Ep. 77: Surviving Bear Encounters (feat. Daryl Ratajczak)

When is it time to scare them off, and when is it time to back off? Should you really fight black bears back, and play dead with a grizzly? What are the best practices while camping in bear country? Bear expert Daryl Ratajczak is on this week to answer all these questions for us and more. 

Daryl has years of experience in rehabbing black bears, working as a wildlife biologist for the state of Tennessee, and giving educational talks and programs about bears through his company Wildlife For You. You can follow Wildlife For You on Facebook here.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, check out our website GetOutAlivePodcast.com and join us on Patreon (where you can now follow us for free)!

Support the show for free by leaving a 5-star review wherever you're listening, or on GoodPods or Podchaser (where we can respond to your comments).

You can find Ashley @TheAngryOlogist on Twitter and Nick still refuses to engage. 

Thanks for listening!

Episode Transcript

(00:15):
Welcome to episode seventy seven of GetIt Alive, a bi weekly podcast about
animal attacks, why they happen,and how we can avoid them. My
name's Ashley, and I have afew housekeeping things to go over before we
get into today's interview. So thefirst one is, I'm sure you've noticed
by now that we have a newlogo. We're actually working on a new
new logo with a great artist whichwill be coming out soon, which means

(00:35):
new merch will come out with thenew logo. And also we're overhauling our
website right now. And if you'relistening to this, I'm sure you've also
heard the ads that are now inthe episode. So the biggest update is
that we're now part of a podcastnetwork, which means we'll have ads.
But also I, just as apodcaster, will have much greater support doing
this for all of you. Andas promised from day one of starting our

(00:58):
Patreon and this podcast, I've alwayssaid 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 theother content you get for joining, but
you can support this podcast for freeby leaving a five star review wherever you're

(01:18):
listening and subscribing. And now,instead of shouting out experts survivalists, I'm
going to read a review every singleepisode 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 nineeight eight two three one one four on
Apple Podcasts, and it is titledgreat Podcast Informative and entertaining. The interviews

(01:41):
with experts sets this podcast apart fromother Animal Tack podcasts. The hosts are
really good at highlighting their guests andnot talking over them. I was interested
in the early episodes on animal attackstories, 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 thatwe do. It becomes my new favorite.
But it's true. I really dolove talking to our guests and experts

(02:05):
about this stuff. So our guesttoday is a bear expert and this has
been a long time coming. I'vebeen 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 probablythe species that we talk about most
on this podcast. So we goover some of the common misconceptions and myths

(02:27):
around bears, like some common sayingsthat 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'strue, 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 isDarryl rada Jack. I am a wildlife

(02:53):
biologist, but I'm a large apexpredator specialist. I'm the kind of guy
that cares about those we call themcharismatic megafauna. But I've been doing this
since the late nineteen nineties, soI've got almost thirty years of working with
bears, working with Cougar's work,Dear and el, but my love for

(03:15):
a wildlife pretty much falls on thoseapex predators. I'm definitely a predator guy,
and I'm thrilled to be here totalk to you. Ashley an open
book and you can ask me whateveryou want, but I'd love to have
a conversation with you. Yeah,for sure. First of all, you
reach out to me, So thankyou for reaching out to me, because
you had listened to I Believe someearly episodes and you were like, let's

(03:37):
talk about misinformation about bears and likemyths about bears. So I am so
happy. This has been a longtime coming. So thank you for doing
this. So what was it aboutbears specifically that made you choose to kind
of specialize in them? Well,this might aggravate people, because I know

(03:59):
that there is is a large contingencyof 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, NewYork, 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 specialtyanimal. And I remember one of the

(04:21):
professors at my college asked if Iwanted 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 Ifigured I would just wait it out and
find a job. I don't knowif you know this, but wildlife jobs
are really hard to come. Byeand lo and beyond. Years after working

(04:43):
odd jobs that I really didn't careto do, there was a position that
opened up just outside a Great SmokingMountain National Park. It was for this
newly formed nonprofit called the Appalachian BearCenter. And what they were going to
do is they were going to workwith the National Park Service and with the
Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, and theyneeded someone to run the facility. And

(05:05):
it was going to be a rehabfacility, an education facility, and a
research facility. And the problem wasit 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 degreedperson to apply for it because it was

(05:26):
like, wow, bears are reallycool. That would be an awesome opportunity.
Maybe I could swing it, andso 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 mylife working with bears and all these other
animals. It's just a dream cometrue. So my getting into the bear
world was kind of out of desperationbut also out of dumb luck that this

(05:50):
particular job opened up at the timeit did and I was able to land
it. Yeah. Yeah, Ithink that's another conversation we could have someday,
like the larger thing of how difficultit is to make it in the
wildlife field and what you need todo to land a job if you're lucky.
Yes, after I took that jobin Tennessee working with black bears again,

