The Shocking Vastness of Prairie , Part 1

In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the vast North American grasslands of which poet William Cullen Bryant wrote, “These are the gardens of the desert, these the unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, for which the speech of England has no name — The Prairies."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, we're going to be beginning a
series on the prairie.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
That's right, I'm excited for this one. Before we get
into it, I want to read a quick line from
a poem. This is from the poem The Prairies by
William Cullen Bryant. You can find this in full at
Poetry Foundation dot org. But just one sweet line here.
These are the gardens of the desert. These the unshorn fields,

(00:44):
boundless and beautiful, for which the speech of England has
no name. The prairies beautiful.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
And you know what, I am trying to trying to
discipline myself to appreciate what's beautiful about the pre too,
because in think, in preparing for this episode, I was
really thinking about the fact that I have something in
myself I truly do not admire. But it is a
tree bias, or maybe I might expand it beyond trees.

(01:15):
I would say a a variation in vertical topography bias.
Like I get a little uncomfortable in landscapes where you
can just where it's relatively flat and you can just
see really far in all directions. For some reason, my
body doesn't like that. It kind of disturbs me. It

(01:38):
kind of makes me feel a little uncomfortable. I am
comforted by the presence of tall things around me, things
that could provide shade, things that I could conceivably like
go around or hide behind. I guess if like a
big animal was approaching me or climb. Yeah, or climb.
And so I recognize within myself have a bias four

(02:01):
forested or tree covered landscapes or landscapes that have I
don't know, you have big tall rocks and variations in
topography or at least buildings or something like that. And
I want to change this about myself. I want to
be able to fully and deeply appreciate what's beautiful and
fascinating about the vast, relatively flat landscapes that don't have

(02:23):
tall trees in them.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
This is a great point. I mean, you like me,
You spent a lot of time in Tennessee and in
Georgia very much. You know, wooded lands for the most part,
and yeah, it's a weird experience when then you go
out to the desert or to the prairie or some
of their landscape like this, and yeah, the trees are
not around you. Is It's fascinating though. My relatives who

(02:48):
live in Arizona have like the opposite feeling when they
come out to Georgia or the Carolina's or somewhere there
are a lot of trees, Like they feel cramped by the trees.
They feel like there are too many of them. They're
going to fall on me, They're gonna be they're crowding
me in. So they have they have a very similar feeling,
but in the reverse direction.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
That is really interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, I've had a
complicated personal emotional esthetic relationship with the prairie that I
want to remove the negativity from.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
No. No, I can relate to this on a number
of levels. In comparing the desert to the prairie. I
think the desert has a way of revealing itself and
in multiple ways in concerning just like observing the flora
and fauna of the desert, but also the desert kind
of like speaks and resonates with us more easily in

(03:42):
a number of other ways. You know, it takes on
all of these symbolic meanings, and not to say the
prairie doesn't, but I don't know the prairie, and my
experience speaks a slightly different language, and maybe you have
to lean in a little bit to hear it. But
I readily admit that, like growing up again, growing up
most of my time surrounded by trees, I had this

(04:04):
romantic idea about the desert and I did not feel
the same way about the prairies. And at the same time,
for most of my life had no experience of the
desert or the prairie. So it was just based on
things that I observed in film and TV and nature
specials as well. You know, it wasn't all fantasy, but
certainly I don't, at least in the original trilogy. I

(04:27):
don't remember any characters in Star Wars showing up on
a prairie planet. They show up on a desert planet.
That's where the excitement is interesting. Meanwhile, we had things
like Little House on the Prairie on TV, which you know,
was fine. I didn't hate it, but I also didn't
have a strong interest in it, and I think there
was something about that, like Little House on the Prairie

(04:49):
kind of despite its, you know, its obvious quality from
a literary sense, or certainly the TV adaptation had its
charms as well, and a lot of people hold uspect
place in their heart for it, but I did not.
It seemed kind of boring, you know again, Star Wars
characters were not there. It did not seem to have
some sort of like a larger meaning to me. And

(05:10):
so I think, based in part on that, I absild
mindedly kind of thought of prairies as just grassy, just
flat stuff that's between the more interesting ecosystems of forest,
tree or mountains or desert. And I thought this without
ever meaningfully traveling through any of it. I think maybe

(05:30):
the one exception was that I remember the VHS box
art for a nineteen nineties horror anthology film called Grim
Prairie Tales, and I never actually saw it, but I
would see the box with this kind of like demonic
laughing James Earl Jones head and weirdly cac dies.

Speaker 3 (05:48):
So I don't know, those are soarros. Yeah, so the
Sonoran Desert it.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Looks like it should be Grim Desert Tales, but again
I haven't seen it, but it had prairie on the title,
so that one gave me help like, Okay, maybe there
is something kind of spooky and cool about the prairie.
So this, luckily, a lot of this changed for me
over the summer. At the beginning of the summer, when
my family and I visited Denver, Colorado, a city that
I'd always associated with high elevations and the mountains, of course,

(06:16):
but this is a city that is in large part
built upon the prairie where the high plains meet the
Rocky Mountains, and while visiting I had the chance to
explore some of these surrounding grasslands. We ended up actually
we went up into the mountains a little bit, but
we went out onto the prairie lands at least half
as much and maybe a little bit more. And this

(06:38):
really gave me a new appreciation for their complexity, and
it stirred my interest in the prairies as a topic
for our show. For instance, I highly recommend for anyone
out there if you're visiting Denver or just flying into
Denver and then planning to do something else. The Rocky
Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge is real close to the airport,

(06:59):
real handy, and very fascinating to visit. It's actually it
was actually established on the grounds of what was once
a major US chemical weapons production facility.

Speaker 3 (07:08):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
So I'm talking mustard gas, chlorine gas, serin, and then
also stuff like napalm and white phosphorus. So just the
worst things ever, just a temple of death. But now
it's been given over to the grasslands. It's a hotbed
of bison conservation as well as conservation for species like
the blackfooted ferret, and it's just a real calm, nice place.

(07:30):
You can see bison with like the skyscrapers of Denver
in the background. It's it's pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
Oh that is cool. Just when I saw your note
about this in the outline and you just had the
word Arsenal there, I was like, how is this connected
to the football club?

Speaker 2 (07:47):
But yeah, yeah, I mean there's a lot of flat
flat land out there. I guess you could play football.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
There, I guess. So don't want to give the impression
that I know anything about soccer slash football. I got
a good family friend who's like an obsessive Arsenal fan.
That's why.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, I know they're a favorite of various, fearless various
football fans. So let's I guess let's get to brass
tacks here, get down to brass tax What exactly is
a prairie again, if you're not if you were like
me and you're not that interested in it's easy to
just sort of count it, you know, think you know
what it is without even really thinking about what it is.
A prairie is a vast, flat, temperate North American grassland,

(08:25):
and they began to emerge, began to appear in the
middle of the continent some eight to ten thousand years ago,
and at their peak covered nearly one third of North America,
from the Rocky Mountains to east of the Mississippi River
and from as far north as Saskatchewan and Canada down
into Texas. Now, prairies are similar to grasslands that you'll

(08:49):
encounter on other continents, So they're similar to the pompous
grasslands of South America, the African velds, and the Eurasian steppe.
Yet they are distinct unto themselves. So you know, you
can say, I mean, the main comparison I think would be,
you know, the step and the prairies. Yeah, they're similar,
but they are different. And while it is very easy

(09:10):
to think of them as just grass just flat. Like
I was saying, these are still incredibly complex environments and
have historically been home to a rich variety of fauna.
I've even seen the American prairie compared, at least in
its more pristine form, as a kind of American serengetti,

(09:30):
as a place that is just rich and diverse from
top to bottom, from the little things you never see
because they're living amidst the tall grasses, to the larger creatures,
the megafauna that are visible because they tower above the
tall grasses. Now, I think it is still somewhat correct
to think of a prairie as a place in between.

