Welcome to episode seventy seven of Get It Alive, a bi weekly podcast about
animal attacks, why they happen, and how we can avoid them. My
name's Ashley, and I have a few housekeeping things to go over before we
get into today's interview. So the first one is, I'm sure you've noticed
by now that we have a new logo. We're actually working on a new
new logo with a great artist which will be coming out soon, which means
new merch will come out with the new logo. And also we're overhauling our
website right now. And if you're listening to this, I'm sure you've also
heard the ads that are now in the episode. So the biggest update is
that we're now part of a podcast network, which means we'll have ads.
But also I, just as a podcaster, will have much greater support doing
this for all of you. And as promised from day one of starting our
Patreon and this podcast, I've always said if we had ads, we would
offer ad free episodes on Patreon, so we're doing that. So if you
join Patreon at the two highest tiers, you'll get AD free episodes on top
of the bonus episodes and all the other content you get for joining, but
you can support this podcast for free by leaving a five star review wherever you're
listening and subscribing. And now, instead of shouting out experts survivalists, I'm
going to read a review every single episode as a thank you for taking time
out of your day to leave them. So the first review i'd like to
redo all is from Laura one nine eight eight two three one one four on
Apple Podcasts, and it is titled great Podcast Informative and entertaining. The interviews
with experts sets this podcast apart from other Animal Tack podcasts. The hosts are
really good at highlighting their guests and not talking over them. I was interested
in the early episodes on animal attack stories, but the more recent episodes on
broader issues have been my favorites. So thank you so much, Laura.
Hopefully you liked this interview as well. It is one of my favorites.
I say that about every interview that we do. It becomes my new favorite.
But it's true. I really do love talking to our guests and experts
about this stuff. So our guest today is a bear expert and this has
been a long time coming. I've been waiting to talk to someone about black
bears and grizzly bears. You know, we've had a polar bear biologist before,
but black bears and grizzlies are probably the species that we talk about most
on this podcast. So we go over some of the common misconceptions and myths
around bears, like some common sayings that you might hear from time to time,
like if it's black, fight back, if it's brown, lie down.
We get into whether or not that's true, and how likely you are
to be attacked by which bear, and just the safest ways that you can
be in the woods around them. So, without further ado, let's get
into the interview. My name is Darryl rada Jack. I am a wildlife
biologist, but I'm a large apex predator specialist. I'm the kind of guy
that cares about those we call them charismatic megafauna. But I've been doing this
since the late nineteen nineties, so I've got almost thirty years of working with
bears, working with Cougar's work, Dear and el, but my love for
a wildlife pretty much falls on those apex predators. I'm definitely a predator guy,
and I'm thrilled to be here to talk to you. Ashley an open
book and you can ask me whatever you want, but I'd love to have
a conversation with you. Yeah, for sure. First of all, you
reach out to me, So thank you for reaching out to me, because
you had listened to I Believe some early episodes and you were like, let's
talk about misinformation about bears and like myths about bears. So I am so
happy. This has been a long time coming. So thank you for doing
this. So what was it about bears specifically that made you choose to kind
of specialize in them? Well, this might aggravate people, because I know
that there is is a large contingency of people that would love to make a
career out of working with bears. And when I graduated from college back in
nineteen ninety two in Syracuse, New York, I was looking for a job.
I had my degree in wildlife management, I was looking for a job
and I really didn't have a specialty animal. And I remember one of the
professors at my college asked if I wanted to pursue my masters working with woodchucks
in Maryland, And at that point, it was like, that doesn't sound
all that appealing. And so I figured I would just wait it out and
find a job. I don't know if you know this, but wildlife jobs
are really hard to come. Bye and lo and beyond. Years after working
odd jobs that I really didn't care to do, there was a position that
opened up just outside a Great Smoking Mountain National Park. It was for this
newly formed nonprofit called the Appalachian Bear Center. And what they were going to
do is they were going to work with the National Park Service and with the
Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, and they needed someone to run the facility. And
it was going to be a rehab facility, an education facility, and a
research facility. And the problem was it paid no money. The sailor is
like seven thousand dollars a year, which is about hundred dollars a week.
So I was like the only degreed person to apply for it because it was
like, wow, bears are really cool. That would be an awesome opportunity.
Maybe I could swing it, and so I took the gamble, and
as soon as I was there. Since that moment I took that job,
I haven't worked a day in my life working with bears and all these other
animals. It's just a dream come true. So my getting into the bear
world was kind of out of desperation but also out of dumb luck that this
particular job opened up at the time it did and I was able to land
it. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's another conversation we could have someday,
like the larger thing of how difficult it is to make it in the
wildlife field and what you need to do to land a job if you're lucky.
Yes, after I took that job in Tennessee working with black bears again,
that was back in mid to late nineteen nineties. I did that for
a number of years and was literally working with bears in some of the most
beautiful places in the world in the Smokies. And I did that for a
number of years. The problem was working where I was, it wasn't the
most secure job, working as a nonprofit. So my wife at the time
said time to get a real job, and so I applied for a position
with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, and because of my experience working with black
bears and the Smokies, within a few years, I was promoted to the
big Game program coordinator for the State of Tennessee. So I was overseeing deer
elk and the bear program for the entire state of Tennessee, and I did
that for about seven years and then moved up to Chief a Wildlife for the
State of Tennessee, so I was over all the wildlife. So throughout my
entire career, I have been dealing with not just handling and working with individual
bears early in my career, but also handling and managing bear populations and talking
about all sorts of things from bear education to unfortunate events such as bear attacks.
Because living in Tennessee you might know this, but We've had a couple
of fatalities that occurred in Tennessee that I've been linked to. So it's been
something I've been dealing with throughout my whole career and I'm more than happy to
talk about it. But whenever I teach people about bears, and there's a
big concern within the public about oh, what do I do if I encounter
a bear? How dangerous are there? And we don't want to scare people,
but I also don't want to blow them off like they're nothing to be
worried about, because if you look at statistics when it comes to these very
severe these fatal bear encounters, there's not many. But if you look between
black bear and brown bear. It's been a year or two since I looked
at the most recent statistics, but it was about fifty to fifty half the
fatalities were attributed to brown bears, half of them more attributed to black bears,
And you think, wow, they're both equally dangerous. But then you've
got to start breaking down that information. And so I hope you don't mind,
but I'm going to quiz you. Sure. Do you know roughly like
how many black bears are estimated in North America? I would say a couple
hundred thousand, very very good. You're right on top of things. It's
obviously very hard to get a really exact number, but they estimate anywhere between
three hundred and fifty to six hundred thousand in North America. When it comes
to brown bears, it is fractionally less. It's the estimates are anywhere from
about thirty thousand sixty thou so black bears outnumber brown bears by at least ten
to one. And so when you look at those statistics and it's half and
half, but you know that there's ten times more black bears out there.
Obviously, brown bears are going to be a bit more of a concern because
they attribute about half of those severe attacks, especially the fatalities. And so
if you were to classify which one do you need to be more cautious.
