Where is the money supposed to come from?” you might ask. “After all, the national debt keeps going up and up and up.” If economics matter to you, then please consider that national park tourism generates more revenue than it costs the parks to operate and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide outside of the NPS. The requested NPS budget in 2023, for example, was $4.75 billion, while the 2023 economic output of national parks was more than $55 billion. For every dollar invested in national parks, taxpayers get much more in return. I bet our Congress and President find money for more bombs in the midst of all this. There always seems to be money for more bombs. They might also fight to provide more tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy because the rich always seem to need more money to feed their greed. So let’s not pretend that firing hardworking and dedicated NPS employees is a true means to reduce debt or taxpayer burden or make government more efficient. It is driven by an ideological agenda.
Our public lands are the nation’s most cherished spaces. The tech billionaires and politicians want you to think that it is GDP, stock values, Walmart, Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook. In reality it is our shared democratic spaces such as parks, wildlife refuges, and national forests.
Most everyone can agree that the U.S. government can spend its money more wisely and efficiently. I favor that. I would question the rationality of anyone who thinks otherwise. Scapegoating federal employees as the problem, however, isn’t a solution. The goal of elected leaders should be to make government work better, not break it. But here we are.
If you’ve read this far, you’re likely a Brooks River bearcam watcher. It remains to be seen how firings will ultimately affect the operation of Brooks Camp this summer. Yet more people than ever before visited Brooks Camp in 2024 (about 19,000 according to park statistics provided to me). Even if visitation declines overall, the nature of the Brooks Camp experience means that it will remain an intensely managed place. Katmai will be especially challenged to ensure that bears and people are safe at the park’s most visited site. The bearcams on explore.org will not be affected, thankfully, but that is of little solace to me knowing that friends and colleagues may be fired solely for ideology. It is not ethical. It is not in the best interest of the taxpayer. It is cruel.
Finally, there’s been a lot of talk of loyalty from the administration. Federal workers need to be loyal, etc. Loyalty for NPS employees doesn’t mean capitulating to a presidential administration’s ideology, which comes and goes on the will of voters. Loyalty for NPS employees means staying loyal to the NPS mission and purpose, which was established by Congressional law in 1916. It is in the U.S. Code. NPS employees cannot escape it nor should they.
The NPS mission is somewhat contradictory and often frustrating to fulfill. I lived the contradiction as a ranger when struggling to determine how to best provide for enjoyment without impairing the things that make parks special. Ensuring that parks meet their Congressional mandates is where the loyalty of NPS employees truly rests. That’s how it is supposed to work. It safeguards parks against the whims of politicians.
I would still consider the current methods to purge the government workforce as wrong even if it were applied to areas of government that I disagree with on principle. Don’t hand the reins of power to an unelected billionaire bureaucrat. Consider how you’d react if you are on the other end of overreaching, unchecked presidential powers in the future. If you don’t like the way that the NPS operates, then work through Congress to change it.
If this is an issue that matters to you and you haven’t contacted your congressional representatives about it, please do. Calling might be better than writing, but this template has some good starting points to communicate. There are a lot of other reasons to write to them as well like their efforts to erase the existence of Trans people. We can get through this but not without holding elected and unelected people accountable, and not without reining in the powers of the presidency.
Consider the plight of the northern acorn barnacle. They begin life as planktonic larvae drifting in the vast ocean, motile yet vulnerable. If one survives its many instar stages, it then seeks a more permanent home. The barnacle settles out of the water column and glues their antennae to a rock or other suitable location where they metamorphose into the shelly animal that we’re most familiar with. There’s no going back at this stage of life. The barnacle has become forever sessile with a head cemented to rock and legs filtering food from the water.
“How else would you attach to a rock?” the barnacle asks. “Certainly not with your feet. You could never eat.”
Many barnacle larvae never get the opportunity to make a permanent home. Predators or some other hazard culls their numbers. They must be choosy in their settled life too. A forever home needs to be close to other barnacles, since mating takes place between closely neighboring barnacles.
