Grizzlyville by Jake Macdonald

Author:Jake Macdonald [Jake MacDonald ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443400831
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

8

The Man Who Talks to Bears

In all his years of dealing with black bears, Dr. Lynn Rogers says he has been injured “only” twice. Once, a mildly annoyed bear swatted him on the arm when he kept interrupting it while it was eating. Another time, he was visiting a high school class with a bear, and when the animal decided to leave the room, he unwisely tried to stop it. He says he’s had a few Hail Mary moments, though. Once, an immense male bear walked up to him and closed its jaws on the top of his head. One false move and the bear would have bitten into his head like an apple. Was he worried? “Bears have their own language,” he explains. “This big fella had told me that he wanted to be my friend. Now, I had never seen a bear do that before, so when he took my head in his mouth I thought, ‘Oh, oh…is this that one bad actor of a bear that’s finally going to do me in?’ But I trusted him. He’d said he wanted to be my friend, and he wasn’t lying. In my experience, bears don’t lie.”

Rogers is arguably the world’s foremost expert on black bears. Most of the world’s big, charismatic animals have their Boswells in the scientific community, whose names you encounter repeatedly when you read about the animals. Timber wolves have David Mech; grizzly bears have Chuck Jonkel of the Border Grizzly Project; polar bears have Ian Stirling; and black bears have Rogers, who is sometimes described as “the Jane Goodall of black bears.”

Lynn Rogers has spent much of his life studying black bears, and they’re pretty much all he wants to talk about. He has travelled with black bears, crawled into their dens, eaten their natural foods, collected their droppings, hauled their squalling cubs down out of trees and weighed and measured them right in front of their mothers, placed radio collars around the necks of wild adult bears without using tranquilizers, and, after a long day of tracking bears, observing their every move and making notes on his laptop computer, he has unrolled his sleeping bag at eleven or twelve o’clock at night and curled up beside them to catch a few hours’ sleep.

For all his tireless study of bears, he is uncomfortable with being studied himself. He is relaxed with bears but wary of journalists, who in his view are less interested in balanced, accurate stories about bears than in stories that quicken the pulse—tales about bears in the schoolyard, bears breaking into homes in the middle of the night and, if you can find them, stories about wild-eyed bears ripping apart screaming hikers. He probably deals with most journalists the same way he deals with me, by ignoring their emails and screening his calls. When I finally catch him with the old tactic of dialling from a payphone, he confesses that he’s not much interested in being interviewed. Yes, he’s in the business

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