Full Transcript for Everyone Thinks They’re a Bear Expert. Chris Morgan Actually Is

takes thinking about European bears, comparing them to brown bears and grizzly bears in North America and polar bears and American black bears. And yeah, there's lots of parallels there where I think about both places, Europe and here. - [Rae] So if we think about bears in general, the eight species of bears altogether, you know, what makes them such a powerful umbrella, say, for conservation? Why could we focus on bears for conservation in general? - [Chris] Well, one of the facts that comes through is that six of the world's eight bear species are threatened with extinction. So there's that. So they're already threatened in some way, six of the eight. They've also got this really broad range of being in different countries and different continents of the world. They also range from thick rainforest, jungle habitat and ecosystems to ice floes when it comes to polar bears and then sort of everything in between, right? So they span the range of ecosystems around the planet. They are in a large part of the planet. It makes them a great umbrella species. So protect the bear, protect the things that the bear needs, the space, the resources, the clean air, the fresh water, the natural resources that we all depend on, right? So there is that. But I also just think, you and I know this well, bears just get attention. My friend used to say whenever we had a bear conversation with anybody, when they found out that we were doing bear research, everyone had an opinion about bears. My friend would always turn to me and say, "Everyone's a bear expert, and they kind of are." - [Rae] Everyone has a bear story. - [Chris] Yeah. - [Rae] Everybody knows somebody who's seen a bear. Everyone has something to contribute. But we also grow up with stories of bears, you know, bear families, and, you know, we have animated bears, and, you know, like teddy bears we sleep with. I mean, they're a huge part of society and culture. And yeah, I think for that reason they get attention. Can you be the expert that tells us about brown bears? To a person who's kind of like I'm not really sure I know what's the difference between this bear and this bear, how would you describe a brown bear? - [Chris] I think just simply put, brown bears are all over the whole Arctic, the northern hemisphere basically, you know, from North America across Europe and Eurasia and Asia. And so that is the most widespread of the eight bear species that there is. They're found in lots of different environments from, you know, the Alaska tundra to coastal parts of Alaska further south where people see them feeding on salmon. They are grizzly bears in Yellowstone. They are brown bears in Europe and brown bears further across in Asia as well. So they're the most widespread. And I think maybe that's the reason they are called Ursus Arctos, right, their Latin name, which literally means bear bear, bear in Latin and then bear in Greek. It's like you can't be more bear than a bear bear, right? - [Rae] Than a brown bear. - [Chris] Yeah. - [Rae] The ultimate bear. - [Chris] The ultimate bear, yeah. And so I think that people get confused sometimes thinking about Alaskan coastal bears and thinking about grizzly bears in Yellowstone or Kodiak bears. They're all part of the same family, which is really surprising in some ways because they do vary in size a lot and in habitat a lot. And I think that's why I'm really drawn to them most. Brown bears in Europe and Asia, the same family of bear here in the shape of a grizzly bear. And they're just found in these just incredible ecosystems that are super varied. You can't study a brown bear in one country and think you've got it licked and know exactly what they're about in another country because they vary so much. - [Rae] You've done work with bears at very, or brown bears at very extreme places, right? So like the North Cascades, which is incredibly wild. And then also parts of like Northern Spain and those mountains that have a strong active human presence. And I think a lot of people would, you know, agree that in most parts of Europe, there's very little kind of like true wilderness left. There's been massive landscape change. And so for these European brown bears, how much does that change their conservation story and the challenges they face? - [Chris] Yeah, yeah, and even the cascades as even wilder cousins, right? I've spent a lot of time in Northern Alaska in the Brooks Range and places like that where there are grizzlies, and it's an order of magnitude more wild than the North Cascades even. And so there's this sort of spectrum of wild that brown bears seem to be able to persist in, and Europe's one of them, and it is a busy place. I mean, anyone who's been to Europe, you don't have to go far to find the next human being. And I think that bears have evolved in that type of ecosystem and that kind of cultural, ancient cultural setting for so long. They've got used to working around people and making a living. And it's another thing that I love about this species, just how varied their behavior is, depends on where you find them, what different habitats they can be found in, what different food species they seek out. And I think that that speaks to how adaptable they are in a place like Europe. Take Spain or Italy or there's bears in Greece for goodness sake. Romania has thousands of brown bears, for example. So even in Europe, it's like this spectrum of wild, and the bears are found in, from the most minimally wild brown bear country to the most maximally wild brown bear country in a place like Romania. And I just think there has been this ancient relationship between humans and bears in those places to the point where it mostly reaches some kind of balance, even though Europe's a busy place. So yeah, really different to the cascades where I work here where it's 10,000 square miles of pretty much roadless wilderness. But I think what I bring to the perspective in the North Cascades and