(09:53):
These are in sort of broad strokes, still lands that
are maybe too moist to be desert and yet too
dry to support far rus. We're going to put a
little asterisk next to that because we're going to get
more into the wino trees question here in a bit.
But yeah, they're unique. They survive both high heat and
drought during the summer, they survive winter chills. And they

(10:13):
are primarily three types of prairie. And these divisions are
based on height and climbate.

Speaker 3 (10:20):
When you say height, you mean grass height.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Grass heighth, Yes, yes, your own personal height has no
no influence. It's about how high the grass glove grows
and then what the climate happens to be. So I'm
going to just roll through these quickly so we'll have
these definitions in place. So, first of all, there's the
tall grass prairie. These are found in humid eastern regions
that benefit from more rainfall, and they're typified by some

(10:44):
really tall grasses, like a big blue stem reaching like
eight feet in heighth and they once covered a staggering
one hundred and seventy million acres of North America. But
as these are also the most fertile of the prairie lands,
they also made ideal farmland, and thus within a mere
generation's time, most of this was transformed into towns, into cities,

(11:06):
and of course into farms. Less than four percent of
it remains.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah, I don't know how those percentages are calculated. I
was looking at estimates that like less than one percent
of the original tall grass prairie area is actually still
in its natural state. Almost all of it has been
converted into cropland.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
Yeah, the numbers are going to beary depending on your sources.
But like the real take home is most of it
is gone because it was very desirable land.

Speaker 3 (11:33):
Yeah, And as we will get into in a minute here,
it is not just the direct conversion of grassland into
crop land or the building and development on the land
that changes it from its natural state. Another thing that
can happen to prairies is changing of the changing of
the surrounding landscape, disrupting the upstream conditions that allow a

(11:58):
prairie to survive as a.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, all right. So that is the tall
grass prairie. But if you have tall you've got to
have short So we also have the short grass prairie.
And this is the arid western prairie, expanses near the
Rocky mountains and mostly falling within its rain shadows, so
the dry area on the leeward side of the mountains.

(12:21):
These prairie lands receive roughly twelve inches of rain yearly
I was reading and are dominated by drought tolerance species.
And then between these two extremes you have the mixed
grass prairie. These prairie lands occupy the space between tall
grass and short grass, a transitional zone that's home to
a lot of mid height grass and short grass. This

(12:43):
is also the prairie zone that survives the most, so
it's the most intact compared to what it was historically,
but still generally no more than thirty percent of it remains,
so it's still been greatly reduced and greatly impacted. It's
just proven a little more resilient to change.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
So as you describe draw prairies are temperate grasslands, and
you can think also of you know, there are tropical
grasslands as well. You know, those have slightly different conditions.
You can think about the tropical grasslands are often called savannahs,
and they might have slightly different yearly weather rainfall conditions.

(13:31):
Like tropical grasslands tend to be warmer year round and
tend to have more seasonal rainfall patterns, like a distinct
wet summer, dry winter pattern. But the prairies are temperate grasslands,
and they're characterized, as we said, by usually flat or
rolling landscapes, so flat expanses or relatively low hills, dominated

(13:51):
not by trees but by grasses and herbaceous flowering plants
called forbes. So one of the defining features of prairie
ecology is what kind of plants are there. The land
is going to be covered by grasses and forbes rather
than woody stemmed plants like trees and shrubs. So the

(14:13):
question I had is what keeps the trees out? Why
does a prairie not just become covered in trees.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
This is a great question because again, it kind of
comes to you just you know what a prairie is,
and it's easy to just not ask this basic question
and be like, oh, it's the prairie, like, no trees allowed,
that's the rule. Trees know it.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
So this is one of those questions. I initially I
just kind of googled this thinking I would find a
you know something with a clear, clearly established answer like
amount of rainfall is the reason, and it turned out
to be more complicated than that. The climate and rainfall
component does appear to be one part of the answer.

(14:53):
Prairie regions tend to be relatively dry compared to forested regions,
or at least go through a dry season, and this
can be harder on woody plants like trees and shrubs,
especially in their seedling and sapling stage, which they require
more water to sustain their larger above ground masses grasses

(15:15):
and forbes. I'm sorry, I'm tripped up. Saying masses and grasses.
Grasses and forbes, on the other hand, are better adapted
to survive drought, in part because so much of their
mass in some cases up to around eighty percent of
their mass is below ground root structure. So grasses and
forbes can typically survive their above ground portions drying out

(15:38):
or even suffering worse fates, which we'll get to in
a minute, and they can come back from this. But
climate and rainfall are not the full picture. I was
actually reading about this in a post on the Prairie
Ecologist blog by an ecologist named Chris Helzer who is
director of Science and Stewardship in Nebraska for the Nature

(15:59):
Can Servancy, And this post is from twenty ten. It's
called why is it so hard to keep trees out
of prairies? Question mark? And why is it getting harder?
Helser begins by mentioning a few factors. So you've got
frequent droughts. This is the climate consideration we were just
talking about. You've got the presence of large animals, large

(16:22):
browsers and mixed feeders like elk and pronghorn. These animals
can eat leafy tree and shrub saplings and limit their
growth by other mechanisms as well, not just eating, like
trampling can also play a role. But Helser says that
the most common and dominant explanation for why the American

(16:43):
prairie has so few trees, and especially why it historically
had so few trees, was fires, lots of fires, and
from what I've been reading, this is still a major
part of the explanation. Lots of sources say that without
frequent prairie fires, trees actually would colonize much of the prairie,

(17:06):
especially the eastern part of the prairie. So on prairie fires,
when I imagine a wildfire, I naturally think immediately of
a forest fire. Maybe this just is another way that
my tree bias is showing up. But somebody says wildfire,
and I picture somewhere out in the mountains in the west,

(17:27):
you know, dry pine trees crackling and burning up. But actually,
prairie ecosystems experience much more frequent fires than most temperate
forest ecosystems. So if you are picking a wildfire at random,
it is more likely that it's a prairie fire than
that it's a forest fire. Fires happen more often on

(17:49):
the prairie than in the forest, and they spread more
quickly when they do happen. Prairie grasses tend to make
excellent fuel beds for a spreading fire, much more so
than trees. For a number of reasons. Trees are harder
to burn. They're harder, it's harder for them to catch fire.
They For one thing, they retain a lot more water
than grasses, even under dry conditions. You know, in that