You need to be cautious about both of them, but brown bears you definitely
have to pay a little bit more attention to, simply because the incident's rate
of encounter resulting in a severe attack is going to be much higher with a
brown bear than it is for a black bear. Yeah, and I think
of all the animals we will ever cover on this podcast, bears the ones
that I think people are the most afraid of, like even worldwide, especially
in Australia. For some reason, we've had so many people reach out and
say like, wow, I can't believe you live around bears, like they're
so scary. And you know, I've lived around black bears forever here in
New England. I've never had a personal issue with them. I've seen like
maybe two in the wild in my entire life. So I love that we
can have this conversation where it's like, all right, let's actually break down
with a professional how at risk you are being around these animals and the risk
like really, like you were saying, is not that high. But we
can get into some ways that we can try to mitigate those conflicts and prevent
bad things from happening. So, to break it down even further, are
there common differences between attacks from black bears versus brown bears? Like it's one
more predatory, is one more defensive. That's a very good question, and
you've probably read Herrero's book where he breaks down all very text the thing with
the difference between the two. When you look at those very severe texts,
and obviously the fatalities are the most severe at all, you'll find that almost
all the fatalities from black bears are attributed to predaceous attacks where the black bear
has the intent of killing and eating the person. Potentially, those very severe
black bear attacks are pretty much all predaceous. There's very few. In fact,
they struggle to really find any that they could say this was a defensive
fatality from a black bear. I don't even know if they have one on
wreck brown bears. On the other hand, there's multiple, multiple instances of
fatalities occurring because of a defensive attack where a female brown bear or grizzly what
many people call them, is just trying to defend their cubs, and a
lot of that is attributed to bears. Behave very similarly. I have no
way of proving this, but their mentality is somewhat similar in the fact that
both brown bears and black bears they don't like people. They don't like people,
they don't want to be around people. Where the difference usually comes with
their interaction with humans is probably more so based on their physical size, their
physical differences than their mental differences. Because if you are a bear and you
come across a person and you're having a bad you just don't want to be
around this person. You can do one or two things. You can run
from the person, or you could try to scare the person away. Most
bears, in most situations will run from a person. But if the bear
says, you know what, I just don't want to I don't feel like
running. I just want this guy out of here, where are you more
likely to be an issue? If you are one hundred and fifty one hundred
and eighty pound black bear or three hundred, four hundred even more pound brown
bear, they're going to be less likely to be intimidated by a human if
you are a much larger bear, and so brown bears being much larger bears,
don't have that fear factor that the black bears do. And so that's
why some of these defensive attacks. The brown bears just take things a little
to fire, and they're much more powerful and more bad things could happen if
you get into a defensive situation with a brown bear as opposed to a black
bear. Yeah, And do you think that that's related at all to the
way that brown and black bears have like coevolved, where black bears have always
evolved and not be the top predator, but often grizzlies or brown bears are
the top predator where they're at. I never thought about that. That's a
really good question. It boils down to them pretty much the exact same thing,
because if you have both species of bears living in the same area,
obviously, look at Greater Yellowstone, you have a large grizzly and a large
black bear. Typically the bigger the body, the more intimidation you have,
So evolutionarily the bears are going to be the black bears are going to be
much more quicker to back down because throughout time if they ever exist with brown
bears in the area, the black bears were not the top predator. So
one of the biggest things I've been told throughout my life and I have come
to understand. And we're not even going to talk about polar bears because like
we're here in the contiguous US down here, so I feel like we're just
going to focus on brown and black bears for this conversation. But I've always
heard if it's brown, lie down, if it's black, fight back.
Can we talk about that statement and how true or not true it is?
Yes, If I could find every publication that has that written in it,
I would burn it. And people recite it and they go by it all
the time, and it bothers me. Yep. Reason being, it's not
correct because all the bear bios, all the people that work with bears,
the vast majority, believe the best response to an encounter, if you have
a close encounter with a bear, your response to that bear should not be
based whatsoever on what species of bear it is. Rather, it should be
based on the behavior of that particular animal. Now, having said that,
and I'll explain that more. But having said that, working having worked for
state and federal agencies before I kind of understand the reasoning for that nursery rhyme.
It's easy to remember. It works in most situations, but not all
situations. And when a government agency is trying to put out information to the
American public as many people as possible, they need simple things to say that
people will remember and their headge and their bet that it's the right piece of
information. But I will tell you, if you are interested in having the
best result from a bear encounter, all it takes is a little more knowledge
about bears in some common sense and understanding bear behavior, and you could increase
your successful encounter rates tremendously by knowing how to read bear behavior. The one
thing that it's interesting, and I don't know if I had told you this
previously, but Janelle Sharhak, she's a brilliant young biologist, worked a lot
with bear She recently did a master's work and she analyzed over three hundred black
bear attacks on humans. And there's certain things that was coming out of that
data that you don't hear about. For example, in some situations, especially
with females that have been attacked by bears, what they found out is the
more you fight back with a black bear, the more severe your injuries tend
to be. You don't hear that in the if it's black fight back.
The thing I'm trying to get across here is when you enjoy the outdoors,
you got to go out there have an understanding of the animals you may encounter
and what your best options if you do have an encounter, what is that
animal doing and how should I react to get myself out of that situation.
And we dive into that later if you like. But the notion that if
it's brown light down of black lie back, one fits all, that's just
not true. Yeah, if you're looking at your own well being, I
would take that extra effort to learn as much as I could about that animal.
Yeah, So this makes me think of I wish I had a way
of like showing you videos and we could go over them. But I'm sure
people send you videos all the time of bears and people interacting. So there
is one really popular video going around that I get sent all the time,
and it's of this family at a picnic table and a black bear comes and
hops on the picnic table and they sit there and they don't move, and
the bear eats their food, and I'm assuming it goes away because the video
ends. In cases like that, where a black bear is approaching somebody and
maybe going after your food, what is the appropriate response. Should you just
stay still? Should you scare it? Well, this leads perfectly into the
differences between their behavior and whatever I teach the class is about bear encounters.
It doesn't matter if it's a brown bear class or a black bear class.
The main difference, there's two basic encounters with with a bear, you could
have what we call and this is by far the most common occurrence, a
defensive encounter. When we talk about encounters, it's where you are close enough
to that animal that you affect its behavior and it affects your behavior. So
if you're up on the mountaintop and you see a bear down in the valley,
that's not an encounter, that's just the bear sighting, yep. But
when you're close enough to that animal that you interact with each other, the
main difference is most encounters tend to be defensive where you invade that bear space.
It could be its personal space. It was just feeding on some BlackBerry
bushes and you just got too close that the bear noticed you. Obviously,
you have other situations where you could have a mother with cubs. She does
not want you around because her cubs are there, So they're in this defensive
mode. You're in my space, You're too close to my cubs a lot
of times. And you know this as well as I. More and more
people are hitting the woods with their dogs, their companion animals. Yeah,
and those dogs amp up the defensive reaction in a bear. So in those
situations, whenever a bear is in a defensive mode or it's a defensive situation,
the bear wants to increase the distance between you and ed. It wants
you to get away or it to get away. And in almost every situation,
you just let that happen. You slowly back away, talk softly,
and let the bear go about its business because it doesn't want you around.