Once secured to the rock, flood tides carry life-sustaining nutrients as well as predators like sea stars and dog whelks. Ebb tides expose the barnacle to suffocating air, potential dehydration, intense summer sun, and winter’s freezing temperatures.
Still, their adaptations provide for success despite the risks. I described it as a plight earlier, and although their journey is filled with uncertainty, perhaps I am being unfair to them. Acorn barnacles are common in North Atlantic intertidal zones. Their shell resists the forces that work against them. The acorn barnacle is a tough critter built for enduring uncertainty and extremes of its intertidal habitat.
Tidal zones and the creatures that make a living amongst the habitat’s extremes have always fascinated me. I’m not aware of any habitat that changes its mood and appearance as much as the intertidal, which is why I found myself earlier this year at Canada’s Fundy National Park, wondering about barnacles and power of the ocean as I watched the biggest tides in the world.
Near Alma, New Brunswick at low tide. The headlands of Fundy National Park encompass the coastline.
My first opportunity to really pay attention to tides was at Assateague Island when, fresh out of college, I spent two summers working at the national seashore. Assateague’s modest three-foot tides never became life threatening (not even when I purposefully got myself stuck in quicksand up to my waist). When the tide got inconvenient, I could mosey away. An incoming Fundy tide demands attention, however. Twelve meters—forty feet—of water rise twice a day along Fundy National Park’s headlands. Places farther north and east can experience even larger tides, perhaps 16 meters or greater in height.
I wanted to watch the tides transition fully from low to high, so I planned the trip to coincide with mid morning low tides and mid afternoon high tides. On my first full day in the park, I set up a chair on the Alma Beach about 30 minutes before the predicted nadir of low tide and walked down to the water’s edge.
The outgoing tide opened access to vast mud and sandy flats, which are extraordinarily tempting to explore. After all, who doesn’t see a mile of mud in front on them and not want to be out in it? I had to remain cautious, though. I lacked knowledge of the shorelines topography and the water’s nuanced interactions with it. I worked to always keep an avenue of escape available.
Sortie d’urgence seulement. I found it easy to underestimate the rate at which an incoming Fundy tide swamps the intertidal. Although I avoided it, stranding by incoming tides must have happen often enough to justify the construction of an emergency platform at New Brunswick’s Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park. Respect the water.
An accident of geography allows Fundy tides to become so large. The bay’s shape accentuates tidal forces. According to NOAA,
“Liquid in a tank, or in this case a basin, will flow back and forth in a characteristic “oscillation” period and, if conditions are right, will oscillate rhythmically. In essence, a standing wave develops. The natural period of oscillation in the Bay of Fundy is approximately 12 hours, which is also about the same length of time for one tidal oscillation (a high/low tide cycle). This coinciding of the tide cycle and the bay oscillation period results in the much larger tidal ranges observed in the bay.”
The shift from ebb to flood tide was easy to see at the water’s edge. Unlike the in-and-out rhythm of waves on a more exposed seashore with smaller tides, the water on the Fundy tide slapped upward with each successive wave once the tide turned.
During a low tide cycle the next day, I walked to the exposed headlands at the Point Wolf River estuary. The shoreline showed all the signs of extreme tides, of course, but I still found the height of the tides hard to fathom. I stood far beneath the lower limit of the acorn barnacles and the rockweeds hanging limp in the dry air. The twisting wrack line from the previous high tide was out of sight on the cliff above. I saw evidence of powerful winter storms that uprooted trees and eroded soils approximately 60 feet above me.
Headlands at the mouth of Point Wolf River.
Within the estuary, the water rolled uphill at the pace of a slow walk.
Tides remain a force that humans cannot control. Like the barnacle, we can only adapt to them. In Alma, the small New Brunswick town adjacent to the national park, lobster boats could leave or enter the harbor only at certain tide levels.