the work that we're doing here is that perspective of the busy Europe. - [Rae] Yeah. -[Chris] You know, I arrived from Europe nearly 30 years ago, emigrated here, and I thought that was it. That's it. It's all done for Europe. It's too busy a place. There's never gonna be any space for brown bears to recover. Then I came here and like, this is it. This is the future of the wilderness. So I had that perspective coming in, but then Europe's turned a corner in many ways, and it is rewilding and bears are coming back. - [Rae] We have to hang on to stories like that, right? Because there are so many places where, you know, where animals are on the brink perhaps, or that societies are on a different brink of just completely overdeveloping. And so before we talk about this good news coming out of Europe, I'm wondering if you can tell us some examples of what happened. Once upon a time, there were an abundance of bears in Southern Europe, and then their population sizes dropped very, very low. Can you tell us about why? - [Chris] I think that the main thing that's been happening in Europe is this sort of centuries of direct persecution, bears being killed by people out of fear or competition. You know, there's only so much landscape in Europe, there's only so much space. And so that competition between bears and human beings has always been pretty intense there. And then as human populations grew, massive fragmentation. So the habitat just chopped up into smaller and smaller and smaller parcels, but it still continues in many parts of Europe, you know, down to poaching and retaliation killings as well where people are killing bears in retaliation for the bears having killed livestock. And surprisingly, Europe is still full of this trans humans kind of lifestyle in many parts of rural Europe where there are brown bears, there are still shepherds. Oldest job in the book, right? There are still shepherds working with herds of sheep and goats in the mountains. And so there is still this conflict that's been going on for thousands of years, but in little pockets where people accept the bears, and the bears can find enough in terms of resources, food and shelter and space and privacy to thrive, they still do. - [Rae] I wanna kind of take advantage of the fact that you are British, and I wanna kind of, I'm not trying to pick on the UK, but I want to hear in your words some thoughts on how, you know, once upon a time, many hundreds, maybe thousand years ago, there were bears in the UK, but not anymore, completely at zero. They have vanished to a point that most of British society doesn't even know that they once roamed, you know, the lands in the country. What does it kind of tell us as a human society that an animal can vanish so completely that people forget it was ever there? - [Chris] That's amazingly well asked that question, Rae. It is very though provoking, but I think your average Brit would be completely terrified of the idea of having brown bears on that landscape in the UK these days. I mean, it's just, it's the folklore, the folk knowledge, the folk information has just been lost. That trickle of information is just so old now. They used to coexist even with the Romans, but I think that the British Isles weren't big enough for Romans and brown bears and the Romans won like they did most things, you know, So they evacuated, Romans evacuated and ultimately left a Britain devoid of bears. And perhaps because they were vacuuming up wildlife from all around the world for their gladiatorial fights and the way that they treated wildlife, you know, as a spectacle and to showcase. So yeah, it's been a long time in Britain, and I always think about it when I'm back there in those hills because that information has been lost. And so if there was ever any sort of attempt or sort of action to try and bring those bears back or wolves as well, which there is, there's talk of bringing wolves back to Scotland, it would take a lot of work on the ground, the kind of stuff that we've done a lot of in the Cascades, you know, just sort of preparing people for what that is, what is a brown bear, starting with the basics, you know? - [Rae] There's a parallel here. There's huge teams of people who are really thinking about bringing grizzly bears back to parts of the United States where they have not existed, not for a thousand years, but for 100, 150 years. I'm recording this in California, right, on the coast of California where once we had grizzly bears roaming, we've got grizzly bears on the state flag. You know, you're in Washington state where there was once an abundance of grizzly bears and now there may or may not be any. I think it's like up in the air. So, you know, I think there's this opportunity. Brown bears would have to be reintroduced back to England, and it would've been like hundreds or a thousand years since they were there before. Brown