The other encounters we have, which are fewer and farther between. Is one
you just describe where you're sitting there and a bear approaches you. So instead
of closed, instead of increasing the distance between you and him, they're trying
to close the distance. There is something there that is making them curious,
and so I call these offensive behaviors. And so the bears most likely looking
for a food reward. In most situations, it smells something, whether or
not you have food at the picnic table or whatever, it smells something that
the bear wants. In those extreme situations where we end up with fatalities,
that's where you are the object of its attention. That's the predatory attack.
But whenever you encounter the bear, if the bear wants to get away,
it's defensive. If the bear wants to get closer to you, it's offensive.
In a situation where you're at a picnic table and a bear's coming at
you, yes, that's where you get aggressive. You scare that bear away.
You let the bear know you're the bigger, more dominant person there,
and in most situations that works. You've always got to maintain this sense of
safety. You got to. You don't want to put yourself in a bad
situation. So if you're nearby a car or house or whatever, make sure
you can always get to that. But you are doing that bear such a
favor if you can scare that bear, way to teach that bear, hey,
it's not good to come up to humans to get some type of food
reward. So anyway, depending on how that bear is acting, either offensively
or defensively. Your reaction should be based off their specific behaviors. Yeah,
that was great, kind of going off what you mentioned a little bit.
So one of our patrons, Dana, asked, does having a dog with
you increase your chances? She asked specifically about like a campsite attack, But
I think it's good to talk about in general because I, even in our
podcast time, I have found that like people with dogs usually amps up reactions
from any wild animal. Oh yeah, and actually I mentioned Janelle Sharhag's analyzing
a lot of the black bear stuff. That increases the severity sometimes when you
have the dog, because exactly like you said, it amps up that bears
defensive reaction. I talked with a friend yesterday. We're actually a really good
bear biologist herself. We were talking to I was just making sure that the
bullet points that jotted down kind of agreed with what her thinking was, and
we laughed about this particular question simply because lots of people go into the woods
with their dogs. In fact, I've got two dogs that I hike with
occasionally. The thing you have to understand is there are some dogs that are
really good can handle themselves. Usually they're highly trained, and there's there's people
that will be with their dog that they have complete control over the dog.
It's it's a very highly trained dog. Nine point nine percent of the people
out there don't have those kind of dogs. They think they do, They
think that they're like little companion. There is the most well behaved. But
when a bear enters that picture, that dog's mind just goes bonkers. It
never experience, and the dog goes crazy, the bear goes crazy, people
go crazy because the dog and bear are interacting, and so it's just an
all around bad situation. Now, going back to your question about having a
dog in your campsite, no matter what we talked about here today, Ashley,
I think you understand this. We can tell you what is most likely
to happen, but we can never guarantee you this is what's gonna happen.
When you're dealing with animals, they behave how they're going to behave, and
sometimes they don't behave the way you expect them. But a lot of times
a lot of people camp with their dog just kind of as an early warning
protection system, which should be good. It could alert you the dog will
notice a bear coming into a camp before you will. But then what's that
dog going to do. Is the dog gonna start chasing after the bear?
Is the dog just gonna stand it the ground? And you have no idea
how that dog's going to react. So the case of saying yes or no,
it's good or bad to have a dog in the camp with you,
you can't answer that to say this is what's gonna happen because I don't know
how the bear's going to react. I don't know how the dog's going to
react. But it could be good, it could be bad. But what
we're seeing more and more, with more people going into the woods with their
dogs, you're just seeing more negative interactions between dogs and bears. Yeah,
this makes me think of two. To bring it back to videos. Have
you seen any of the videos of people who are hiking with their dogs off
leash and their dogs actually bring back an animal. Oh yeah, there's one
where this the person with I think they have an Australian shepherd and it brings
back a full bull moose towards the people because it got scared and ran back
to the owners. And it's like, yeah, when you have your dogs
off leash, whatever's chastes coming right back at you. So, especially with
the bull moose, think about what's going on and that moose is the moose
has evolved with one of their tough predators being wolfe. And you have a
dog which is more or less a domesticated wolf, It's gonna react defensively,
especially if there's a calf around and so you are just opening the door.
I will never tell anyone not to go hiking with their dog, but if
they choose to do so, which, like I said, I've done it
myself, know the consequences. Yeah, know that you might lose your dog.
No, you might lose your life, You might have a really negative
Is it worth taking that risk? Some say yes, some say no.
But it's just hard to predict what will happen in any situation because animals behave
however they want to behave. Yeah, for sure. So speaking of risks,
one of our patrons, John asked, would you recommend carrying both bear
spray and a high caliber handgun in black Bear country or would you say bear
spray alone is all that one would need. I am a huge, huge
proponent of bear spray. It's funny because you you probably get on social media
and you'll always hear the people that will be quick to say, well,
I'm going to carry my forty five or give me my gun over some stupid
bear spray. But I will tell you I would recommend it one hundred percent
of the time, especially if you don't know much about firearms. If you
are worried about bears, the best thing to carry with you in the woods
against a defense against bears is your brain. If you know how to behave
around bears, that's going to get you out of almost every situation. If
you had to carry a piece of equipment to get you out of that last
half of percent, it's bear spray. The gun is like further on down
the road. And here's why. In a high pressure, intense situation like
that, I just told you, you have no idea how an animal is
going to behave the bear, a dog or anything. You also don't know
how you are going to react. I've had personal experiences with this where in
a high tense situation like that, your mind is telling you to do one
thing, but your body's doing something else. And so, unless you are
a military special person and that trains every day for intense situations with your handgun,
put the handgun away carry bear spray. The reason being as long as
you can get it out in that situation, that canister of bear spray is
going to put up more or less a wall if you deploy it correctly,
it's going to put up a wall of spray that the bear has to go
through. That handgun is only going to fire a single projectile and a fast
coming animal that has to hit in the perfect spot, and you're under pressure,
under duress. I take bear spray every time over a handgun. Yeah,
let me just say one thing, because you'll also hear the detractor as
well. Bear spray doesn't work all the time. I'm going to put it
this way. Your handgun doesn't work all the time either, if you don't
hit in the right spot. What people don't understand is when it comes to
bears, you know, their sense of smell, their old factory senses are
just off the charts. I got a whole spiel I can go to about
how powerful their nose is, but like two thousand times more powerful than our
nose. If you have ever been sprayed by pepper spray, or have any
instance, it freaks you out. Your eyes water, you can't breathe.
