Maybe, they're your worst nightmare.
Or, perhaps, they bring a smile to your face.
Grizzly bears are famous for triggering a whole range of different emotions.
Most of them passion.
Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?
Let me start with this one. What's the first thing that pops into your head when I say grizzly bear?
Alaska
Claws
Beautiful
Kill
Hunting
Rag
Don't need them here.
Trouble
Really big
Scary
Magnificent wild creature
Mountains
Nature
A big bear holding a cupcake
I'm Chris Morgan. I'm ecologist and filmmaker.
Bears have been my specialty for 25 years.
I worked all over the world
and even captured, radiocollared and tracked them on foot for two thousand miles in the Canadian Rockies.
So I got to know them really well
And what started as fear ended up as a deep respect for an animal that fascinates me.
But as much as that my other passion became sharing what I've learned with other people.
Ladies and gentlemen, here's Chris Morgan.
I came to Washington State twenty years ago and made it home.
And I set out to find out what other people know
and how they feel about grizzly bears in the North Cascades.
Wanted grizzly bears?
You've got the time for a quick quiz?
Have you any idea how heave a grizzly bear might be when it's born?
80 pounds?
15 pounds?
14 pounds
About 30 pounds
12 pounds?
What if I told you 1 pound when it's born.
Oh, I wanna see one now.
Do you know how many grizzly bears there used to be in the Lower 48?
5000?
3000
We think there were 50000, maybe, 100000 grizzlies in the Lower 48.
And now there are fewer than 2,000
So we've done this amazing job of pushing them into these little corners
And we're standing on one of them right now.
And in the North Cascades fewer than 20, maybe, only two or three
But we get a handful of unverified potential sightings every year.
There was a photograph in 2010 and a photograph in 2012 on those remote cameras.
Just 10 miles north to the border.
What percentage of the bears diet is meet?
75%
50?
I'd say a third.
Generally less than 20%.
Which one will win in a smelling competition a bloodhound or a grizzly bear?
A bloodhound
I'll go with the grizzly bear.
He's right.
What does a bear eat?
Chipmunks?
Berries, fish.
Baby elk
Clams
Cattle
Moths
Grass
Everything the can find
Fish
Good answer
A bear's most common food?
Plants
They are mostly grazes.
In the North Cascades there are 100 plant species on bear's menu.
And they can eat 100000 thousand berries or even 40,000 moths in a day.
What kind of sign tells that bears have been around?
Scat
If you wanna know if it's bear poop or deer poop you can look into the poop and see of there're seeds or not.
Cause they eat berries
Seeds and fertilizer. All in one package.
Look out for tracks
This is a rear track of a grizzly bear.
The other thing you can find is their hair on trees.
Whether they've been backrubbing on trees so look out for that stuff.
And flipped rocks tell you a bear has been searching for insects and grubs.
What's the difference between a grizzly bear and a black bear?
They have kind of a hump on their shoulder.
And a dished nose
And claw length is a big one.
Are grizzly bears dangerous?
Of course, they can be.
They're wild animals trying to survive
So attacks are usually about defending food or cubs or in response to a surprise.
You can take some pretty simple precautions, though.
Carry bear spray
It's way more effective than bullets.
Wet noses and electric fences don't mix well.
And make noise on the trail, bears don't like surprises.
How do you think grizzlies will be good or bad for the economy?
Judging by places like Yellowstone where people come to see them that's probably good.
In a national park such as this it would attract people to, maybe, see the bears more.
I'd say they would be good for economy
Definitely not good for the livestock industry.
Probably good for tourism, I think.
Actually a whole bunch of studies have shown that they are really good for the economy
in terms of bear viewing. Yellowstone and other places.
They pump millions of dollars a year into the economy that just locally by having grizzly bears there.
Awesome
How would you feel about seeing a grizzly bear in this ecosystem?
Oh, I think it'd be cool, man. If I was going through here and I saw one. That'd be cool.
Or, maybe, you have bigger questions.
Are bears a part of our natural heritage?
Are they important for ecosystems?
Should we showed them for future generations
A majority of people think so.
Can we coexist with grizzly bears?
No, because people do stupid things.
No
No, they can't coexist.
They can't coexist in Alaska.
Oh, absolutely, they do in Alaska.
Absolutely
They were here once before, right.
Grizzly bears have seen glaciers and entire species come and go.
They've been a part of the North Cascades for around 20000 years.
They now live in a time when their fate will be decided by us.
The National Park Service and the US Fish & Wildlife Service
in collaboration with other agencies have begun a process to figure out how to
recover the North Cascades grizzly bear.
And not everyone is in the agreement so it has to be fair and open.
Would you like to see a healthy population of grizzly bears in the North Cascades again?
Certainly, they're part of the North-West.
No
Yes
Why?
Cause a food chain needs a help to keep going.
Well, I'm against it. Why would you want some that big and tough here?
I just think they're magnificent animals
so anytime that we can bring something back and have it to where out kids can see it
and know about it rather than just in a book, it's amazing.
That's just good for conservation, for anything.
If they goodly want to come in, let them come in.
They have the right to be here. I don't want to see them extinct.
at all
Recovery for the North Cascades grizzly bear won't be fast.
It might take a hundred years.
None of us want to see lions or elephants disappear.
In the same way it's time for us to think really carefully together about the grizzly bear's place on earth.
And here, in the North Cascades.
You got me all emotional