Barnacles seem get on with the business of life no matter the phase of the tide. Yet I can’t help consider what their lives must be like secured to a rock for their entire adult lives, living in a habitat changing at a pace that even a lowly human can see. For them, the intertidal might symbolize perfection.
Think of a mama bear. What does that idea conjure in your mind? Perhaps it is fierceness, since mother bears are ornery and defensive when necessary. Maybe it is commitment, because mother bears dedicate years to raise a single litter. Perhaps it is sacrifice, since mother bears provide cubs with time and energy that could otherwise serve to promote her own physical health.
We’re fortunate to watch many different female bears at Brooks River in Katmai National Park. Yet there is one whose maternal efforts are legend. One who can fish successfully almost anywhere. One whose fearsome reputation is long-lived among other brown bears, including large adult males. Don’t get in her way. Don’t lurk near her fishing spot. Don’t look at her cubs. Do give 128 Grazer your 2023 Fat Bear Week vote.
Grazer | ɡrāzər |
(2005 – Present) A female brown bear documented to use Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Also known as bear 128.
verb. [with object] The effort of a mother bear to maul or attack another bear with little provocation, especially in defense of her cubs: She grazered him.
Origin: Bear cam slang. Circa late 2010s and early 2020s.
Grazer is famous among people and (maybe) infamous among brown bears for her extraordinary defensiveness. When she arrived at Brooks River in 2016 with three cubs representing her first known litter, she would confront and attack other bears with little or no provocation. Sometimes it appeared that another bear only had to look in her family’s direction to draw her ire, as bear 83 knows well.
Her behavior didn’t mellow when those first cubs grew into yearlings the following summer. Nor did she rethink her aggressiveness toward other bears when raising her second litter. While mother bears can change their parenting strategy as they gain skill and experience, Grazer continued on the path forged with her first litter—the best defense is a good offense.
Grazer separated from her most recent litter at the beginning of summer 2023. Since then, she’s lived a brown bear bachelorette’s life. Her pheromones attracted the attention of male bears during the mating season. They chased her tail, with varying degrees of success, right bear 164? After the mating season, and also during it, she focused on eating. A lot. Her waistline carries the weight of her success.
Grazer’s formidable reputation carried into this summer. She ranked high in the hierarchy among bears and was perhaps the river’s most dominant female. Notably, 151 Walker deferred to her frequently in early summer. Walker is a big dude and he’s not shy about displacing bears from preferred fishing spots. Bears have good memories, though. Maybe he had too many bad experiences with her in the past and didn’t want to risk more dangerous confrontations.
In this video, Walker is in full dominance mode as he works to displace another adult male at Brooks Falls. But watch his behavior when Grazer shows up on the boulders above.
And in case you need more examples of Grazer bulldozing bears, here you go. (Watch with sound on for the full effect.)
During my brief time at Brooks River early last summer, I watched bears fish largely without success because the expected salmon run was slow to arrive. Some of the big guys caught some fish. 747, for example, sat at Brooks Falls like he always does and let the fish come to him, but even he wasn’t catching many. Most other bears fared worse. They roamed from one place at the river to another, searching for the few early arriving salmon.
Grazer, though, has practiced—no, perfected—her fishing tactics in many different places. If fish are jumping Brooks Falls, she’ll catch them there. If there’s space in the waterfall’s far pool, she’ll catch them there. She’ll work the jacuzzi below the falls. She’ll fish in the middle of the night. She’ll use her strength and agility to chase down salmon.
One evening last summer, I stood on the riffles platform watching her work the river in front of me. While the riffles provides brown bears with fishing opportunities, it is often a more challenging place for bears to catch salmon than the falls. The riffles doesn’t provide the same pinch points in topography as the falls and salmon have many escape routes. There aren’t many bears who can make the best of that situation consistently, especially when few salmon are in the water and bears are forced to run through the water to get them.