It's a horrible experience. We have the weakest ass nose that you could ever
imagine. Now, take a bear that has this hugely complex nasal cavity with
all these old factory receptors and al sudden you flood that with capsicum with this
pepper spray that is just it short circuits their brain their nose. It's so
powerful. As soon as they hit that, they pretty much in most situations,
they forget about it. They want to get out of there because this
is pure health form, and so they forget everything that they're going to do
and they're just scrambling to get away from whatever is attacking their face. Rain
Again, I'm a huge proponent of bear spray to know how to use it,
even with the guns that you still have to practice being able to draw
a bear spray, But you don't have to worry about hitting in that perfect
spot. You just got to be able to deploy it to put that cloud
between you and that bear. Yeah, and I know that they sell practice
bear spray cans or like inert cans where you can even just I've talked about
this so many times of the podcast, But like practice before you go out
taking it out quickly, like have it where you can reach it. Because
we the bear attack survivor or the grizzly bear attack survivor that we spoke to
Jeremy Evans, he had a gun and bear spray. Both were I think
his gun he had out, but his bear spray was in the bottom of
his bag. But he was like, that bear came at me so fast,
there was no way I could have shot her. Yeah, and didn't
have his bear spray where he needed it, so like obviously and died not
well for him. Could have been worse, but didn't end well for him.
But yeah, like just having it somewhere where you can reach it and
practice so that you know you can pull that out quickly if the worst,
And I will tell you with those situations, the readiness is the key.
Now, if you are totally surprised, it doesn't matter if it's a bear
spray, a gun or anything. If you are totally taken by surprise the
speed of those bears, you're unlikely to draw anything quickly. Yeah, But
this is why I said the most important tool that you carry with you is
your brain because you know it's that spidey sense you get like something's not right.
I maybe smell a carcass or I'm getting into a real heavy vegetation area
and like all the burrs and everything went quiet. Something's just not right.
That's where your brain said, you know what, let's get the bear spray
ready. You're carry it if you want to. But because if there's a
complete surprise by a bear at close rain, it doesn't matter how fast you
are. If you've got to dig something out, you're likely not going to
get it out in time. So that's where the situational awareness and use in
your brain is the most important. Yeah, and not wearing headphones when you're
out in bear country important too, so that you can pay attention to those
signs for sure. But yeah, the bear spray reminds me of I'm not
sure if this is like a thing that's come up on the podcast before,
but like, for example, when dogs get sprayed by skunks, this is
kind of a reach, but I'll get there. So when dogs get sprayed
by skunks, the reason that your dog doesn't ever learn to stop going after
skunks is because there's like no consequences. They still get to go home to
you. They might have a bath, which they hate, but they still
get to eat. But in the wild, if a coyote is sprayed by
a skunk, they smell like a skunk and all their senses get messed up,
they probably won't be able to find food. Their food can smell them
coming. So I can imagine a person spraying a bear with bear spray is
also you are helping to teach that bear not to mess with people, because
you are harming it in a way so that it feels like that you are
not a safe food source, helping it learn to stay away from people.
I love that you brought that up. It is a tremendous tool for a
verse of conditions for teaching that bear. That was the wrong thing for me
to do, to go after that person because that hurt, yeah and so,
And the good thing is it hurts, it doesn't kill. Yep.
You could have arguments about shooting a bear and killing it in a defensive situation,
but if a bear is protecting its young, it's not doing anything other
than being a bear. A bear spray will is much better at teaching it
a lesson than just completely removing that bear for being a bear. Yeah,
for sure. So kind of going along this line, John had another question,
which was has there been any studies to show if different sounds made by
humans scare bear off more effectively, for instance, like a roar versus a
yell? And then I was thinking bear bells and how often do bear bells
work if at all? Yeah, very good question. First off, the
thing with bear bells, there's actually a couple of things here. Bears are
pretty smart animals. And you know what habituation is, habituation. It's not
a bad thing. A lot of people confuse habituation with being food conditioned,
but habituation is just where a bear is so used to a certain stimuli that
they disregarded. And so in most cases, like bears around the Smokies and
Yellowstone, they're habituated to people. They see people all the time, so
they don't pay any attention to them. So habituation can occur with things other
than people. So if they're exposed to a stimulus, say you live in
a really popular tourist town that has a lot of hikers, a lot of
bears, and every hiker is wearing bear bells. The bear it's gonna sound
like Christmas time in the woods all the time. You're gonna hear bears bells
ringing, and so the bears will become somewhat that it doesn't it won't phase
them as much because they hear it all the time. Now, the main
purpose of bear bells is not to scare bears away, so to speak,
but more or less to alert them to your present because, especially if for
hiking alone, sometimes we don't talk, we don't listen to music. Sometimes
we walk quietly, and that could potentially lead to this close encounter because you
accidentally stuck up on a bear. So the purpose of the bear bells is
just to let the bear know something's coming down the trail, and a bear's
senses are so much better than ours they'll be able to say, hey,
that's a human. I'm going to get out of here before you've become That's
why you don't even see bears, and so bear bells can serve a purpose,
especially if you're in an area where the bears might not be used to
seeing people. It just it's an odd sound that the bear's not used to
hearing, and that will usually freak them out and say I've never heard this
before, I don't like this. He'll get out of the way, so
as far as what kind of sounds work best. Again, there's no one
size fits all sound that's going to work in every situation. Obviously depending on
the situation. If you have an offensive bear that is approaching you, you
are trying to scare it away. So the louder, the more aggressive you
are, the better off that sound is going to be. If you're in
a defensive situation where the bear just wants you away, talking softly will put
the bear more at ease than being loud and aggressive. You have a mother
with cubs, it's better to say, hey, mom, I'm sorry,
I'm in your area and back way instead of like, get real aggressive because
she's gonna start to ampuff. And so the sounds can be very situational and
so there's no one particular sound that works best. I will tell you what's
becoming more and more popular. There's some people that don't like the idea of
bear spray, and so they carry air horns. Yeah, it will work.
If there's a bear close buying you suddenly hit it with an air horn,
it could surprise the bear. The problem with an airhorn, though,
is if that bear has bad intentions, there's no hurt. Bear spray will
hurt that bear and stop him. An air horn will irritate that bear,
but it's not going to hurt him. And if they're intent on getting something,
they're still going to get it. Yeah, and so it could be
it could be another tool in your pack that you use. But I would
not want to rely on a sound to keep a bear away because it all
depends on the intention of that bear at the time. Yeah, And to
me, it's also important to point out, like you know, the people
who might not want to use bear spray because they're afraid of hurting the bear.
In the worst case scenario, if a bear hurts you and you didn't
have bear spray, that bear is likely going to be at least here in
New Hampshire. Like bears that attack people, they try to find those bears
to euthanize them or move them away. So ultimately, yeah, a bear
hurting you is going to definitely hurt that bear. So like bear spray is
temporary, euthanasias forever, So bear spray great option. Yeah, No,
that's a great point, and it's just not New Hampshire, it's pretty much
every state. If you have a severe attack, there's just too much risk
that state wildlife agencies aren't going to take that risk to allow those bears to
remain out there. And I know a lot of people don't agree with that,
but there's reasonings behind that. Yeah, for sure, it's the not
fun part of wildlife management that people don't talk about. Yeah. Yeah,
So John, John has so many good questions, so we're gonna keep wronging
with another one of John's question. So what types of wildlife areas should people
avoid during what seasons to avoid conflicts with bears? That's pretty easy. The
nice thing with bears is they're fairly easy to pattern. Bears are gluttons.