bears would have to be reintroduced back to places like California where it's been maybe 100, 120 years since they've been here. There actually is a big difference, right? Like we were talking about kind of the cultural significance and the understanding of having these carnivores on the landscape. It's been lost over a certain number of generations, but maybe it's still not too late in some of these parts of the Western US. Maybe we don't have to go a thousand years. Maybe in our lifetime we can see those returns. - [Chris] Wouldn't that be something? Yeah, we've done a lot of research here in the Cascades to figure out what people know about them and what people don't know about them, grizzly bears. And it's fascinating. Some people are more up on the information, and others have lost that knowledge. Some people love the idea of grizzlies. In fact, most people want grizzlies back here. A small vocal minority, which is often the case, right, with contentious issues, it's the vocal minority you hear from. And so the vocal minority is heard mostly, and

they don't want grizzlies back. And so even though it's been a short period of time, the last confirmed grizzly in the Cascades was in 1996, so it's been a while. But every year these reports come in. - [Rae] Oh, but not too long. - [Chris] And sometimes you just don't know, is it a grizzly? Is it not? Did you get a photograph? No, it was too far away, you know. So we get reports, but the official consensus is that they're functionally extubated, meaning that they're functionally extinct here in the Cascades. But you're right, it's an interesting thought. It's back to that spectrum, isn't it, of what's possible given how long a bear might have been gone from a landscape in any particular habitat or ecosystem or country of the world, which is what makes it so fascinating to me. Every country and every situation and every predicament or success story, they're all different even just within one species, the brown bear. - [Rae] So when we think about these brown bears living in Europe, they're living in fragmented landscapes. So I wanna kind of understand from you, do you see similar human bear conflict in these parts of Europe with brown bears that you see in North America or is it actually very, very different? - [Chris] I think it's very similar. And in the States we've got the space, and if we can open up our minds to the possibilities of having bears share our space still, it's there. In Europe, we don't have the space. So the algebra comes all down to tolerance. You know, do we have the tolerance for the bears that are left? And that's an up and down rollercoaster of a journey depending upon the headlines of the day in Europe. You know, attacks happen in Europe. For example, there was an attack a couple of years ago in the northern population in the Alps of Italy, and suddenly there's this spike in people not wanting bears back there. Very different to the situation in Abruzzo further south in Italy where they call them Uncle Bear. They don't say the bears there. They say the bear, The Bear, right? It's a very focused character that they think about in this place where they've coexisted for 4,000 years. - [Rae] Kind of an omnipresent like spirit of bear. - [Chris] That's a great way to put it. It's almost everywhere you go in Abruzzo, there's mention of bears or there's statues or signs or road names. So very different to something, I know you've worked a lot on the Rocky Mountain Front, you know, where bears are expanding into that prairie territory there and very different to that kind of relationship. It's like, whoa, the bears are back. What are we gonna do about it? And it can be really rife with conflict. So there's a lot of parallels between the conflicts in the US and in Europe. It just feels like it's a more deep set, and it's an older relationship there in terms of white settler relationship with North America, differentiating, of course, from the indigenous people here who've had pretty amazing relationships with most bears in

North America for thousands and thousands of years. So there's lots of parallels in some ways where the conflict is based around humans and bears trying to compete for the same resources. - [Rae] I wanna hear some stories from you because what I've learned is that you were in your early 20s tracking brown bears in Spain. What did that feel like? Can you just paint me a picture of that era in your life? - [Chris] Spain is a special place to me. The backstory before Spain was when I was 18 years old, I came to the States for the first time to visit, and I worked on a summer camp in New Hampshire. And when I was there, there was a black bear biologist doing his research in the White Mountain National Forest. And I was supposed to be focused on working as a camp counselor on the summer camp. And this guy came in and started telling all the kids about his black bear research. I'm like, "Wait a minute, you can be?" I'd never thought about a bear in my life. I thought you could be a black bear biologist? That's crazy. I mean, people do this with their lives. And I was hooked, and I bugged this guy until he finally relented and let me go out into the field with him. And we got out of the campground, and out of the summer camp one night. So one night he comes up to the summer camp, darkness of the night. Don't ask me why. I was a bit clueless at the time. He says, "Come on, I'll take you into the field." So I jump