Ob:
People suggest making noise when hiking, since the last thing you want to do is surprise a bear… talking loudly, blowing a whistle, etc.
You should have a whistle anyway, in case you get lost.
You can determine the type of bear in the area by the scat they leave:
Black bears eat berries, fruit, seeds, etc, as well as small animals.
Brown bears are similar, but the scat will contain the remains of larger animals.
Grizzly bear scat will contain larger bone fragments and whistles.
Meh. We also don’t spend a lot of time getting down on writers who don’t fuss and grumble about such details. I certainly don’t take umbrage in such instances, especially when I don’t have any trouble discerning what an imperfectly written post says. 
The selfie-stick example got me giggling good and proper.
I’m starting to get worried that I’ll wear out the new emoji 
Unfortunately, it’s not us humans who get culled in the vast majority of cases. If a bear, whether black, brown, or white, starts getting frisky with tourists and is clearly associating humans with food, it will be first moved to a new location, if one is available. If it continues to be a problem or there are no suitable relocation locations available then it is almost always killed.
Even relocating a bear to an unfamiliar area far from home can doom the animal; bears are raised by their mothers to know where to find food, water and shelter in their local areas and a bear relocated to an strange environment could starve to death before they figure things out.
Thanks for that response. I’ve worked with people who were terrible at different types of communication, but were brilliant at their jobs
Yeah, according to one study in California 80% of relocated bears returned to where they came from, and 55% of them die within 5 months:
This was for black bears but I’m seeing other articles indicating that Grizzlies have similarly poor survival rates after relocation.
A lot of people are basically uneducated about nature. What they think they know they get from Disney movies (really) and bad nature specials on TV.
I am a docent at an aquarium and we have touch pools. The number of people who think anemones give electrical shocks (Thanks to Nemo) is absurd.
And far too many people are brought up to believe someone else will protect them and that if they get hurt, even through their own actions, someone will make it up to them via a lawsuit.
Much of nature wants to kill and eat you or regards you as a threat to be killed, It does not want to join hands with you and sing songs about how “All Nature Is One”.
That’s really weird because the anemones in Finding Nemo don’t give electrical shocks. Marlin specifically says they “sting,” which is 100% accurate even if anemones are mostly harmless to humans.
I wonder how many aquarium visitors ask if the sharks are friendly ones that have sworn off eating fish?
When you watch the movie, it looks like electrical shocks and an awful lot of people think it is.
Maybe these tourists should watch that particular scene from The Revenant to keep them aware of the damage a bear can do.
The easiest way to tell the difference between a black bear and grizzly is to climb a tree.
The black bear will climb up after you to eat you. The grizzly will push over the tree, then eat you.
I don’t trust the cat to not chew my face off. I’m sure as hell not getting close to a bear.
“Gentle” Ben:
Meanwhile in Katmai National Park in Alaska, famous for the high number of brown bears who gather at the Brooks River to feast on salmon and Fat Bear Week, the NPS requires visitors to attend a 30 minute Bear School but doesn’t limit the number of fisherfolk or photographers in the river and doesn’t have enough staff to enforce the rules. The goal is to prevent the bears from associating humans with food, but people are regularly far too close to bears, take food out of the designated safe areas and generally behave recklessly. Visitors once threw a salmon at a bear so they could get pictures. I’m part of a Discord group that watches the live cams through Explore.dotorg and we have taken to documenting what is rapidly becoming ‘People Cam’ instead of bear cam. Explore has a rule that humans can’t be shown on the cams and there are times the cams just can’t follow a bear because of people in sight. Parents are also bringing small children. The trails and roads are regularly shared by bears and humans, so this seems very risky. Every year or so a cub is killed by a male bear, not because it likes to kill cubs but because its prey instinct was triggered or it was already in fight mode and the cub was just in the way. so the park’s attitude that the bears are habituated to human presence and won’t attack is a fantasy. Katmai NP is a ticking time bomb and it’s going to be bad. The entire Park Service needs more money for rangers so the rules can be actually enforced, violators should be banned from the parks and the number of humans allowed into Katmai, and especially in the river needs to be reduced and controlled. Bears are going to be bears, but humans are going to be human. It’s a dangerous mix.
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