Wherever there's food, there's bears. So whether or not it's a BlackBerry field
in the summertime that's ripening, camping in the middle of that BlackBerry field if
there's a potential draw of bears to that area because of those blackberries, not
a good place to camp in the fall, especially in New England or the
eastern half of the country that has a large acorn crop. If you've got
a lot of acorns dropping around there, that might not be a good place.
Bears obviously are trying to fatten up for the wintertime. You go more
out western states and you have those salmon runs up some of the streams in
the West, you might not want to camp, especially if you're Alaska Western
Canada, where those brown bears are coming in to feed on the salmon.
You don't want to be camping right next to the river their favorite food source.
So a lot of it it's situational awareness. Is this a place where
bear is likely to come feed? Or think also about travel corridors. Most
wild animals don't like exposing themselves and so they'll kind of stick to that edge
that brush line to stay concealed. So it would probably be better to camp
in a more open spot than tucked away under the tree somewhere, because that
could just be a chance of dumb luck that and animals just walking through the
thicker stuff to get from point A to point B. A lot of it's
come in sense. The best thing to do is think about that animal and
know about that animal, have a good understanding of what they like and don't
like, and just say, if I was this animal, would I want
to be in this spot? And if you're like, oh, this is
a really good spot to see bears, don't camp there. Yeah. Yeah.
John had another camping question. So, if you are out camping where
there's bears, how far away from your camp should you hang a bear bag
to like put all your food into so that they can't access it? And
then is there a certain height that you should hang bear bags at. You
are gonna hate me because I'm never going to answer your question like succinctly.
Just this is. This isn't the hard and fast rule you anywhere you go,
it may have slightly different guidelines because it it's based on it's situational.
It's based on the area. So you might be an area that does not
have many trees for you to hang a bear bag from, and so it
all depends on where you're camping for that night. The thing I want to
stress to people is even when you see guidelines to hang a bear bag one
hundred yards away from your campsite, it's a guideline. So if you walk
ninety nine yards and you can't say, oh this is bad, but take
one more step and say, okay, we're good. Just get a feel
for the outdoors, get a feel for the animals. Just say all right,
I'm far enough away, but where I'm hanging this pack, it's a
trail that goes right back to my campsite, So maybe this isn't a good
place. Take those guidelines and kind of just get the gist of what they're
saying. If you have food that they recommend hanging in a tree, the
hardest thing, usually Ashley, is finding a good tree to hang in it,
yep, because it's very difficult. A lot of trees are too low,
their branches aren't conducive to hang in a heavy bag or anything. So
it's just finding a good tree that will work to hang your bag in a
way that a bear is less likely to get at it. Now I say
less likely, because bears are ingenious. If they want to get something,
they're going to get something, and so if you make it hard for them,
hopefully it'll dissuade them. But there's no steadfast rule of this is how
you do it, this is how you don't do it, because in some
situations the way you do it here could be completely wrong the way you do
it over here. So the main thing is you want to keep the bear
out of your campsite. You don't that bag if you have food in it,
no matter how many times you see it bears sense of smell. It's
gonna smell stuff that's on the outside of the bag, on your clothes.
That bear is going to be able to tell that there's something hanging in that
tree. It could draw a bear into your pack to investigate. The key
to all those guidelines is to keep that bear out of your campsite while you're
sleeping. Yep. So yeah, I think to a great resources like contact
your state wildlife agency or like if you're traveling to a different state, just
reach out and be like, hey, what are your recommendations for this specific
area too. Yeah. The good thing is like a lot of campsite trailheads,
well we'll have a guideline or more than likely you go to their website.
They'll have information on how you should do things in the back country in
that particular area. But you can't somewhere out westwar where I go camping a
lot, there's not a tree over six foot tall in some of the areas.
So you got to be you just got to be smart with your food
storage because the whole goal of all of those guidelines is to make sure you're
not bringing that bear into your campsite. Yep. Yeah, for sure.
So to get more into the more intense attack. So John, once again
another great question. If one comes across another person who has been mauled or
someone who is like in the process of being attacked by a bear, what
should you do to get that person to safety with minimal risk to yourself if
possible. And there's a second half to his question, so we'll get it
to that after you answer the first part. Yeah, this was the other
question that I was talking to my best friend about regarding how to respond to
this, because the first thing that she brought up to me is she said,
John, just let John know he is that upper one half of one
percent, because ninety nine percent of the people if they come across a stranger
that is getting mauled by a bear, nobody's going in there. Yeah,
it's such a crazy event. And unless you are this ultimate hero that will
charge into save, which is a where trait in people. But we would
never encourage it because I think John mentioned you don't have bear spray, you
don't have a fare arm. Yeah, if you're alone with no sort of
defense. The one thing you have to understand if you have a severe situation
where an animal is or a bear is unfortunately mauling someone or has already killed
someone. It has already done the damage to one person. We want to
make sure it doesn't do the damage to two people. And so we will
never tell anyone to go in and try to do what they can simply because
it's a bad situation and you're not prepared a situation like that. The best
thing you could possibly do is try to get a hold of someone nine to
one one, any agency you can get a hold of as quickly as possible
so they can bring the resources necessary to help that person out. You can't
do it with your bare hands. Karate is good, but it's not good
enough on a bear. Yeah. This really brings me back to We did
a two part episode early on in this podcast about the series of attacks at
Glacier National Park from Brown Bearsli Yeah, Night of the Grizzlies, and Nick
my cost was like so angry because he was like, there's people being attackling,
you got to go help. And I was like, but the people
don't have bears, brier, they don't have guns, and he was like,
it doesn't matter. Someone's being attacked and I'm like, I think that
makes it worse. Yeah, And Nick was thinking like but in real life.
It's it's something that it'd be hard to do. Now, I understand,
like if it was if it was your child, if it was someone
that you knew, then that act of heroism definitely increases. But to stumble
upon someone, your best bet is to try to get someone who's better prepared
to handle that situation, because if you're not prepared, you're just increasing the
likelihood there's going to be too bad a situations. Yeah, I think the
link between John and Nick is that they're both veterans, so I think they're
already the type of people that would run in and try to help a situation.