into his truck, and I thought he was gonna take a left into the National Forest to where his study site was with these black bears. But he took a right and we ended up getting down into town, the town of Berlin, New Hampshire, and he pulled up at the garbage dump. - [Rae] Oh no. - [Chris] On the garbage were 14 black bears all lit by full moonlight. It was the most amazing transformative thing I've ever seen in my life, I think, to this day. - [Rae] Wow. - [Chris] And we ended up tranquilizing and collaring a bunch of bears that night, and it changed my life. So I'd had that experience in New Hampshire as an 18-year-old. And then I came back to England 'cause it was just a short visit of a few months. I thought, where are the bears? And I found out that they had bears in Spain. So all that was new to me as well. And most Brits don't know that there were bears in Spain. Some Spanish people don't know that there are bears still in Spain. So it's still a little bit under the radar, certainly was back then. So I ended up going over there. I bought this old dilapidated jalopy of a camping van, bright yellow it was. It looked like an ice cream van or something. I'm like, "This is so embarrassing." One little village I pulled in and had nowhere to camp, and I knocked on a door, and there was a barn next door, and this elderly lady said to me, "Oh, you can camp in with the cows." So I was right in the heart of brown bear country in Spain and welcomed warmly by everybody. And it just stayed with me so much. And back then there were 60 bears. And so

I'd hike maybe 25 miles a day, sometimes less, sometimes a bit more. This one day I remember I hiked, still I think my longest hike, 35 miles in one day. - [Rae] Goodness. - [Chris] Exhausting. So I hiked around 35 miles and did part of the perimeter of this reserve. And at one point I'm hiking down the trail, and I'm exhausted and delirious. And you know how you get in the field, right, where you just kind of, at a certain point your head's spinning and you can't see straight 'cause, you know, you've been out in the sun. - [Rae] Your body's about to give out. Yes, I've been there. - [Chris] And then I heard some rustling in the brush and a brown bear ran across the trail in front of me, and I was like, "Oh my God." And remember I didn't have much experience at the time with bears. I was 21, and I climbed the nearest tree to look around for it, but it had run across the trail and then just disappeared, and I heard it running away. I'm like oh my God, I've just seen a Spanish brown bear. So it just gelled this moment in my life of this is definitely gonna be my future. The garbage dump in New Hampshire was what triggered it. Spain solidified it. And then I've watched that country look after it. Oh, honestly, it makes me emotional thinking about it. I've watched that country love its bears and bring them back from the edge. You know, it's been an amazing story. 60 brown bears when I was there. And you fast forward to today and there are more like four, there's almost 400 brown bears in the north of Spain now. So it's just been this incredible success story that you couldn't imagine in a place as busy and small as Spain compared to North American standards. It feels like Spain is full of possibilities for bears. It feels like it is going down the right track. And it was just two things. It was education and legislation, you know? Teach people what these bears are, make people care, you know, turn this curiosity into wonder and awe and love and respect and then protection in that order. And that's what it takes. And then the legislation, making sure that people were really persecuted pretty heavily legally if they killed a bear, if they poached or did any of these retribution killings. You know, so, and it worked. - [Rae] From what you know, are all of these countries that have European brown bears doing the same kind of work to promote coexistence? - [Chris] They try to. In fact, you know, there's a great example. Pescasseroli is this little village in the middle of Italy, just two hours from Rome, and they have maybe 80, if we're lucky, brown bears still there that have coexisted with people for 4,000 years. Two hours drive from Rome. There's another population to the north in Italy, and they're not connected and haven't been for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, the northern population in Italy and the Abruzzo population near Rome. And they're very different stories. The ones in the Alps, you probably know, Rae, they were brought in from

Slovenia in the '90s, about 10 bears. So a different sort of strain of bear. And it seems to show there's more conflicts up there. There are attacks on human beings up there, whereas there are not in Abruzzo. The ones in Abruzzo are like the uncle bear that I talk about. Don't want to exaggerate it, but it's almost fairytale kind of story there. And so even within one country, there are different situations like the states, North Cascades versus a Yellowstone, you know, a very different management needed and attention and action needed kind of thing. But these countries do try to work together. - [Peter] Europe came back from the brink for brown bears through education, legislation and time. The question Chris grapples with is whether the Northern Cascades can do the same. The last confirmed grizzly there was in 1966. The ecology is ready. The politics is not yet. - [Rae] So I have a question for you