(18:13):
water it has to be heated up before the tree
can actually catch fire, and that takes a lot of energy.
So trees are harder fuel to ignite grasses and forbes
because they're thinner, dry out more completely, and they have
a greater surface area volume ratio, so more of them
is surface area that's exposed to oxygen. Finer fuels, as

(18:36):
you know from if you've ever tried to build a bonfire,
finer fuels are easier to ignite. You know, the smaller,
thinner twigs and stems catch fire more easily. And also
trees are spaced further apart. Grasses are very crowded together,
making a continuous bed of fuel so that the fire
can spread easily. So a dry prairie is an ideal

(18:58):
place for a fire to spread. Much like forest fires,
these grass fires can be ignited by lightning or they
can be started by humans, and both types of fire
have historically been important in shaping the American prairie. There
was historically a hunting practice used by multiple Native American
planes tribes and somewhat also by European settlers afterwards, that

(19:21):
used fire on the prairie as a hunting method. Basically,
by creating sort of a ring of fire in the
dry grasses around a herd of prey animals, you could
funnel them toward a kill site, toward a pre selected
exit point that could be a kill site where the
animals would be killed actively, or maybe funneling them toward
like a precipice like a cliff. And so yeah, this

(19:46):
was a good method for hunting, and it was used
for a long time as one reason fires would be
started on the prairie by humans. So if you see
a prairie fire just racing over the face of a
grassland and leaving this, it doesn't look nice in its wake.
You know, it leaves this smoking black you know, plateau
of mordor behind. It's very natural to see this as

(20:09):
a purely destructive force, but we have learned that historically
these fires actually counterintuitively protect prairie ecosystems from being colonized
by woody stemmed plants like trees and shrubs. Grasses and
forbes are actually much better equipped to survive grassland fires

(20:33):
because again, so much of their mass is below the ground.
If the top side portion dries out in a drought
or burns up in a fire, the plant can regenerate
from its robust root and below ground structure. Woody plants
tend to invest more in their above ground structures, and
it's harder for a woody plant, a young woody plant

(20:55):
like a woody plant sapling or seedling, to recover and
survive if that above ground unstructure is burned, especially if
it's burned over and over, which can happen in prairie ecosystems.
Once a tree becomes mature, it is more resistant to fire,
But repeated fires on a plane will tend to kill
tree saplings and seedlings that have taken root, while allowing

(21:18):
the grasses and forbes to bounce back. And this is
a key thing to understand. It's not so much that
fire limits trees in grasslands by killing adult trees, It's
that it limits recruitment. It limits the ability of young
trees that are sprouting to mature and survive and makes them,

(21:39):
you know, they tend to be out competed by the
grasses around them. But anyway, as a result of all this,
now that prairie ecosystems have been so modified by human development,
and this includes the conversion of grasslands into croplands, It
includes artificial barriers like roads, and you know, the planting

(21:59):
of native trees things like that. Because of all these changes,
fires cannot spread naturally as they once would have on
much of the American prairie, and as a result, many
prairies are now subjected to intentional prescribed burns to protect
them as an ecosystem. We actually have to intentionally set

(22:19):
fire to them in order to help these ecosystems survive.
But coming back to so all that was just on
prairie fires, But I want to come back now to
that post on the blog post by Chris Helser. He
comes to question the idea that fire is the main
limiting factor on tree growth, and he phrases it like

(22:41):
this quote. However, if that explanation is true, Why are
there so many prairies managed with frequent fire being invaded
by native and non native trees alike, for which the
only feasible control method seems to be herbicide treatment posits
several ideas several things that could be partial explanations here.

(23:04):
One is that the relevant parts of the North American
interior seem to be in a relatively wet climatic cycle
that is favorable to the recruitment of trees. Remember we
talked about climate and amount of rainfall or moisture as
a limiting factor on the spread of trees into prairie areas. Historically,

(23:25):
the prairies have been drier than they are today, or
at least much of them. Somewhat varies by region, but
they are somewhat, at least in parts, getting wetter, and
that may be helping trees colonize them more easily. Another
thing Helser writes is quote second, we're still missing those
elk and pronghorn, although you'd think white tail deer and

(23:47):
cottontails would make up for that. So I don't know,
kind of a shrug on this one. Not sure how
the herbivory is playing a role. He mentions that some
non native tree species like the Siberian elm and the
autumn olive may not be subject to the natural control
pressures that help keep native North American trees out of

(24:09):
the prairie. And then he offers a final hypothesis which
he seems to kind of favor, and this is that
it could be that in the American tall grass and
mixed grass prairies there are more trees in the surrounding
landscape than there used to be. And this is from
multiple things. It's from, of course, intentional human planting of trees,

(24:31):
but also from human disruption of the natural checks on
tree colonization, so like limiting the spread of prairie fires
and eliminating browsing animals. So because we've already got more
trees established in the area, Hellser wonders if the presence
of all those trees just produces so much seed rain

(24:52):
that quote it overrides any natural controls prairies have for
out competing them. So under this hypo athesis, even if
the odds are still against woody plants in these environments,
now the woody plants are rolling the dice so often
that they're overcoming the odds.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
That's a great point. You know, this is another experience
I had when I was out there in the Denver
area and in the grasslands, is that you would have
you would be exploring an area that you know, part
of you know, State State Park for example, and there
would be some trees, and people like me from mostly
treed areas, you don't think twice about it, but then

(25:32):
you read a sign and the sign is explaining where
these trees came from, like they were they were planted
here by some farm that used to you know that
that's set up here, you know, you know, maybe a
century ago, that sort of thing, and that's why they
started being trees in this particular spot. Yeah. So I
think this point about, uh, the introduction of these trees
and allowing trees in the area to just establish that foothold,

(25:56):
and then you know, they're just doing better on the
dice roll as you say.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
Yeah, and once the trees are mature again, they are
more resistant to fires. At that point, you know, the
fire mainly works to protect the prairie by suppressing the
growth and recruitment of new young trees. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
And of course the humans that planted them, they're planning
them for a different reasons. They wanted to wind break,
or they just wanted the familiarity of having trees around,
that sort of thing, but it ends up having this impact.