So maybe to all the veterans out there, still leave it and wait
until someone else comes in. There's nothing wrong where if you can see it
happening where you yell and you scream, but you definitely don't want to go
up to that bear because that bear's going to take you out too. But
yeah, if you want to try to get the bear off by yelling,
scream and throwing things, but if you don't have anything to immediately deal with
that bear, you just can't interject yourself into that particular encounter. Yeah,
and his second part of the question was like, in this situation, like,
how do you get that person out of there? And I think some
wilderness like first aid training would be really helpful to know if that's the kind
of thing that you're worried about, because handling someone who has been brutally attacked
by an animal, like, there's a lot going on there that I don't
know if either of us are qualified to get into how to handle that,
but well, I'll tell you. One of the things I used to do,
especially when I was in Tennessee, is I helped coordinate bear attack response
training for different state and federal agencies. It's pretty intense, and that's kind
of one of the things that I wanted to touch on because when you're talking
about these severe attacks, it is such devastating, a personally devastating experience for
the not just the person that has attacked, but their friends, their family,
all the first responders. And I know sometimes people tend to like joke
about it or play it off, but it is such you want to joke
about a serial killer who's on a rampage and just make light heartedness, because
there are situations where it just it's life changing, and so we want to
treat bear attechs with the utmost respect. And so one of the trainings,
and I'll give you an example. One of the trainings we were doing in
Gatlinburg just over a decade ago. We brought in specialists from out west who
dealt with numerous attack situations and they're horrific. Some of them will break up
when you mentioned specific cases. And we wanted to prepare all these first responders
from all these different Southeastern states and federal agencies about what you're likely to get
into. So we had these different scenarios set up around Gallenburg, Tennessee,
and I worked one of those scenarios. And they go all out with this
training. They want to make sure these first responders are prepared. And so
the particular scenario we set up was just on the outskirts of town. There
was a restaurant there and behind the restaurant was a little play set, and
so we may the scene the instructors, myself and the instructors, we made
the scene that supposedly there was a young three year old girl playing on the
swing set and a bear grabbed her dragged her off into the bushes, and
so they use all the props they had the baby dolls, the everything in
there. And as soon as you set that up and you look at it
right away, you're like, oh God, I hope I never ever have
to encounter this. So we got the scene all set up and the particular
group of students who are mostly wildlife officers or first responders, started coming in
to They were told there was a bear incident and to come investigating. So
they approached the scene and they started piecing it together what was happening, and
they saw the doll where it was, they saw the drag marks, and
they're clicking like a young child with taking and all of a sudden, we
cueued up the actors. And my good friend who I was talking with yesterday,
she was one of the actors, and she's phenomenal. She's brilliant,
and she played the part better than anyone ever. And she comes out of
the restaurant and she screams and she runs over there and she's trying to go
find her baby, and the officers panicked and she's screaming, where's my baby?
Where? And Ashley, it was the most amazing thing. Here was
a simulation and you look around and I'm crying. The officers are everybody's crying
because there's this mom that's trying to find her bab, and so the lightheartedness
of these attacks can sometimes like anyone that's been involved with it just it doesn't
sit well. Yeah, but I understand the general public has this interest in
them, But we just got to treat all of these situations with that most
respect because they're pretty pretty serious situations. Yeah, for sure. Yeah,
we spoke to Jeremy Evans, the Grizzly Attack survivor. You know, it's
funny, it was his first time ever going on a podcast and like really
ever talking in public about what happened to him, and his story is crazy,
but he the whole you know, went through talking about the whole attack
itself and like his journey to get help, and the first thing that made
him cry was talking about his wife and how like she responded and how she
helped. Oh my god, I'm like teary up thinking about it. But
yeah, I think something that can get lost often in podcasts when you're talking
about even true crime like people killing people, is like there are real people
involved in these stories that are still traumatized by these events. So like it's
not a big thing to joke about or like you know, and I know
the humor of the joking is kind of like a coping mechanism even for the
general public, to make it not so scary. Yeah, but I will
tell you, I told you like during that situation, I cried. But
even sitting through that class, we we would go over different case studies,
and there's there's a cell phone video of a person who was recently attacked by
a bear. He did not hang his food away from his campsite. He
ended up getting mauled by a bear, and so he made a video and
he was he was mauled pretty severely, and it wasn't pretty to look at,
but he was pretty much saying goodbye to his wife. And you're just
sitting there and you're just you're in tears. It's like this is this is
the worst possible thing that can happen. So the good news with that is
he was saved. There is actually a for service worker coming up the trail
on a horse that was able to help him out. So yeah, started
to going a downward tangent. But I enjoy talking about them. I think
they're fascinating. But yeah, whenever we talk about we're always trying to just
put in perspective of this is serious stuff. Yeah, and I think it's
a good reminder too, Like going off of John's question of like how can
you help somebody, It's like, I don't know, even professionals aren't usually
prepared to come across this event because one, it's so rare into it's so
horrific if you do come across it only cow And for a second there,
I forgot why I've got on that tangent. But it's basically the question because
even in that training, the professionals are taught like to approach a situation,
especially if the bear is still over a victim or near a victim. It's
almost like military training about you got to be in specific positions to watch all
your guards, and even the trajectory at which if you're to put a bear
down in which you angle that gun so as not to cause more injury to
the victim, and so you know, as well as in a lot of
situations where you have people saying the gun is the best thing, there's a
lot of situations where they shoot their friend trying to shoot the bear. Yep.
So yeah, and I believe I can't think of specific one off the
top of my head, but I have heard of bear attacks where that exact
thing happens. Someone goes to shoot them there and ends up shooting themselves or
their friend. So yeah, it happens, all right, So to move
on similar one of our patrons, Ali asked, what do you think is
causing the increase of bear attacks in Japan in the last year? And I
don't know exactly what she's referring to because I haven't heard of this. I
don't really keep up with the news in Japan on bears. Maybe I should,
but I don't know if you know what she's referring to. Well,
no, I wasn't. Sorry, I kind of researched it, and pretty
much all I saw was over the last few decades, the amount of encounters
and the tacks of her attacks has increased in Japan, and I think it's
pretty simple. It's the exact same thing that's happening here, because if you
look over the decades, we're having more and more bear encounters, bear attacks,
and that's just I would imagine as just a simple product of human populations
going up, bear populations also going up in most situations, And that second
part a lot of people don't realize, especially in the general public. They
know human populations arizon, but when you say, what about bear populations,
Oh they're going down. That's not true. Look at black bears. Black
bear populations have exploded over the last century, and so it's just I believe
it's just simply a product of more encounters. So it's just a population statistic.
Yeah. Well, that's really all the questions I had on bear attacks.
So I know there's some misconceptions that we should get into that maybe aren't
bear attack related, but just bear related. So before we start recording,
you and I were talking a little bit and one of your biggest pep peeves
is the misconception about bear hibernation. So do we want to dispel that rumor
right now? Yeah, and I'll do it quick. And I can't thank
you enough, Ashley, because when I brought that up a few months ago,
you brought up on the Treadwell episode about making that clarification. And I'm
glad you referenced bearwise dot org because is that website tremendously useful information and it
has something about hibernation on there, and that website is written by bear biologists
that work with bears all the time. The confusion and the pet peeveseness is
when you say, or when people say, bears don't hibernate. Let me
ask you, how do you define hibernation? And there's two different definitions.
You could use the general term that the general public would like, or if
you would rather use the biology like the biological definition, either one. How
would you just define hibernation? Yeah, generally, I would like broadly,
I would describe it as a long term period of sleep or the animals respiration
and like heart rate decrease and their metabolism slows down. Okay, that is
definitely closer to the biological definition. If you ask a ten year old child
or just someone off the street, they'll say hibernation is sleeping through the winter,
and that's fair. So yeah, And if you look at Miriam's or
Merriam Webster dictionary, it'll say a dormant or torpid time through the in which
animals sleep through the winter. So that's how most people they're like, the
bears are inactive during the winter. From the biological perspective, I'm so glad
you brought that up, because there is a biological aspect to hibernation. And
what it is. It's a lot of people think it's based on cold,
so when it snows outside animals, it's loosely related to that. What it's
most closely related to is lack of food. And so you all know in
North America, in most parts of North America, during the wintertime, trees
lose their leaves, plants stop growing. We have this period of months and
months where plant life does not grow. Bears are omnivores and a huge chunk
of their diet is plant life. So if they have no food out there
for a number of months, they got to figure out how to survive.