Grazer parks herself on the near bank upstream of me. She moves into the water after several minutes and spots a lone salmon. She lunges and misses. She chases. Another lunge, another miss. She continues running at full speed through the water while somehow keeping an eye on the salmon. With a final lunge, she fully submerges into a two to three-foot-deep pool and surfaces with the salmon in her jaws. I can see the fish gasping in the air as blood runs from deep puncture wounds in its body. Grazer eats all of it—tail to head—even the gill plates and mandibles.
In early summer when few bears were catching salmon, Grazer found success. She is perhaps the best angler at Brooks River.
Bear 128 Grazer with a catch in the riffles on July 6, 2023.
Let’s not lose sight of Grazer’s goals either. She’s working to build the fat reserves necessary to sustain her survival during winter hibernation. She’s also building fat in case she gives birth in the den. Bear cubs are born mid winter while mother hibernates. Abundant fat reserves are necessary for mother bears to reproduce, so getting fat is vital to a bear’s reproductive success.
In a way, my 2023 Fat Bear Week endorsement is a recognition of Grazer’s full-bodied and fat-addled collection of work since 2016. When she is raising cubs Grazer is the archetypal mama bear. She’s formidable, strong, brave, skilled, and successful. She deserves your vote in Fat Bear Week 2023.
My Fat Bear Week bracket predictions for 2023. Yes, yes, I know. I don’t predict that Grazer will win. There’s a difference between who I think should win and who I think will actually win, after all. Which bear’s corner are you in? Download your bracket from FatBearWeek.org.
While every season has much to admire, I find springtime especially enthralling. Something new appears nearly every day. At first, maple sap runs heavy during March’s warm days and sub-freezing nights. Around then, a trickle of meltwater in a ditch and a bare patch of matted leaves on the edge of a snow bank promise room for other plants to break dormancy. Soon after, the first golden catkins appear on the hazelnut and gray alder. Rainy evenings bring amphibians out of hibernation. In a short time, the soon-to-flower ephemeral herbs emerge from the crust of leaves. By late April and early May, the forest canopy bursts to life again with bird song, the blossoms of red maple and quaking aspen, and finally the unfurling of leaves that will soon thoroughly shade the ground where I trod.
Each of these are little events that promise a lot more. I’m unsure if non-human animals contemplate these changes like I do. Yet, I’m certain they pay attention to them. Black bears, recently emerged from their dens, know the pattern and are eager to exploit the change of the season to their advantage. If I’m lucky, their efforts to find their first substantial meals of the year might allow me to investigate what they are up to.
A section of Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument sits to the east of Sebois River. It’s a quiet area of the park since there are no campsites, less than a mile of developed hiking trails, and only a few maintained roads. Bicycling through it is fun and is made even more enjoyable when I afford myself the time to go slow and pay attention. It’s one of the best places in park that I’ve yet found to look for bear sign in the spring.
Riding the single lane spur that loops off and back to American Thread Road last weekend I came across many piles of bear scat, which I was hoping to see. Not because I particularly admire turds, but because bears are cryptic here. They are frequently hunted throughout northern Maine and consequently have a substantial fear of people. The thick forest also limits my ability to watch a bear if I happen to see one. The signs that bears leave behind—such as marking trees and scat—are like pages in a book. A single page may not reveal much but look at enough pages and you’ll get a good story.
In particular, scat can reveal how recently a bear was in the vicinity and what it was eating. Black bears are omnivores that are well adapted to survive on plants, and the vast majority of their annual calories come from plant foods. In north-central Maine, though, there are no calorie-rich berries to eat in the spring. Perhaps there are some leftover acorns, but oak trees are not common in the forests as this area is near the northern end of their range in the northeastern U.S. So other plant foods are a bear’s best springtime bet.