Speaker 3 (26:24):
Yeah. So anyway, I thought this blog post was interesting
because it highlights something that I gathered from reading other
sources about this. There is not a simple answer for
why trees were historically kept out of the North American Prairie,
especially the wetter More eastern half. It seems to come
down to a complicated interplay of different forces, including, but

(26:48):
possibly not limited to, climate and levels of rainfall, herbivy,
and fire patterns, all of which have now been somewhat
disrupted from the historical norm. So that's an important thing
to think about when we're talking about the prairie as
an endangered type of ecosystem or landscape. It is not

(27:08):
just the direct conversion of grassland into farmland that makes
the prairie endangered. It's also the human alteration of circumstances
which may have been upstream of the prairie's natural plant balance.
Changing those circumstances related to herbivory, fire, and climate sort
of opens the door to possibilities of forests unknown.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Yeah, that is fascinating. I want to come back to
something because I know you have some notes on this.
That original line from the poem by William Cullen Bryant
that I read at the top of the episode about
the prairies for which the speech of England has no name.
I know you have a note about this. Oh, I

(27:54):
wanted to touch on this.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
Well, it's just the word prairie. I was wondering where
that comes from. It comes from the French, so it
comes from a French term originally meaning meadow basically, you know,
so like a grassy area. That doesn't you know, meadow
and prairie are not exactly the same thing. I think
they both refer to grassy areas. But you might think
of a small meadow in a clearing in a forest,

(28:18):
you know, a meadow place of grasses or flowers, whereas
with a prairie we're thinking of a much vaster ecoregion.
And as you noted, there are other regional terms around
the world that kind of mean the same thing as prairie.
I mean, of course, you know, on different continents there
are differences between these types of regions, but there are
similar landscapes in Europe and Asia most often called like

(28:41):
the steppe, and you know the pampa in South America.
So the prairie is not totally unique, but there are
unique things about each continental prairie type region.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah, yeah, but I love this idea. That's like the
English where like we have no word for this. What
would the French call it? Let's start at the French
on this one. They would never all right, moving on here,

(29:13):
I wanna, I wanna, I'm want to zoom in on
a topic here related to the historic American prairie that
is fascinating because it touches on what prairies used to be,
especially before the arrival of Europeans, and also has something
to say about where they are now and how the
related organisms fit into our current world and our attitudes

(29:36):
towards them. So the prairies are, to be clear, still
a home to a diverse, thriving population of flora and fauna.
I mean the uh, you know, again, greatly reduced, but
when you really begin to look, you see that there's
a great deal of diversity here. But during the height
of the prairie, again, before the arrival of Europeans, the

(29:57):
prairies were home to even more examples of various organisms,
including megafauna and the apex predators that depended on them.
So this would have included on the megafauna front elk, mule, deer, pronghorn,
but especially the American bison being a prime example here,

(30:17):
a towering example of North American megafauna that once roamed
the continent in numbers estimated to be between like thirty
and sixty million before the coming of Europeans and their
subsequent mass slaughter, particularly in the eighteen seventies. This was
when we had a government sanctioned mass elimination of bison

(30:38):
that was intended to undermine and control planes Native American tribes.
We may come back to talk about the bison more
specifically because they are fascinating creatures and their story is
one of tragedy and wonder. But the prairie again used
to be home to other organisms, and one in particular

(31:00):
that we've come to associate more with mountainous regions in
today's world, and that is the grizzly bear.

Speaker 3 (31:07):
That is interesting. I do not associate the grizzly bear
at all with prairie landscapes. I think of them as
dwelling in the forests and the mountains, and I guess
maybe in the I don't know, in the like the
valleys of Alaska, that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yeah, exactly, I had the same thing. Like I set out,
I did not expect to be researching and writing and
podcasting about grizzly bears because I kind of have an
aversion to grizzly bears. Not to say they are not
fascinating organisms, but I find them, like deeply viscerally to
be disturbing to me. I would say I am somewhat

(31:46):
in fear of them. I am generally not in areas
where they are, so's it's, you know, a distant fear.
But I can look at an image of a grizzly
bear or I can see one in a zoo and
like it's going to affect me on a deep level
where I'm like, I don't like what I'm looking at.
This is this is this is this is this is
impacting me in a very primal way, and it is

(32:07):
electing fear.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
Yes, you know, there's a thing I always want to
balance on our show. It's kind of difficult to do,
which is being careful never to demonize animals and like
you know, talk about like you know, sharks or bears
or anything is just bloodthirsty killers and monsters that are
out to destroy you. But also we should acknowledge like

(32:30):
that they can mess you up. I remember being disturbed
reading that actually quite funny chapter in Mary Roach's book
Fuzz where she takes the class on how to analyze
sort of animal crime scenes and determine what sort of
predator or animal likely attacked a person based on the
wounds and reading about how you know, ooh, with grizzly bears,

(32:52):
very often you see wounds to the face. Uh yeah,
I mean I think it depends on like the circumstances
of the attack, like is it an attempt at predation
or is it more like a territorial defense or something.
But yeah, anyway, grizzly bears are incredibly powerful, amazing, awe
inspiring creatures and you don't want to fight one, right right.

Speaker 2 (33:15):
And to be clear, we're not going to really talk
about about bears killing people so much in this episode.
We're probably going to talk more about the reverse of that.
But yeah, I mean, on a very basic level, when
you have a large organism like this, it clearly eats
meat and is capable of taking a human down. I

(33:36):
think it's only natural to have a certain reaction to them.
And you know, our survival reaction to something like this
is going to air on the side of assuming it
might hurt us. Yeah, that's just the way we're wired.

Speaker 3 (33:48):
Yeah, we have a fear bias, just like I have
a tree bias. Actually, and you know what, I would
say that the context of imagining a grizzly bear within
the planes, within a region where there aren't really trees around,
anything to hide behind, Yeah, that I find especially frightening.
There's something different there if you're an in a landscape

(34:11):
with a grizzly bear and it's not a forest, there's
not anything to hide behind or big tall things. It's
just it's just flat land and you and this animal.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
Yeah, that is a great point, and that is also
going to be a key point to understanding especially historic
encounters between European descendants and the grizzly bears of the Prairies.
I should also point out that, you know, we often
also also associate black bears with mountainous regions these days,
whereas the historic range of the black bear was a

(34:41):
bit more diverse as well, including a wide range of
forest lands. But also swamps. You know, thinking particularly about
the black bears that once were found throughout the New
Orleans area, or rather the Louisiana area, but also into
the area that is now in New Orleans, and you know,
for the most part they're not there anymore. But with
the grizzly, I do think, yeah, the difference is more

(35:03):
pronounced here because again, this would have been an apex
predator of the Great North American Prairie, and it would
have and it would have depended upon the bison to
a large extent. So we're gonna get I want to
give the warning here that we are going to come
back and sort of and look at everything with like
a modern biology and conservation viewpoint. But I actually want

(35:27):
to begin here by looking at some of the journals
from Lewis and Clark when they explored North America's interior
from eighteen oh four through eighteen oh six. This was
the first US military expedition to explore the newly acquired
Louisiana territory. And you can find all these journals online.
There are they're easy to access via the University of

(35:50):
Nebraska Lincoln at Lewis and Clark Journals dot UNL dot
edu and you can go in there. You can search
by day, you can search by like organism name and
so forth, and really they drill into their various encounters
and experiences, especially if you really want a lot of
discussion of bear testicles or just the testicles of any

(36:10):
organisms they were running into. They're just giving like a
you know, a fairly clinical description of everything. But there
is also some bias in there, especially when they start
describing the monstrous white bears the grizzly bears, but they
do indeed refer to them as the white bear.

Speaker 3 (36:26):
I would also say, beyond their historical interests, these journals
are worth checking out just if you want to see
some really hilarious spelling choices. I can't stop thinking about
the way that Lewis decides to spell the word animal.
It's so good for me.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Yeah. When I started putting some of this into our notes,
at first I was correcting the archaic spellings and changing
them over to our spellings. But after a while I
was like, no, no, these are great. I should leave
them as his as long as they don't interfere with
my ability to read them aloud for the podcast.