They're not going to fly, they're not going to migrate deer during the wintertime,
their diety changes, so instead of eating forbes and leaves, they're eating
twigs because that's all that's out there. Bears will and other animals will hibernate,
and so pretty much the biological definition of the hibernation is where the body
will go dormant for a while, and there's certain changes within that animal,
like you mentioned lower respiration, lower heart rate, and what all that does.
They kind of put their body in kind of like an idle mode where
they're not burning a lot of energy. It decreases their metabolism, so they're
not burning through all their fat resources. They'll still burn through it, but
at a much slower rate. So there's that metabolic decrease. So when bears
hibernate, all those hibernating animals, the true hibernators, they lower the respiration,
they lower their heart rate. Their metabolism decreases tremendously. But the key
with a lot of those is their body temperature drops from around say ninety five
to one hundred degrees, and it drops to almost freezing, so their body
temperature goes way out. The thing that bears do differently is they lower their
heart rate, lower the respiration. They form that fecal plug because they're not
going to eat or drink, but their temperature stays relatively high. It only
drops about ten degrees, so they're still hovering high eighties, low nineties.
All that means is they can wake up real easily. So if they're disturbed,
then it just takes them a few minutes. They'll still be really wobbly
and groggy, but they can get out, move around, but then they'll
go back to sleep. The reason it's a pet peeve is when it's generalized
way too much and say, oh, bears don't hibernate because they're using this
torpor, this other strategy where their temperature doesn't drop public things. Oh,
they don't hibernate. They're out all winter long. And believe it or not,
we have folks that hear that that will go visit the Smokies in January
and February because they heard bears don't hibernate and it's like, no, they're
they're sleeping. There might be a bear that is awake or has access to
food. That's a big problem is if they constantly have access to food,
then they don't have to sleep as much because that adaptation is because there's no
food around. If they have food, then they don't have to sleep as
much. So anyway, thank you, thank you, thank you for clearing
that up. It's they don't hibernate the same way other animals hibernate, but
they still spend most of the winter sleeping. Because if it was true that
they didn't, the best time to see bears would be January and February because
there's no leaves on the streets. But they're not out. Most of them
are sleeping. Yeah, so thank you for that. Thank you. I've
also heard in recent years there's been like maybe it's just the fact that it
reported more and now I'm keeping more of an eye on it, But I've
heard more people say that grizzlies are waking up during the middle of the winter
very hungry and are like going after people or bird feeders or whatever. Is
there anything happening with brown bears and like why they're waking up early or hungry.
I haven't heard it like as much of it being a whole species wide
phenomena, But if you have areas, one of the biggest food sources is
that there's a beetle. There's an insect that a lot of the bears will
gorge themselves on. And when you have specific situations, whether or not it's
due to climate change or just bad weather or something where an animal's food source,
especially in the fall when they're trying to fatten up, has been tremendously
impacted by another event, and the bears don't get those fat reserves that they
need to stay sleeping, Then bears in a particular area might a lot of
them might be underweight and get up to forge around for food because they're all
kind of struggling in that particular winter. I don't believe it's happening on the
whole global or metal scale, but definitely in some areas you could have some
winners that bears are more active because either there's more food around or something happened
to their food source. So the thing with social media is we hear a
lot more of the anomalies. Before social media. If something happened in somewhere
Iowa, you never heard about it, but now it's front page news because
something weird happened in Iowa. Yeah, all right, are there any other
pet peeves or misinformation things about bears that you would like to clear? Well,
I'm sure I get a lot, but we're over an hour now,
so I don't want to keep it too long. But cool. Well.
One of the last fun questions, which I think could lead more into some
things that you have worked on the past. Kim, one of our patrons
asked, what cartoon bear is your favorite? I started thinking about this and
I don't want to disappoint Kim, because I promise you the bear I'm gonna
mention she never heard of. Hopefully she'll hear it soon. But it's not
a cartoon either. I was a kid, I loved Yogi and smoking all
that, but my favorite bear in general. I actually wrote a book.
Released the book last year. It's called Spooning a Bear, and it's just
a series of short stories about some of my adventures being a bear biologist,
and a lot of them came from when I was working at the rehab and
research facility in the Smokies. Now understand, when you're doing bear rehab,
the best way to do it is hands off. You don't want any contact
with the bears. You don't want those bears to associate with humans at all.
So I all the bears I rehabbed, which I forget the grand total,
it is either forty three it's close to fifty bears, but never had
any contact with them. Everything was done behind blinds. You didn't get in
there and crawl in the cage with them or anything like that. But there's
one bear that was brought to us early on. It was probably about a
twenty pound cub is. It was already about six seven months old, but
it was captured by the State Wildlife Agency. They grabbed it off the porch
of someone's house and sure enough, we found there some wrong. The bear
had aspiration pneumonia, which is indicative of being bottle fed the wrong way.
They had the bear tilted the wrong way and it got liquid in and the
bear's lungs and that bear we took it to the vet to make sure it
is going to be okay, and the vet was pretty serious with me.
He said, Darryl, don't be too upset if the bear doesn't make it
through the night, because it's it's not doing very well. And so here
I am. I'm one of the biggest animal lovers, and I wanted to
see that bear released to the wild. Then I'm just told that the bear's
not going to survive through the night. So that was one of the only
times where since the bears wasn't going to make he couldn't be released back to
the wild. I wanted to make sure he had a really good last night.
So instead of feeding the natural foods, the acorns, the grapes,
whatever the natural foods we typically gave the bears, I gave him a little
treat kind of as his last meal. And the cub's name was Deacon.
He was comforted by my presence and so I did something you never ever,
ever should do with wildbear. But I let him out of the cage and
he would go on my lap. Because you have to understand, whoever ruined
this bear handle this bear quite a bit, and so it thought that I
was the mama bear. And so there's one and only time I ever got
to handle a real bear. And when I went to put him back in
the cage when we're all done kind of comforting each other, he would have
none of it. Like he would go spread eagle with both and paused holding
the door and is like a little trampoline, trying to push him in,
and he wanted to go in. And then he turned around and wrapped his
arms around my leg and I could feel his claws digging in, and I'm
like, holy cow, I've got a real bear here. And so I
ended up. I was in a storage shed at the facility, and I
ended up throwing a blanket on the floor and I let him play around and
dummy me. I was exhausted from a long day. I fell asleep and
when I woke up in the morning, at first I didn't even open my
eyes, and I was thinking, did I dream all that? And I
woke up and I was spooning the bear. The bear had fallen asleep in
my arm. So Deacon is my favorite bear because this is the only time
I ever actually handled and got up close and personal. But the happy ending
to the story is we say that the bear ended up living, but it
was still a heart wrenching story because bear that is fed by humans and wants
to be around humans can't be released back to the It's a way to find
a sanctuary for that bear to go to. But Deacon is probably my favorite
bearon if you want, if you got to read about Deacon, it's in
my book Scooting a Bear, which you can just google it or look it
up on Amazon. So nice. Well, in speak, you don't just
have a book, You also have your own business. So can you tell
us a little bit about your business and why you started it? Oh yeah,
back in back in twenty sixteen. I moved from Tennessee to New Mexico
back in twenty fifteen, and by twenty sixteen I was kind of touring all
over the Southwest given bear talks, bear safety talks, cougar talks, just
lots of apex predator type of talks. In the West, things are a
lot more spread out than in the east, so when you got to drive
from one town to another, it's three hour drive this way or that way.