While a black bear’s digestive track remains essentially one of a carnivore, it utilizes adaptations such as an elongated gut and slightly flattened molars to extract nutrition from tough to digest plant foods. A bear also consumes plants when they are most nutritious and digestible. Newly emerged green vegetation like grass, sedge, and clover contains relatively high amounts of protein, for example. As those plants mature, protein content declines while indigestible fiber increases. Fiber helps keep the bear on a so-called regular schedule, but the bear is really after the protein. Even though hibernating bears maintain their muscle health without eating or exercise, if they’ve exhausted their fat reserves by springtime then their body is forced to tap into their lean tissue reserves. Young, tender veg helps bears stave off muscle loss and even build muscle before sugary, fat-building foods become available in mid to late summer.
All but one of the scat piles I found were filled with herbaceous plants. Although most looked older than a day–when bears eat green veg, the resulting scat quickly oxidizes when exposed to air to form a black surface crust–this was a promising sign. I knew that the lightly used roads are good travel corridors for bears and the sunlight reaching the road edges allows vegetation to green-up more quickly than the forest interior, which attracts bears to the roadsides. Perhaps I might see a bear if I pedaled slowly and remained observant.
The effort paid off near the crest of a hill when I spotted a dark mass of animal on the edge of the road. I stopped to watch.
The wind was at my back, which is a welcome push when cycling uphill but also carried my scent to the bear. Once it caught my scent, the bear only needed a couple of seconds to decide to run into the forest. Had the wind been blowing the other way, I probably could’ve watched it much longer with less chance of disturbing it unintentionally. Still, I was grateful for the moment and the small insights into its world.
Before widespread logging and, later, roadbuilding encroached on the area’s forests, grassy areas in northern Maine were likely much less common than today. Black bears always sought the first spring greens, but they had to look in other places—riverbanks, stream sides, and beaver meadows for example. They continue to go to those areas, of course, even as roadsides have opened another foraging opportunity. Roads are risky places that expose bears to people though. Bears weigh the risk along with the potential reward of a good meal.
I knew the bear I saw was eating well even as it still had a long way to go until it was fat enough to enter its winter den next fall. Its effort is a journey recorded in its scat—pages, if you will, in the Book of Turds.
Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska is historically, culturally, and ecologically unique. The river corridor has harbored Alaska Native peoples for thousands of years, is one of the densest archeological sites in Alaska, and remains a place of profound significance for Alutiiq descendants of former Katmai residents. The underlying geology records stories of great volcanic and glacial change. Hundreds of thousands of sockeye salmon annually use the river for migration and spawning. And, during the last 40 years it has become especially famous for its brown bears and wildlife viewing opportunities. There’s no other place like it.
Bear 482 Brett searches for salmon in Brooks River while her two cubs hang on for the ride. July 14, 2021.
Brooks Camp is also experiencing more people than ever before.
In the midst of skyrocketing visitation last year, Katmai National Park implemented a pilot permit program for Brooks River. The permit system didn’t change wildlife distance regulations at Brooks River or limit the overall number of people who could visit. Instead, it applied only to those who wish to physically enter the river or its banks outside of the designated trails, roadways, bridge, and platforms. No one needed to reserve a permit unless they planned to enter the river or walk off trail along the riverbanks (two activities that I suggest should be avoided to give bears the space they need).
The pilot program appeared to be successful. It provided National Park Service (NPS) staff with an additional opportunity to communicate the special circumstances, rules, and responsibilities that apply to Brooks River. The NPS could revoke the permit in instances where permit holders did not adhere to wildlife distance or fishing regulations, which effectively prohibited the person(s) from reentering the river. It allowed approved Brooks River Guides to continue to give their clients the mandatory bear-safety orientations. And finally, it did not restrict or interfere with subsistence fishing associated with the traditional redfish harvest.
Now, the NPS is looking for public comments about the permit system. If you have the time and care about the bears who make the river their summer home, then please support the plan with a comment on or before April 28. As the Katmai Conservancy suggests, say yes to the permit and ask the NPS to limit the number of permits on a daily or weekly basis.