Speaker 3 (36:59):
With respect to this, enamel I love it.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
So, yeah, they encountered the white bear. They encountered grizzly
bears in what is now Montana and Nebraska on prairie lands,
and again, like you were saying, a terrifying open ground
on which to potentially have an encounter with such an
enormous and potentially dangerous organism to couch this, you know, again,

(37:25):
this was you know, they did not know what we
know now about bears, and early on in their travels
they'd heard indigenous tales of the white bear in its ferocity,
tales which considered the bear with you know, at the
very least respect. So not everyone necessarily hunted them, and
if they did hunt them at all, there was like

(37:45):
an understanding you had to have like a certain number
of men to go out and hunt them, and then
there was also no small amount of fear bound up
in that respect. But for their own part, they mostly
knew the far milder black bears of the east, and
they didn't expect much out of the white bear. It's
also been pointed out that they were people of the trees,

(38:08):
and so even when they were thinking about having encounters
with bears, they were thinking about a landscape broken up
by trees, and trees that could potentially climb. You know,
there's a big caveat there about how helpful climbing a
tree can or would be with certain bear species. But
still it was very much in their mind. And then
suddenly they're in an area where there are no trees,

(38:29):
there's just these grasses and rolling hills, and then a
creature of enormous size.

Speaker 3 (38:34):
It starts to make me wonder, actually, how much it
could potentially shape your psychology and your views of the world.
To just the difference between all of their conditions being
equal growing up in a place that has trees all
around versus growing up in a place that's open, open
landscape all around. It seems like it would have powerful

(38:55):
shaping power.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
But yeah, you know, we talked a little about this
in the past, I think when we're discussing some writings
about indigenous peoples of the Far North. I forget the
exact reference, but it was like something about being able
to see into tomorrow. Because the distances that you could
see were so vast, you could see a place that
you were traveling to in the future, and so in

(39:17):
a way it was like seeing into the future in
a way that just is not going to clock with
someone who's used to being surrounded by trees where you know,
I can't even see into this afternoon, that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (39:27):
I mean, on one hand, that seems plausible. On the
other hand, I would be careful because that seems like
exactly the kind of thing that could give way to,
you know, pseudoscientific generalizations about people, which you know you
got to be careful about. Yeah, but it does seem
like it could be a significant factor in shaping how
you grow up and how you see the.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well let's get into some of
these accounts from the the journals of Lewis and Clark,
beginning with April twenty ninth, eighteen oh five. So this
is this is what is generally depicted as their first
encounter the white bear with the grizzly bear. And you
see a mixture here of both appreciation for the size
of the creature, but also this kind of idea that like,

(40:08):
I don't think we're going to have much of a
problem with grizzly bears. So, just reading a bit here
from it, it was a male not fully grown. We
estimated his weight at three hundred pounds. These are all
the particulars in which this animal appeared to me to
differ from the black bear. It is a much more
furious and formidable animal, and will frequently pursue the hunter
when wounded. It is astonishing to see the wounds they

(40:31):
will bear before they can be put to death. The
Indians may well fear this animal, equipped as they generally are,
with their bows and arrows or indifferent fuses, but in
the hands of skillful riflemen, there are by no means
as they are, by no means as formidable or dangerous
as they have been represented.

Speaker 3 (40:49):
Wow, that sounds like some classic arrogance.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
That's just like, yeah, they're like, we're not gonna have
a problem with these. You know, we're well armed, we
have good riflemen, nothing to worry about. That was April
twenty ninth, and then on May fifth, this encounter occurs.
I'm going to read another just a bit from the journal.
Captain Clark and Drewer killed the largest brown bear this
evening which we have yet seen. It was a most

(41:14):
tremendous looking animal and extremely hard to kill, notwithstanding he
had five balls through his lungs and five others in
various parts. He swam more than half the distance across
the river to a sandbar, and it was at least
twenty minutes before he died. He did not attempt to attack,
but fled and made the most tremendous roaring from the
moment he was shot. We had no means of weighing

(41:37):
this monster. Captain Clark thought he would weigh five hundred pounds.
For my own part, I think the estimate too small
by one hundred pounds. He measured eight feet seven and
a half inches from the nose to the extremity of
the hind feet, five feet ten and a half inches
around the breast around and then there's some other figures here,
and then he says his talons were five in number

(41:59):
on each and we're four and three eighth inches in length.

Speaker 3 (42:03):
I just had to check this because I thought that
was the case. But this monster they're talking about is
not even at the upper end of the range of
like normal adult grizzly size. I think I just googled,
But like adult male grizzlies can get up to like
seven hundred pounds, and even the you know, bigger ones
like in Alaska, like the Kodiak Bears, of course, are
can be even bigger. But yeah, so they're like marveling

(42:26):
at this that's not even as big as they can get.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
Right, right, And the balls that they're talking about these
are of course musket balls. And yeah, it's a frequent
detail of this is like how many shots it takes
to bring down one of these animals. So this encounter occurred,
and then the next day Lewis reflects on it more.
He says, solid brown bear swim the river above us.

(42:49):
He disappeared before we can get in reach of him.
I find that the curiosity of our party is pretty
well satisfied with respect to this animal. The formidable appearance
of the male bear killed on the added to the
difficulty with which they die when even shot through the
vital parts, has staggered the resolution several that have staggered
the resolution of several of them. Others, however, seem keen

(43:12):
for action with the bear. I expect these gentlemen will
give us some amusement shortly, as they will as they
soon begin now to copulate. So he's talking about the
bear scopulating, not the men. Sort of, most people writing
about this particular bit from the journal basically the sort
of translation seems to be. We'll see how. We'll see

(43:34):
how bold and and eager for bear encounters everyone in
the party truly is, as the male bears get it
more and more into the mating season and are more
and more aggressive. Now there are two other encounters of
note I want to read. One is from May fourteenth,
eighteen oh five, in which a wounded bear refuses to

(43:55):
die and chases the men. I'm going to read at
least part of this one. One of the parts wounded
a brown bear very badly, but being alone, did not
think proper to pursue him. In the evening, the men
in two of the rear canoes discovered a large brown
bear lying in the open grounds about three hundred paces
from the river, and six of them went out to
attack him. All good hunters, they took advantage of a

(44:15):
small imminence which concealed them, and got within forty paces
of him unperceived. Two of them reserved their fires as
had been previously concerted. The four others fired nearly at
the same time and put each his bullet through him.
Two of the balls passed through the bulk of both
lobes of his lungs in an instant the monster randed

(44:37):
them with open mouth. The two who had reserved their
fires discharged their pieces at him as he came towards them.
Both of them struck him, only one slightly, and the
other fortunately broke his shoulder. This, however, only retarded his
motion for a moment. Only The men, unable to reload
their guns, took to flight. The bear pursued and had