And I was loving it. But I mentioned on my Facebook page back
then, I've got to go to Los Alamos to give a bear talk tomorrow
night, and someone said, man, I would love to sit in on
your talk. Can you do it online? And the light bulb went off,
and so I started a business called Wildlife for You. It's just an
educ wildlife education where I would just give talks. And I started doing webinars
back in twenty seventeen. General webinars air safety, but different species talks about
maybe foxes or people would send in can you do a class on this?
And so I would do all that. And I have a website that's in
band need of updating, and my son, my youngest son, is in
college to update that and he promises within the next few months he'll have it
updating. But I used to teach a lot of online classes and I've got
over eighty different online classes available. If anyone, I'm going to have all
those available. But we also did a podcast, there's a Wildlife for You
podcast. I don't want to compete with yours a couple of years ago.
It's over and done with. I started with the brilliant friend of mine,
Stephanie Payne, who was my co host, and we talked about a whole
different slew of different topics and that was I think we have over eighty shows
on that one, so nice. Yeah. So I've got a real job
where I go to pay the bills as a wildlife biologist. But my true
passion is the education side of things, because unfortunately, and I know you
know this too well, some of the smartest people in the business are not
the best communicators. And so my passion is taking that hard, good sound
science, translating it and providing it to the public so they can understand it
better. Yep, because sometimes what we put out it doesn't always carry over
in the best way. And so yeah, if you ever want to talk
any more about any other topic, I'm happy to do it because I love
trying to educate the public about wildlife because it's my passion. Yeah, I
mean, first of all, thank you for doing this in general, but
yeah, that's why I want to do this too, because I mean things
like the if it's black fight back, if it's brown led down, like
there's more nuance to that statement that you can't get out of, like the
government just issuing that statement. And that's why broadcasts are great. Yeah,
that two sentence nursery rhyme doesn't cover at all, but if you listen to
someone explain why it doesn't work in all situations and what you are supposed to
do. I'm trying to reach those people that love wildlife and love to learn,
because the best moment, Ashley, is that light bulb moment, and
we see it all the time. It's like, oh, I get it.
As soon as that light bulb goes off, those folks are a thousand
times in better shape being in the woods than someone that's just reading a two
sentence nursery rhyme. Yeah, and you know, I know some people may
not agree with like the branding of our podcast where like it's branded as an
animal attack pod, But the whole purpose is like to get people in that
might be afraid of animal tax, right, so they're looking up like animal
tax or whatever, and that will lead them to this where you can actually
learn about like Okay, here's actually the statistics on whether or not this is
likely to happen to you and how you could avoid this from happening to you.
So I totally get that approach. I totally appreciated because obviously, when
you're in this business, you've got to capture people's attention. And I will
tell you I've written a ton of articles. The one I wrote it was
about wildlife photographers because oftentimes they do very very bad things, and sometimes they
think what they do is so unobtrusive it doesn't affect the animals, which is
a bunch of malarkey in many situations. And so the article I wrote was
about the ethics of wildlife photography, but the title it was I Killed a
Bear, And it was a shock title that once people read it, they're
like, oh, I had no idea we had we could potentially have that
impact on an animal, because if they're changing that animal's behavior, they can
definitely have a negative impact on those animals. Yeah, so I totally get
and understand your marketing strategies to draw people in just to get them to listen.
And again, I can't thank you enough Ashley for reaching out trying to
get the most current, up to date, best information out there. Yeah.
Truly wonderful. Yeah, Well, thank you, Daryl, Thank you
so much for doing this. I would love to have you back on another
time. There's so many things we could talk about, so yeah, anytime
you want to come back, you let me know, even if we're not
on air, if you have any questions or one or anything, by by
all means, please feel free to reach out. Yeah, and how can
other people reach out and find you if they would like to talk to you?
Well, there is a Facebook page, which is kind of For the
last couple of months, I've been dealing with some family issues with my dad,
so it's kind of been quiet, but wildlife for you. On Facebook,
it was pretty active for a while. We got a pretty good following
on Facebook. I think there's we had over eleven thousand people following that right
now. Yeah, and I see you. Also, if anyone's listening and
they are part of the Science Career Network Facebook pages or anything like that,
you are super active on all those. That's where I first thought, Yeah,
I know, that is funny that I usually do not find people from
Facebook, so it's funny that that's how we connected. But it worked out
so all right. Well, thank you so much, Daryl for doing this.
It was great, haven't you. I had an absolute blast, Ashley,
And if you ever need me again and be happy to talking about any
other thing you want. I think we got to touch on Krueger's before too
long. Oh absolutely, yeah. I hope you all enjoyed the interview with
Darryl. And my favorite quote from the episode was, if you have a
close encounter with the bear, your response to that bear should not be based
whatsoever on what species of bear it is. Rather, it should be based
on the behavior of that particular animal. And I think that's really important really
with any animal that we're talking about, but it highlights the need for us
to be more connected to the animals around us, the world around us,
and just if you're going out in the woods, just get a better sense
of what's going on around you and what you might encounter. And you don't
have to be afraid of bears. You are not likely to be attacked by
a bear. As we mentioned the episode, we can't predict exactly how every
animal is going to act, but in general, you are not likely to
be attacked by a bear, especially if you go out prepared with bear spray
and you know basic bear behavior. So in our next episode, I will
be telling a story of someone who lived very close with black bears, and
we will dive a little deeper into their behavior and maybe things to keep an
eye out for. Also, our next bonus episode on Patreon will also be
a story about bears, one that has been very highly requested by a lot
of you, so stay tuned for that. And I figured, you know,
we're having basically this entire month dedicated to bears. But tis the season
bears are waking up from hibernation, so that means take down those bird feeders
there are already hitting them, so please get those in so it doesn't cause
a problem for the rest of the summer. So take what you learn from
this episode, put that to use as bears are coming out of hibernation and
if there are any around you, and stay safe out there, all right.
You can check out our episode description for links to find Darryl, links
to find us on social media. And thank you to Josh Walsh for making
our intro music, and thank you to his brother Jesse Walsh for doing all
the other lifting in the audio department. Also, Jesse is currently updating our
early episodes to upgrade the sound quality, so thank you so much Jesse for
doing that. Is a long time coming. Thank you all right, I
will catch you all in two weeks for another animal attack story. See yeah