(06:13):
that was back in mid to latenineteen nineties. I did that for
a number of years and was literallyworking with bears in some of the most
beautiful places in the world in theSmokies. And I did that for a
number of years. The problem wasworking where I was, it wasn't the
most secure job, working as anonprofit. So my wife at the time
said time to get a real job, and so I applied for a position

(06:39):
with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency,and because of my experience working with black
bears and the Smokies, within afew years, I was promoted to the
big Game program coordinator for the Stateof Tennessee. So I was overseeing deer
elk and the bear program for theentire state of Tennessee, and I did
that for about seven years and thenmoved up to Chief a Wildlife for the

(07:03):
State of Tennessee, so I wasover all the wildlife. So throughout my
entire career, I have been dealingwith not just handling and working with individual
bears early in my career, butalso handling and managing bear populations and talking
about all sorts of things from beareducation to unfortunate events such as bear attacks.

(07:26):
Because living in Tennessee you might knowthis, but We've had a couple
of fatalities that occurred in Tennessee thatI've been linked to. So it's been
something I've been dealing with throughout mywhole career and I'm more than happy to
talk about it. But whenever Iteach people about bears, and there's a
big concern within the public about oh, what do I do if I encounter

(07:47):
a bear? How dangerous are there? And we don't want to scare people,
but I also don't want to blowthem off like they're nothing to be
worried about, because if you lookat statistics when it comes to these very
severe these fatal bear encounters, there'snot many. But if you look between

(08:07):
black bear and brown bear. It'sbeen a year or two since I looked
at the most recent statistics, butit 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'reboth equally dangerous. But then you've
got to start breaking down that information. And so I hope you don't mind,

(08:28):
but I'm going to quiz you.Sure. Do you know roughly like
how many black bears are estimated inNorth 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 reallyexact number, but they estimate anywhere between
three hundred and fifty to six hundredthousand in North America. When it comes

(08:52):
to brown bears, it is fractionallyless. It's the estimates are anywhere from
about thirty thousand sixty thou so blackbears outnumber brown bears by at least ten
to one. And so when youlook at those statistics and it's half and
half, but you know that there'sten times more black bears out there.

(09:15):
Obviously, brown bears are going tobe a bit more of a concern because
they attribute about half of those severeattacks, especially the fatalities. And so
if you were to classify which onedo you need to be more cautious.
You need to be cautious about bothof them, but brown bears you definitely
have to pay a little bit moreattention to, simply because the incident's rate

(09:39):
of encounter resulting in a severe attackis going to be much higher with a
brown bear than it is for ablack bear. Yeah, and I think
of all the animals we will evercover on this podcast, bears the ones
that I think people are the mostafraid of, like even worldwide, especially
in Australia. For some reason,we've had so many people reach out and
say like, wow, I can'tbelieve you live around bears, like they're
so scary. And you know,I've lived around black bears forever here in

(10:03):
New England. I've never had apersonal issue with them. I've seen like
maybe two in the wild in myentire 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 youare 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 wecan try to mitigate those conflicts and prevent

(10:26):
bad things from happening. So,to break it down even further, are
there common differences between attacks from blackbears 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 hebreaks down all very text the thing with

(10:46):
the difference between the two. Whenyou look at those very severe texts,
and obviously the fatalities are the mostsevere at all, you'll find that almost
all the fatalities from black bears areattributed to predaceous attacks where the black bear
has the intent of killing and eatingthe person. Potentially, those very severe

(11:11):
black bear attacks are pretty much allpredaceous. There's very few. In fact,
they struggle to really find any thatthey could say this was a defensive
fatality from a black bear. Idon't even know if they have one on
wreck brown bears. On the otherhand, there's multiple, multiple instances of
fatalities occurring because of a defensive attackwhere a female brown bear or grizzly what

(11:37):
many people call them, is justtrying to defend their cubs, and a
lot of that is attributed to bears. Behave very similarly. I have no
way of proving this, but theirmentality is somewhat similar in the fact that
both brown bears and black bears theydon't like people. They don't like people,
they don't want to be around people. Where the difference usually comes with

(12:01):
their interaction with humans is probably moreso 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 havinga bad you just don't want to be
around this person. You can doone or two things. You can run

(12:22):
from the person, or you couldtry to scare the person away. Most
bears, in most situations will runfrom a person. But if the bear
says, you know what, Ijust don't want to I don't feel like
running. I just want this guyout of here, where are you more
likely to be an issue? Ifyou are one hundred and fifty one hundred

(12:43):
and eighty pound black bear or threehundred, four hundred even more pound brown
bear, they're going to be lesslikely 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 theblack bears do. And so that's