Why are permits necessary? The relative ease and accessibility of the bear-viewing experience at Brooks Camp has attracted increasing numbers of people. More than 16,000 people visited in 2022—an all time record high—and almost double the visitation of 2008. Brooks River is a mere 1.5 miles (2.6 km) long, yet dozens of brown bears use it during the salmon migration and spawning seasons of summer and early fall.
People who enter in the river directly occupy the habitat that bears need to fish for salmon. Numerous scientific studies (reviewed here) have documented that human recreation can displace bears in time and space. The presence of people can cause bears to switch from diurnal to crepuscular activities in response to bear-viewing, angling, hiking, and camping. Bears decrease in number and are present for shorter time spans when exposed to people, angling, and bear-viewing. Bears also spend less time fishing and have less fishing success when anglers and bear-viewers are present.
Bears gather at Brooks River to fish for salmon. People in Brooks River risk displacing bears from important foraging areas in the river. This is especially true for bears who do not habituate to our presence. In these situations, we unwittingly become a competitor in the bear’s mind for space, and most of the time that bear won’t challenge us for it.
Studies specific to Katmai National Park have found that the presence of people can affect when bears fish (Olson et al. 1998) and cause bears to avoid or alter their use of foraging areas (Rode et al. 2007; Smith 2002; Turner and Hamon 2016). Therefore, even a small number of well-behaved and well-intentioned people in the wrong place (like in the river) can have a disproportionately negative effect on brown bears. Disturbance of wildlife can also result in decreased visitor satisfaction (Skibins et al. 2012) and create user conflicts between visitors who are recreating in different ways (bear watching from the platforms or online via webcams vs fishing or photographing bears in the river).
Importantly, and tucked away in the park’s newsletter about the permits, is this: “There is no limit established to the number of permits issued during the permit-required time frame currently, but this will be considered if public feedback to the plan supports a limitation or if conditions change within the Brooks River Corridor to warrant a limitation.” Therefore, I recommend that comments ask the NPS to go beyond merely requiring permits. Comments about the permits should encourage the NPS to establish limits to permits on a daily or weekly basis and perhaps even greater seasonal closures to Brooks River to adequately protect habitat for bears.
I didn’t visit Brooks River in person last year, but rangers and some people I know who had traveled there reported to me that the pilot permit system worked well. While it does not address over-crowding and congestion issues at Brooks Camp caused by record-high levels of visitation, it is certainly a big step in the right direction to ensure the river’s bears have access to the habitat they need to survive. None of the existing regulations would change at Brooks Camp. The permits only make it easier for the NPS to enforce them. But permits alone are not enough. Existing protections for bears can be made more effective if permits were limited in availability. Our national parks, and indeed Brooks Camp, cannot support unlimited numbers of people. The Brooks River corridor is a small area overall. It has limited space for bears and a limited carrying capacity for a high-quality bear-viewing or fishing experiences. Please let the NPS know you support their efforts to protect habitat for bears in the river through the permit system and that the number of permits should be limited on a daily or weekly basis when bears are actively fishing in the river.
This may seem non-controversial. After all, wild animal populations are made of individuals just like human families and communities are composed of individual people. But this idea hasn’t been accepted widely among scientists and managers of national parks.
Thankfully that tide seems to be turning, and I’m pleased to be able to contribute to this scientific effort. Results from a survey of bear cam viewers on explore.org show that people who care about Otis and other individual bears are more likely support conservation efforts for brown bears compared to viewers who do said they could not identify individual bears. Please head over to my post on explore.org to learn more.
Bear 480 Otis sits in his office at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park, Alaska.
I’d like to thank the researchers who made this study possible—Jeff Skibins (who drafted this paper and did the data analysis) and Lynne Lewis and Leslie Richardson (who were instrumental in the survey design and implementation). I’d also like to thank the Katmai Conservancy for covering the expense to make the paper available to everyone through open access.