(44:58):
very nearly overtaken them before the they reached the river.
Two of the party betook themselves to a canoe, and
the others separated and concealed themselves among the willows, reloaded
their pieces. Each discharged his peace at him as they
had an opportunity. They struck him several times, but the
guns served only to direct the bear toward them. In

(45:18):
this manner, he pursued two of them separately, so close
that they were obliged to throw aside their guns and
pouches and throw themselves into the river, Although the bank
was nearly twenty feet perpendicular. So enraged was this animal
that he plunged into the river only a few feet
behind the second man he had compelled take refuge in
the water. When one of those who still remained on

(45:40):
shore shot him through the head and finally killed him.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
So yeah, a harrowing encounter here for the men involved,
as this thing just stubbornly refuses to die and is
taking after them, so you know, they barely survive with
their lives here. And then on June fourteenth, eighteen oh five,
this is the final encounter I'm going to read, but

(46:05):
it's also maybe one of the more mysterious ones as
we'll get into, and this involves Lewis himself alone being
attacked by a bear, so I'll read it here. I
selected a fat buffalo and shot him very well through
the lungs. While I was gazing attentively on the poor animal,

(46:27):
discharging blood in streams from his mouth and nostrils, expecting
him to fall every instant, and having entirely forgotten to
reload my rifle, a large white or rather brown bear
had perceived and crept on me within twenty steps before
I discovered him. In the first moment, I drew up
my gun to shoot, but at the same instant recollected

(46:48):
that she was not loaded and that he was too
near for me to hope to perform this operation before
he reached me. As he was then briskly advancing on me.
It was an open level plane, not a bush within miles,
nor a tree within less than three hundred yards of me.
The river bank was sloping and not more than three
feet above the level of the water. In short, there

(47:11):
was no place by means of which I could conceal
myself from this monster until I could charge my rifle.
In the situation, I thought of retreating in a brisk
walk as fast as he was advancing, until I could
reach a tree about three hundred yards below me. But
I had no sooner turned myself about, but he pitched
at me, open mouthed, in full speed. I ran about

(47:32):
eighty yards and found he gained on me fast. I
then run ran into the water. The idea struck me
to get into the water to such depth that I
could stand, and he would be obliged to swim, and
that he could in that situation, and then I could,
in that situation defend myself with my espitom So this
is a European pole arm, or like a spear axe combination.

(47:56):
If you look up pictures of Lewis and Clark expedition,
see examples of people standing with these. I'm to understand
these were mostly used as walking sticks, and also is
like a way of like sort of like, you know,
poking around in the grass to see if there's a
snake there, that sort of thing, and then he continues Accordingly,
I ran hastily into the water about waist deep and

(48:17):
faced about and presented the point of my espitoon. At
this instant he arrived at the edge of the water
within about twenty feet of me. The moment I put
myself in this attitude of defense, he suddenly wheeled about
as if frightened, declined the combat on such unequal grounds,
and retreated with quite as great precipitation as he had
just before pursued me.

Speaker 3 (48:39):
Oh interesting, Okay, so I would say, realistically, we think
if this animal actually did decide to attack Lewis, Lewis
has basically no chance really here. But for some reason,
this animal comes to the edge of the water and
then changes its mind runs away.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
Yeah. Yeah. Lewis goes un to reflect on the mystery
here of the bear suddenly giving up chase, because initially
the way it sounds, he's kind of like, oh, the
bear realized that he had a bit out more than
he could chew. I had a spear, and he ran
away and ran like three miles away, like really runs off,
really quite spooked. But he does reflect on the mystery

(49:20):
and saying like, I can't really explain why this bear
decided to decline the combat, but I am very thankful
that he did, you know, you know, and we know
of course that and they would have. He knew as
well that the bears were good swimmers. There was no
drop off in the water here, and there was nothing,
nothing known to have scared it off. So it's not

(49:41):
like there was like a cinematic moment where suddenly the
rest of the party shows up or somebody I don't
know arrives on a tank or anything like that. It's
just the bear changed his mind and got spooked and
ran away. Okay, so there's a lot there, and I

(50:05):
want to now turn to some modern and contemporary analysis
of what was going on here. So I turned for
more reflection all of this, on all of this in
the book Lewis and Clark Among the Grizzlies, Legend and
Legacy in the American West by Paul Schulery. This is
from two thousand and two. So Shuley is a great

(50:26):
writer and explores in great depth exactly you know, what
these encounters consisted of, and how we can make sense
of them, knowing what we know now about the bear,
knowing what we know about the people that were engaging
in these encounters and Shoeleery writes that we have to
exercise caution in interpreting these accounts. Something in this is key,

(50:51):
something that later historians absolutely did not do. As they
retold these harrowing tales. Embellished these tales, made them even
more monstrous and terrifying. You know, I'm thinking very much
about sort of the manly adventure magazines of the old days,
you know, where it's some dude with his his shirt

(51:11):
ripped and there's a bear and there's you know, maybe
saving a woman from the bear, that sort of thing.
But that kind of vibe like like, take what is
being laid out here in the journals of Lewis and
Clark and then just really heighten the drama.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
Yeah, and they're already poppy, get a good upper cut
in on there.

Speaker 2 (51:28):
Yeah, Yeah, like let's add more punches and fewer descriptions
of bear desticles. So yeah, he points out that, yeah,
that this is something that historians that that later historians
absolutely did not do They did not go in with caution.
They embellished these stories, and in doing so they helped
to cement cement an altogether negative American impression of the

(51:49):
grizzly bear, to position it as a monster, as a
man killer, and something that is just it's out there
in the wilderness and it's out to get you. Demonization
of wildlife something we see with, you know, certainly with
other organisms of North America, like the wolf. So Shulery
points out, as others have that while Lewis and the

(52:11):
Lewis and Clark accounts are considered truthful and they are
written in a mostly straightforward manner, you know, some editorializing
about the monstrous nature of the bears aside, many of
their encounters with the bears were encounters with bears that
had been shot at, wounded, or in some way interfered with.
So Schuleery writes, quote, Lewis and Clark were rarely attacked

(52:31):
and only occasionally even approached by grizzly bears unless the
bears were shot first.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
Yeah, I mean, so it is certainly not the case
that you are that bears will never mess with you
and you unless you mess with them. First, I mean,
in some cases they will people have been attacked and
prayed on by bears in the wild without initiating the
encounter with violence. But in a lot of these cases
that Lewis and Clark talk about, the humans started it

(52:58):
like they were acting aggressively. First. They just start shooting
at a bear that they see.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
Right, right, And you know, not to really demonize Lewis
and Clark and their party for engaging with wildlife in
this manner, like you know, part of it was just
the times that they were living in their expectations of
and then impression of the wildlife, and they did not
know the things we know now about grizzly bear behavior
in particular. But yeah, also I don't want to err

(53:26):
on the other side of saying that these are not
potentially dangerous creatures.

Speaker 3 (53:30):
Right, so you don't start fights with them, but also
just try to avoid them. You don't want to be
in their zone.