that is very much an opinion question. The question is about how hard to fight for reintroductions, how hard to fight for bringing bears back to places where they historically used to live. We have some examples from Europe where there wasn't a reintroduction necessary. And then we have places like, you know, the state of Washington or state of California where there are none, and it would take reintroduction to bring them back in the short term. It's possible that if we gave it 500 years, they may be able to get back on their own. Do you have a sense of when it's the right time to fight for it and push and say, no, right now is the time versus, you know, using patience and maybe not seeing it in your own lifetime? - [Chris] It is all about what the future of these wild places can offer to a bear that I think rightfully belongs here in the case of the North Cascades or in the case of some of these other populations in Europe that I know well. When I arrived here in the States, I started working on the North Cascades and hiked all over the Cascades doing research, but then it switched to education, and I just spoke to thousands of people, sometimes just one-on-one. Then we hired a small team of people, and we created a project called the Grizzly Bear Outreach Project. And part of our goal there was trying to understand what people do think about bears and do you want them? And we had opinion polls done, really strictly regulated, statistically analyzed opinion polls that was so useful feeding into the programs that we had, what we teach people, what we tell people. And it was non-advocacy. I was super deeply curious in a very real way about what people thought about grizzlies and what they knew about them. And it turns out they didn't know very much, and a lot of them were opposed, especially those on the front lines. So I think partly to answer your question, I think if we can create this sort of landscape of understanding, as I call it, which is having people understand what these bears are while they're here if necessary, but before they come back, even more important in places like the Cascades, then that goes a long way to the recovery and success of those programs, right? It's impossible without human buy-in. And so to me, it feels like if the local communities of people want grizzly bears back, that's the biggest sign, back to the politics versus ecology. The ecology's here, plenty of space, plenty of food for bears in the Cascades, for example. But if the politics and cultural beliefs of people are aligned and want it, and we found that most people did want Grizzly bears back in the Cascades, then there you go, you're off on the right foot. But without it, I think it's just kind of a losing battle. You know, the time will come for the North Cascades Grizzly, and I've been working on it for 25 years, but some of my colleagues even longer. It's such a long-term sort of goal. You can't expect it to happen overnight, and I wouldn't want it to. I wouldn't want these bears to come back into a landscape that's not ready for them emotionally and psychologically. So it's all about the bears. A few years ago, I did a back of the envelope, literally back of the envelope calculation with a pen and paper. And I figured out if you put the eight bear species together around the world and protected them or managed them wisely with empathy and with reality as well, those eight bear species would cover about a third of the earth's land surface, which is just kind of mind-boggling, isn't it, what's possible, just one small family of creatures called bears and what we can learn from them and what we can protect if we look after them. - [Rae] Wow, I couldn't have said that better. Thank you so much, Chris. You're a storyteller. You are a traveler. You are an immigrant. You are this person who brings such a global perspective to a local issue. And so really grateful for not just the conversation that you've had with me, but just who you are in the world. - [Chris] Thank you, Rae. - [Rae] And the amazing work that you're doing. - [Chris] That's very, very kind of you. Thank you. And right back at you. There are thankfully a lot of us that are out there working hard for the bears and other creatures that we all love, right? You know, and keeping that bigger picture in mind. - [Peter] Every bear recovery story comes down to the same thing. Not habitat, not legislation, not science, but people deciding that the bear belongs. Europe figured that out. The Northern Cascades is still working on it. Time will tell. This is "Back from the Brink" from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. - [Rae] If this episode left you feeling like you wanna buy an old van and head out into bear country, maybe start with a book about bears before you set off. Follow or subscribe. Leave us a review and send this episode to the bear lover, the wilderness dreamer, or the person in your life who will be totally shocked to learn that there are bears in Spain. I'm Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant. I'll see you next time on "Back From the Brink" from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. - [Announcer] The "Back From the Brink" podcast is sponsored by Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, hosted by Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, narrated by Peter Gros. Executive producers are Jen Wulf and Jenny Van Soelen, Podcast production by Lower Street Media.