Seventy-nine million salmon returned collectively to Bristol Bay in 2022, setting a new record high for the region. Bristol Bay’s wholly intact watersheds make this possible. Water flows freely from snowmelt-fed rivulets and springs high in the mountains through the chains of lakes that occupy glacially-carved basins and into the lower stems of rivers that empty into the Bering Sea. Adult salmon swim upstream without encountering human-made obstructions or water diversions. And, instead of being displaced by shore-line hardening structures to protect buildings or roads, such as it is throughout much of the U.S. west coast, billions of salmon fry in Bristol Bay find ample refuge in the slack-waters along stream margins, grassy marshes, and lakes. Vast numbers of salmon don’t even see a bridge during their entire lives. The diversity and health of the watersheds make Bristol Bay whole.
I was late to the Pebble fight, only learning about the proposed mine in 2007 during my first summer as a park ranger in Katmai National Park. But many people in the Bristol Bay region have been advocating against Pebble Mine for 20 years. I hope the fishing boat captains and their deck hands; Alaska Native Tribes, village councils, and coalitions; lodge owners, employees, and fishing guides; chefs; scientists; those who work for non-profit and conservation organizations; and many others have the opportunity to rest well for at least a few days now that the threat of the mine is no longer looming. I thank them for their work.
Before I had the fortune of living in the Bristol Bay area, I did not understand—or even fathom—the importance of salmon to place and people. The calendar in Bristol Bay is centered on salmon. The region’s economy is centered on salmon. Its ecology is centered on salmon. And it works, beautifully.
I’ve said many times before that our world is wounded. Too much of humanity seems to have a unique desire and capability to consume land, habitats, material without considering the rights of other creatures or the value that future generations of people might place on those things. I wish I could take everyone to Bristol Bay at the height of the summertime salmon run to see the fishing fleet and processors, to stand on the edge of a river while tens of thousands of salmon swim upstream, to watch brown bears gorge on their most important and sought-after food, to see an ecosystem functioning at its fully realized potential. It just might change your perspective on what should be and what is possible for our world.
I find the urge to explore bogs and boggy habitats difficult to resist. Other people avoid them, which gives me space to be alone. They’re mucky, which is often a fun and challenging substrate underfoot. They contain unique species, which I find fascinating. They are full of life. And they offer surprises.
On an unseasonably warm late October day, I found myself poking around the edges of Little Messer Pond, an approximately 27-acre pond in Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, Maine.
Little Messer PondLittle Messer Pond
While exploring the pond’s northern flank, on a shelf of sphagnum peat that cups the pond’s shore, I found several purple pitcher plants (Sarracenia purpurea), one of the most iconic bog species in this area. The purple pitcher lives an uncommon, carnivorous lifestyle for a photosynthesizing organism. Pitcher plants supplement their growth by capturing small animal prey, typically insects. Unlike Venus fly-traps, however, which ensnare prey using a trigger-like mechanism, pitcher plants use a passive, gravity-driven process. Their leaves form bell or cone-shaped bowls that fill with rainwater. The top of the each leaf has a flaring lip lined with nectar glands to attract insects. If a hapless insect falls inside, downward pointing hairs resist its escape attempts.
Purple Pitcher Plant
Pitcher plants can’t move, so they have unsurprisingly indiscriminate tastes. To cite just one example, a study from Newfoundland documented 12 insect orders serving as prey in pitcher plants. Prey eventually drowns in the pitcher’s water where enzymes as well as inquilines (microorganisms adapted to live in the pitchers such as midge larvae, nematodes, bacteria, protozoa, and rotifers among others) break down the trapped prey, releasing nitrogen and phosphorus for the plant. Purple pitcher plants, in particular, seem to be particularly rich in inquilines, hosting at least 165 different species across its range. Pitchers are habitats of their own making and their adaptations allow them to live in nutrient poor soils where competition from tall plants in minimal.
Looking at the pitchers on the edge of Little Messer, I found ants, beetles, flies, dragonflies, various bits of unidentified insects, and a sludge of the leftovers in their bowls.
They’d eat me if I were small enough.