Speaker 2 (53:36):
Yeah, yeah, I respect the grizzly bear, but I do
not want to be where the grizzly bear is for
my part. So Jewelry has some really interesting things to
say though about that solo encounter that Lewis has and
that mysterious behavior at the bear, and he provides some possibilities,
some possible explanations for why it goes down the way

(53:58):
it does, and he stresses some keep points here, and
this one's really interesting, Sece. First of all, if the
bear was actually aggressively intent on killing Lewis, if it
saw this human out there, you know, near this wounded bison,
and was like that looks delicious. I'm going to go
eat him, Lewis would never have stood a chance. Jewelry writes. Quote,

(54:20):
even with a fifty foot head start, Lewis almost certainly
could not have outrun this bear for eighty yards if
it really wanted to catch him. And so he stresses that,
you know, while at this point Lewis had observed fast
moving grizzlies. A motivated grizzly can move amazingly fast, Like
I look this up and we're talking thirty five to

(54:41):
forty mile per hour sprints. So that's not sustained, but
that's a sprint. So compare that to peak human performance
of like twenty seven miles per hour. Like, if you're
in a foot short foot race with a grizzly bear,
you have no chance because that grizzly bear running at
racehorse speeds at least in a burst.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
Yeah. And also that speed for humans is not like
something the average human that's like peak athletics, like the
fastest human runner for a moment. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (55:14):
And and I think this is also really interesting to
think about when coming back to the fact that we
talked about earlier about the grizzly bear being a bison hunter,
and to be you know, I think it's it's largely
considered that it would these would have these prairie grizzlies
would have depended on you know, your typical prey. You know,
it would have been the young and the old and

(55:36):
the wounded. Those would be the easiest targets, So those
are the ones the bears would go for. But even
with that in mind, like the bear would have to
be able to move pretty quickly in the short term
in order to make the most of these opportunities. Okay,
so Chelry points out Lewis would not have known any
of this, of course, because the study of bear behavior

(55:58):
has come a long way and in a lot way
in the last century. But a bear rushing towards someone
or something might just be because the bear wants to
get a better look at it. So that's interesting to
think about again from a human perspective, also horrifying. I'm
imagining a grizzly bear coming towards me. I don't know

(56:22):
if I'm going to be too comforted by the fact, Oh,
he just wants a better look at you know. I mean,
I understand you're going to be absolutely terrified. I would
be as well. I would like die six times before
the bear reached me. But yeah, that's one possibility. So
the bear wasn't actually charging to get him and therefore
not moving at attack speed, but just wanted a closer look.

(56:43):
It's possible that the bear had never seen a human before.
It's also possible that the bear had experiences with a
human before he was humans before. We just don't know.
Another thing to take into account here, And this is
something we know now about bear behavior? Is it? False
charges and bluff charges are an important part of bear behavior,

(57:06):
especially when they're startled, when they're dealing with something they
think might be a thread or it's the unknown, and
it is a form of communication.

Speaker 3 (57:14):
And for the bear, what is the primary purpose of
communication with false charges or bluff charges? Is it to
gather information about what the other animal is going to
do in reaction.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
That's my understanding. Yeah, that it's you know, it's about
it's almost like making your body larger, you know, in
some of these sort of like basic communications about fitness
and ability to engage in combat, particularly with another bear.
That's important here because these kind of like nuanced conversations
are going to be most successful when both organisms speak

(57:48):
the same language. A grizzly bear does a bluff charge
at a human being who does not know much about
bear communication, they're only going to interpret that one way,
like this bear wants to kill me and eat.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
But these types of false charges might play more effective
a role at communication between bears themselves. And that's actually
something I've read about that in some cases where bears
interact with humans, sometimes they're treating us like a prey animal.
Other times they seem to be treating us more like
they might treat another bear.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
Yeah, yeah, which is again still terrifying. And Shulary points
out that running in this scenario with a bluff charge
would absolutely be the wrong answer, and of course this
is what Lewis does, but it is the wrong answer
because it running in this case can trigger the chase
response on the part of the bear, and so that

(58:42):
means like the bear could potentially be approaching you with
a bluff charge or with you just to get a
closer look at you. But once you start running from it,
you kind of make up the bear's mind where the
bear might be like, I don't know what this is
and then like, oh, it's running, it's potentially prey. Better
go investigate more. And the further investigation could prove fatal

(59:02):
for the human or of course for the bear. That
of course bear human interactions, especially in the modern sense,
when you factor in modern firearms, which are going to
be on the whole better at killing bears than the
weapons that Lewis and Clark had, Like you know, you
end up with deaths on both sides of the scenario

(59:23):
where you would.

Speaker 3 (59:24):
Prefer there it be zero.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
Yeah, so on that, but it's also he also points
out standing your ground is also equally unadvisable. So Lewis
did the best he could with what very little he
knew about bear behavior on a deeper level, and it
luckily worked.

Speaker 3 (59:41):
Out for him. Yeah sounds like he got lucky.

Speaker 2 (59:43):
Yeah, Yeah, And he did realize that he got very lucky.
Shuleery writes, quote, bears are curiosity personified as omnivores. It
is to their advantage to check things out, poking around,
nosing this and that, lopping over to get a better
look at some unfamiliar These are essential attributes of an
animal that lives by investigation as much as the bear does.

(01:00:07):
They are inveterate detectives and experimenters.

Speaker 3 (01:00:11):
That's yeah, they're scientists. They're just trying to gather information.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
Yeah again, I mean I don't want to be their experience. Yeah,
and I don't think any of us do.

Speaker 3 (01:00:18):
But that is part of it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
So it's possible. Again, it's possible the bear had never
seen a human before and was coming closer. It's possible.
Shuleerry points out that it might have associated humans with
bison carrion.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
Oh yeah, from humans hunting bison before. So humans are around,
maybe they've got good bison me.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
Yeah, yeah, And in this case, like that would have
been a proper connection because he had just shot a bison,
so yeah, you know, coming in to see what's up.
I see the signs of a potential meal here. And
as for why the bear fled, Jewlry Rights something suddenly
spooked this bear and it ran off. It could have
been visual, perhaps to do with Lewis's stance or his

(01:00:58):
silhouette against the low horizon, or it could have been
something in the bear's own mental wiring. It's fun to
wonder about it, but again we do not know. So
we're told that the bear ran for like three miles,
so if this is accurate, it was seemingly really spooked.
Could it have been spooked by just the realization that

(01:01:19):
Lewis was a human possibly apparently especially that had experienced
a bad encounter with a human being before, But other
accounts from Lewis and Clark seem to indicate that the
mere presence of a human was not a deterrent to
these bears on the whole.

Speaker 3 (01:01:33):
So I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
Again, we just don't know. Yeah, but mistellings and tellings,
exaggerations even of this encounter and others it helped to
cement the idea that these bears were aggressive threats that
you not only needed to be avoided, but needed to
be weeded out. Lewis and Clark first described the bear
as grizzly, and the bear's scientific name Ursus arctos horrivolous.