(13:03):
why some of these defensive attacks.The brown bears just take things a little
to fire, and they're much morepowerful and more bad things could happen if
you get into a defensive situation witha brown bear as opposed to a black
bear. Yeah, And do youthink that that's related at all to the
way that brown and black bears havelike coevolved, where black bears have always
evolved and not be the top predator, but often grizzlies or brown bears are

(13:26):
the top predator where they're at.I never thought about that. That's a
really good question. It boils downto them pretty much the exact same thing,
because if you have both species ofbears living in the same area,
obviously, look at Greater Yellowstone,you have a large grizzly and a large
black bear. Typically the bigger thebody, the more intimidation you have,

(13:50):
So evolutionarily the bears are going tobe the black bears are going to be
much more quicker to back down becausethroughout time if they ever exist with brown
bears in the area, the blackbears were not the top predator. So
one of the biggest things I've beentold throughout my life and I have come
to understand. And we're not evengoing to talk about polar bears because like

(14:11):
we're here in the contiguous US downhere, so I feel like we're just
going to focus on brown and blackbears 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 andhow true or not true it is?
Yes, If I could find everypublication that has that written in it,
I would burn it. And peoplerecite it and they go by it all

(14:33):
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 bestresponse to an encounter, if you have
a close encounter with a bear,your response to that bear should not be

(14:56):
based whatsoever on what species of bearit is. Rather, it should be
based on the behavior of that particularanimal. Now, having said that,
and I'll explain that more. Buthaving said that, working having worked for
state and federal agencies before I kindof understand the reasoning for that nursery rhyme.

(15:16):
It's easy to remember. It worksin most situations, but not all
situations. And when a government agencyis 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 andtheir bet that it's the right piece of

(15:37):
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 andunderstanding bear behavior, and you could increase
your successful encounter rates tremendously by knowinghow to read bear behavior. The one

(15:58):
thing that it's interesting, and Idon't know if I had told you this
previously, but Janelle Sharhak, she'sa brilliant young biologist, worked a lot
with bear She recently did a master'swork and she analyzed over three hundred black
bear attacks on humans. And there'scertain things that was coming out of that
data that you don't hear about.For example, in some situations, especially

(16:22):
with females that have been attacked bybears, what they found out is the
more you fight back with a blackbear, the more severe your injuries tend
to be. You don't hear thatin the if it's black fight back.
The thing I'm trying to get acrosshere is when you enjoy the outdoors,
you got to go out there havean understanding of the animals you may encounter

(16:45):
and what your best options if youdo have an encounter, what is that
animal doing and how should I reactto get myself out of that situation.
And we dive into that later ifyou like. But the notion that if
it's brown light down of black lieback, one fits all, that's just
not true. Yeah, if you'relooking at your own well being, I
would take that extra effort to learnas much as I could about that animal.

(17:07):
Yeah, So this makes me thinkof I wish I had a way
of like showing you videos and wecould go over them. But I'm sure
people send you videos all the timeof bears and people interacting. So there
is one really popular video going aroundthat I get sent all the time,
and it's of this family at apicnic table and a black bear comes and
hops on the picnic table and theysit there and they don't move, and

(17:30):
the bear eats their food, andI'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, whatis the appropriate response. Should you just
stay still? Should you scare it? Well, this leads perfectly into the
differences between their behavior and whatever Iteach the class is about bear encounters.

(17:51):
It doesn't matter if it's a brownbear class or a black bear class.
The main difference, there's two basicencounters with with a bear, you could
have what we call and this isby far the most common occurrence, a
defensive encounter. When we talk aboutencounters, it's where you are close enough
to that animal that you affect itsbehavior and it affects your behavior. So

(18:15):
if you're up on the mountaintop andyou see a bear down in the valley,
that's not an encounter, that's justthe bear sighting, yep. But
when you're close enough to that animalthat you interact with each other, the
main difference is most encounters tend tobe defensive where you invade that bear space.
It could be its personal space.It was just feeding on some BlackBerry

(18:37):
bushes and you just got too closethat the bear noticed you. Obviously,
you have other situations where you couldhave a mother with cubs. She does
not want you around because her cubsare 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 thisas well as I. More and more
people are hitting the woods with theirdogs, their companion animals. Yeah,

(19:00):
and those dogs amp up the defensivereaction in a bear. So in those
situations, whenever a bear is ina defensive mode or it's a defensive situation,
the bear wants to increase the distancebetween you and ed. It wants
you to get away or it toget away. And in almost every situation,

(19:22):
you just let that happen. Youslowly back away, talk softly,
and let the bear go about itsbusiness because it doesn't want you around.
The other encounters we have, whichare fewer and farther between. Is one
you just describe where you're sitting thereand a bear approaches you. So instead
of closed, instead of increasing thedistance between you and him, they're trying

(19:45):
to close the distance. There issomething 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 mostsituations, it smells something, whether or
not you have food at the picnictable or whatever, it smells something that
the bear wants. In those extremesituations where we end up with fatalities,

(20:10):
that's where you are the object ofits 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 wantsto get closer to you, it's offensive.
In a situation where you're at apicnic table and a bear's coming at
you, yes, that's where youget aggressive. You scare that bear away.

