Yellowstone’s Irreplaceable Grizzlies
March 4, 2016
Yellowstone’s Irreplaceable Grizzlies
by David Mattson
Imagine a grizzly bear on a cloudy day in May turning over chunks of sod in a wet swale to reveal clots of wriggling earthworms…which it then slurps up. Or, in the next valley over, a bear furiously hopping sideways as it excavates a tunnel in pursuit of an escaping pocket gopher, but then contenting itself with a cache of exposed roots that the gopher had made as winder provender. Or, earlier in the year yet, during April, a grizzly bear flopped on its belly in the middle of barren white sinter casually raking potassium- and sulfur-rich dirt into its mouth to consume as a spring restorative. Or a hulking male grizzly settling down to the challenging task of tearing the thick hide off of a winter-killed bison, with the prospect of days of feasting ahead.
Or a female with two cubs emerging from the shadows of a lodgepole pine forest one day in late September and strolling down into the dried-up bottom of a pond that had been inundated earlier that spring…and then systematically rototilling the mud to turn up the starch-rich rhizomes of a plant called pondweed. Or another bear deep in the adjoining pine forest scraping the duff to get at a bolete mushroom, and then digging deeper yet to excavate the illusive underground portions of a false truffle.
Nowhere else on Earth other than Yellowstone will you find bears of any species in any number engaged in these behaviors—focused on eating these foods. Or, if there are other bears doing these sorts of things elsewhere, it is extremely rare and very poorly documented; perhaps one other known instance of brown bears eating pondweed rhizomes, near Lake Baikal in Siberia. Or a few other instances of brown bears eating earthworms from under moldy hay in central Russia. But little more than that.
And then Imagine…
On top of this, Yellowstone is a bastion of behaviors directed at foods that may occur with modest frequency in other regions, but nowhere to the extent found in and around Yellowstone Park.
Think of a bear during mid-fall homing in on the chatter of a red squirrel to locate and then plunder the squirrel’s cache of whitebark pine seeds. Or of bears flocking to the great talus slopes beneath the tundra plateaus of the Absaroka Mountains to lick up army cutworm moths from under overturned rocks. Or of grizzlies patiently angling for spawning cutthroat trout up and down the smallish tributary streams of Yellowstone Lake.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/04/80346/
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