(01:02:00):
This is credited to naturalist George Ord in eighteen fifteen,
but it of course means horrible brown bear. And so
by the early nineteen hundreds, grizzly bears had been largely
pushed out of the prairies and a big part of
this was widespread government sponsored eradication programs during the eighteen

(01:02:20):
hundreds and after nineteen hundred, the species could really only
be found as far as the prairies go. It could
only be found in small populations on the Canadian prairies,
and for the most part, we're seeing the scenario that
is reflected in their modern habitats, where they are pushed
into a lot of mountainous regions, deeply wooded areas, places
pretty far from what we think of as the prairie today.

(01:02:42):
And it also should be pointed out that in recent
years there have in some cases we have in some
cases seen grizzlies partially return to some of these landscapes,
these prairie landscapes. So this is complex and it gets controversial,
it runs there, you end up running into political issues
as well.

Speaker 3 (01:03:00):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
The landscapes, it's also worth pointing out, are not the
same as they once were, so you could have you
can have grizzly bears potentially beginning to return to a
prairie environment. But what does it mean if the bison
and elk that historically supported them in those environments are
no longer there or no longer there in the numbers
that sustained them.

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
I don't know for sure, but I would tend to
assume that might sort of funnel those grizzlies toward human
populated areas that have, you know, food that the bears
could get into, which we don't want you you want
to minimize contact between bears and humans.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
That's one thing that I've seen pointed out about the
you know, you look at the California flag and you
have the brown bear on the flag. That's the only
place you'll find a Californian brown bear because they were
forced out, and you know, it has been brought up,
what can we reintroduce this animal? Can we reintroduce brown
bears into the parts of California that they once called home?
And the problem is, of course, the potential big problem

(01:03:56):
is that those are the areas that humans now call home.
And you're going up with you know a lot of
crossover between these populations, which is not to say, you know,
it's a complete no, but this just underlines the complexity
of trying to bring animals back into habitats that no
longer fully exist in the way they once did. Now
here's another interesting side note about prairie bison hunting grizzlies.

(01:04:21):
They had access to higher protein meals than their modern relatives,
and so they're thought to have on the whole been
much larger than today's mountain bound grizzlies. So not really
comparing them to like kodiaks and so forth, but in
terms of some of the mountain bound grizzlies today, the
ones who would have lived on the prairie would have been,
on the whole larger, and so that also we can

(01:04:44):
compare that to some of these stats that Lewis and
Clark roll out here. Those stats are are even less
impressive when we consider that they were probably much larger
grizzlies out there. Yeah, and this is has in part
led to a little bit of of cryptozoology. I didn't
really expect to get into this, but there's a purely

(01:05:05):
cryptozoological notion that some of these grizzlies that were encountered
and written about and remembered from the from the prairies
might not have been grizzlies at all, but surviving short
faced bears. So short face bears, to be clear, have
definitely been extinct for more than ten thousand years. Humans

(01:05:27):
certainly lived alongside them in North America in some of
these same areas, but they definitely went extinct. But you can,
and you could, but you could then you could say
that they overlapped both the prehistoric grasslands and the modern
prairie that emerged out of those prehistoric grasslands. But yeah,
there's this purely cryptozoological idea that what if the bears

(01:05:51):
that were encountered were larger and more aggressive because they
weren't grizzlies, they were this older, different of variety of
prehistoric bear. And again that's also leaning on this idea
that the bears were more aggressive, and as we already said,
there's a lot to suggest that they weren't actually any
more aggressive than grizzlies are today. You just have to

(01:06:14):
factor in these other aspects of the encounters, like being
shot at first and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:06:20):
Yeah, so it sounds like this hypothesis, like a whole
lot of cryptozoology thought is getting a lot of its
power from wouldn't it be cool if?

Speaker 2 (01:06:29):
Yeah, Yeah, wouldn't it be cool if this type of
encounter was actually because you know, there was actually a survivor,
the surviving bear species, whereas in reality they are definitely extinct,
and they're not even super closely related to the grizzly bear.
They're more closely related to the South American spectacled bear

(01:06:51):
that's the only living relative of the short faced bear.
But the short face bears were big there on the whole,
considered larger than the modern grizzly bear, even larger than
modern polar bears, and they had a They did, unless
the name implies, have a shorter face, like a shorter snout.
You can see this in some of the like the
skeletons that are presented of them. And I'm to understand

(01:07:14):
that the short face bear was also partial inspiration for
the way that the spirit bear Tumbach appears in the
television adaptation of The Terror from twenty eighteen. I think
they also added some slight human touches to that face
as well to make it look extra creepy, but I
think the short face is also part of it.

Speaker 3 (01:07:35):
I haven't seen that, but I've got the picture you
have in the outline here yet kind of human looking
mouth disturbing in the way that like a parrotfish's mouth
might be. Yeah, wait a minute, thinking parrotfish. Yeaheah, so
the kind of human looking teeth.

Speaker 2 (01:07:49):
M m, yeah, yeah, Tombach. I highly recommend The Terror
as an AMC mini series. They ended up expanding it,
but that first season of The Terror is an adaptation
of the Dan Simon's novel and is quite excellent. Excellent cast,
very well done. Amazing monster. There's the Tombach bear. By

(01:08:11):
the way, we have a polar bear ornament that we
put on our Christmas tree every year, and I think
quite by accident, it has kind of a short looking
snout and so we refer.

Speaker 3 (01:08:20):
To it as toumbuch.

Speaker 2 (01:08:21):
It's the Toumbuk Christmas ornament.

Speaker 3 (01:08:23):
Nice.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
So anyway, I'm getting further away from the grizzly bear.
But yeah, I just found it really fascinated. It was
not expecting to read research and talk about grizzly bears
today in this episode, but like, they are a part
of the history of the prairie, and they are a
part of the prairie that we have, you know, vastly
changed via our interference, and so I think they're important

(01:08:47):
to talk about.

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):
Well, I guess that's another part of what I was
talking about earlier, this complex interplay of different factors that
make the prairies endangered and open them up to being
overtaken by trees. One of those factors is herbivy, of course,
and herbivy, of course is impacted by the presence or

(01:09:10):
lack thereof, of predators. And so it's like, I don't know,
there are just so many factors that are all linked
in one way or another to a greater and lesser degree,
and we've meddled with all of them. We've changed like
all of these factors up and down the line.

Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
Yeah, absolutely, all right, Well, I think we're going to
go ahead and close out this episode. But prairie dwellers
out there, people who are more familiar with the prairie,
who have grown up on the prairie, perhaps in a
little house, maybe a big house, we would love to
hear from you if you have added thoughts on any
of this. Anything we've discussed here is fair game as well.

(01:09:45):
You want to talk about bears or the absence of trees,
a fear of trees, or a fear of the absence
of trees, all of that is fair game. We're going
to be back with some more discussion of prairies, and
at this point I'm not sure exactly what we'll get
into it. There's a lot to consider, you know, again,
diverse ecosystem, all sorts of interesting flora and fauna, as

(01:10:05):
well as history, cultural traditions and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:10:09):
Totally, so join us again for part two.

Speaker 2 (01:10:11):
Just a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
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we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
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(01:10:33):
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We thank you very.

Speaker 3 (01:10:52):
Much, huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer
JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch
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Speaker 1 (01:11:14):
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