None of the prey was unusual or unexpected until I stumbled upon a curious sight—a spotted salamander inside a pitcher.
I was taken aback by the sight. I had never seen something like this before, and I remember exclaiming “What the?” even though I was alone. Was this a big payday for the plant or was the salamander only a temporary resident?
Small vertebrates are exceedingly scarce as a prey item for purple pitcher plants. In the scientific literature, I couldn’t find much documentation of it. A study from Massachusetts documented red-spotted newts as a food source for pitcher plants. A more recent study from an Ontario bog found that spotted salamanders are a potentially rich prey for pitcher plants. (One of the researchers leading that study described his sighting of a salamander in a pitcher plant felt like a “WTF moment” so I guess I wasn’t alone in my surprise.) In August 2017, researchers at that study site searched the contents of 144 pitcher plants. They found, as expected, mostly insects but also several recently metamorphosed spotted salamanders. In August 2018, they investigated 58 plants and found three spotted salamanders. The physical condition of the salamanders varied. Some were in an advanced state of decay while others were lively and were able to swim to the bottom of the pitcher when disturbed.
Plenty of uncertainty surrounds pitcher plants and the importance of small vertebrate prey to them like salamanders and newts. No one has yet tested what might attract a salamander into a pitcher since a salamander has to climb up to get into one. If the salamander can escape, then pitchers could be a refuge for salamanders who have recently emerged from the water onto the land. Perhaps salamanders are attracted to the pitcher by small insects visiting to feed on the plant’s nectaries. Their apparent capture could be random too, although, dead salamanders apparently break down quickly inside pitcher plants so maybe their true rate of capture is greater than anyone realizes.
I wonder if it might happen only in places with the right combination of habitats. Purple pitcher plants typically (but not exclusively) grow in nutrient poor bogs, places that don’t always support breeding populations of spotted salamanders. Adult spotted salamanders migrate en masse during spring to vernal pools where they breed. They may also use permanent ponds for reproduction as long as those don’t contain fish, which eat salamander eggs and larval salamanders. Newts, in contrast, breed in a greater variety of wetlands including ponds and lakes that contain fish.
At the Ontario study site, pitcher plants grow on bog islands in permanent and fish free ponds where spotted salamanders gather to breed every spring. This seems to provide a combination of habitats that increase the likelihood of pitcher plants capturing salamanders later in the year when the juvenile salamanders metamorphose and begin their terrestrial lives. Little Messer Pond, in contrast, is home to fish, snapping turtles, and presumably other salamander predators.
A salamander or newt, even a juvenile, is a significant catch for a pitcher plant. A newt of about 500 mg of dry mass contains about 5 mg of nitrogen, which is several orders of magnitude more than an ant, a pitcher’s most common prey. That’s enough nitrogen to increase the probability of the plant flowering the next summer. If the salamander I saw had indeed perished in the pitcher, maybe it’ll dignified in death by a marvelous pitcher plant flower next summer.
In my area, purple pitcher plants flowers appear in early summer.
Pitcher plants are wonderfully adapted to secure nutrients and survive in habitats that most plants cannot tolerate. If they’re lucky enough to capture something as large and nutrient rich as a salamander, then their physical structure can hinder escape. Their acidic water (often lower than pH 4 by mid summer) can weaken salamanders through electrolyte imbalance. And, the water within them might contain compounds that inebriate or paralyze small prey.
The fate of the salamander that I found remains unknown. I returned a week later with the intention of relocating it, but I could not find it despite my best efforts. Although I can’t be sure, I think it is unlikely that I missed it since the boggy area with the pitcher plants isn’t large and the pitchers are easy to locate. If it were still alive, perhaps it fled to the bottom of the pitcher upon my approach. However, if it were still in the pitcher after seven days, then it should’ve been dead. Did it escape the trap that so many other victims of pitcher plants could not? I wish I knew the end of this story—a drama of uncertainty, survival, life, and death.
Wandering at Large 