Volume 15, Number 2
Summer 2003

The Great Grizzly Search (GGS) has a new focus for 2003. The Craighead Wildlife-Wildlands Institute completed the habitat analysis for the Bitterroot Grizzly reintroduction EIS in 2000. This seasonal food abundance data has been compiled and reproduced in various GIS maps, which have been provided to us by Dr. Jack Hogg of the Montana Conservation Science Institute.

Grizzly bear tracks in the wild. The GGS Team travel "in the world with them," moving on their own through the same mountains as the great bear. Photo: Sheeyena Eastman

These habitat-type specific maps and 4 years of field experience in the ecosystem will guide the GGS efforts in 2003, centered on the greater Salmon-Selway-Bitterroot region. By comparing these maps with field data from the last 3 seasons, we have zeroed in on a series of specific locations throughout the region. Our field crews will devote more energy to these particular basins, drainages and divides, believing that the years of research and our own experience will put us in the right place at the right time for documenting grizzly activity. DNA samples will continue to be collected from rub trees, scat and hair stations. We will also conduct a more thorough habitat analysis concerning species distribution, abundance and consumption by the bears that call these places home.

Our knowledge of these remote landscapes has deepened each year with concern to the seasonal evolution of the habitat with which the bears exist in such remarkable harmony. From the moment they emerge from their dens each spring, mysteriously reborn from inside the mountain, they immediately absorb clues about what type of year it will be. This is their wisdom·a seemingly magical sense for the way of the world in which they survive. We are able to study the bear through the evidence left behind. From tracks, respectful observation, rub trees, scat and hair samples, we are able to learn when and where they are around, what foods they are keyed into, and how it is they move between the seasons and the remaining pockets of secure wild habitat. Because we are "in the world with them", moving on our own through the same mountains, we learn much of this information from the land itself.

Our research is done with great respect for the bear's right to live beyond our curiosities and scientific methodologies. Each year interns and volunteers, who are at the beginning of their research careers, participate in this project. We are proud to offer them a compassionate, conscious, non-intrusive research methodology that is effective. This type of research, or science, is unfortunately not taught at our universities and isn't widely practiced by our managing agencies. Each future researcher who takes this traditional knowledge of respect for the non-human into their next project increases the quality of our management and helps to honor our relationship with the wild ones.