(20:30):
You let the bear know you're thebigger, more dominant person there,
and in most situations that works.You've always got to maintain this sense of
safety. You got to. Youdon't want to put yourself in a bad
situation. So if you're nearby acar 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,

(20:55):
it's not good to come up tohumans to get some type of food
reward. So anyway, depending onhow that bear is acting, either offensively
or defensively. Your reaction should bebased off their specific behaviors. Yeah,
that was great, kind of goingoff what you mentioned a little bit.
So one of our patrons, Dana, asked, does having a dog with
you increase your chances? She askedspecifically about like a campsite attack, But

(21:19):
I think it's good to talk aboutin general because I, even in our
podcast time, I have found thatlike 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

(21:41):
have the dog, because exactly likeyou said, it amps up that bears
defensive reaction. I talked with afriend yesterday. We're actually a really good
bear biologist herself. We were talkingto I was just making sure that the
bullet points that jotted down kind ofagreed with what her thinking was, and
we laughed about this particular question simplybecause lots of people go into the woods

(22:06):
with their dogs. In fact,I've got two dogs that I hike with
occasionally. The thing you have tounderstand is there are some dogs that are
really good can handle themselves. Usuallythey're highly trained, and there's there's people
that will be with their dog thatthey have complete control over the dog.
It's it's a very highly trained dog. Nine point nine percent of the people

(22:32):
out there don't have those kind ofdogs. 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 goescrazy, the bear goes crazy, people
go crazy because the dog and bearare interacting, and so it's just an

(22:53):
all around bad situation. Now,going back to your question about having a
dog in your campsite, no matterwhat we talked about here today, Ashley,
I think you understand this. Wecan tell you what is most likely
to happen, but we can neverguarantee you this is what's gonna happen.
When you're dealing with animals, theybehave how they're going to behave, and

(23:17):
sometimes they don't behave the way youexpect them. But a lot of times
a lot of people camp with theirdog 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 campbefore you will. But then what's that
dog going to do. Is thedog gonna start chasing after the bear?

(23:37):
Is the dog just gonna stand itthe 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 adog in the camp with you,
you can't answer that to say thisis 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

(23:59):
we're seeing more and more, withmore people going into the woods with their
dogs, you're just seeing more negativeinteractions between dogs and bears. Yeah,
this makes me think of two.To bring it back to videos. Have
you seen any of the videos ofpeople who are hiking with their dogs off
leash and their dogs actually bring backan animal. Oh yeah, there's one
where this the person with I thinkthey have an Australian shepherd and it brings

(24:23):
back a full bull moose towards thepeople 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 rightback at you. So, especially with
the bull moose, think about what'sgoing on and that moose is the moose
has evolved with one of their toughpredators being wolfe. And you have a
dog which is more or less adomesticated wolf, It's gonna react defensively,

(24:48):
especially if there's a calf around andso you are just opening the door.
I will never tell anyone not togo 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.

(25:12):
But it's just hard to predict whatwill 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 inblack Bear country or would you say bear

(25:33):
spray alone is all that one wouldneed. I am a huge, huge
proponent of bear spray. It's funnybecause you you probably get on social media
and you'll always hear the people thatwill be quick to say, well,
I'm going to carry my forty fiveor give me my gun over some stupid
bear spray. But I will tellyou I would recommend it one hundred percent

(25:57):
of the time, especially if youdon't know much about firearms. If you
are worried about bears, the bestthing to carry with you in the woods
against a defense against bears is yourbrain. If you know how to behave
around bears, that's going to getyou out of almost every situation. If

(26:18):
you had to carry a piece ofequipment 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, adog or anything. You also don't know

(26:41):
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 somethingelse. And so, unless you are
a military special person and that trainsevery day for intense situations with your handgun,

(27:03):
put the handgun away carry bear spray. The reason being as long as
you can get it out in thatsituation, that canister of bear spray is
going to put up more or lessa wall if you deploy it correctly,
it's going to put up a wallof spray that the bear has to go
through. That handgun is only goingto fire a single projectile and a fast

(27:25):
coming animal that has to hit inthe perfect spot, and you're under pressure,
under duress. I take bear sprayevery 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 allthe time. I'm going to put it
this way. Your handgun doesn't workall the time either, if you don't
hit in the right spot. Whatpeople don't understand is when it comes to

(27:48):
bears, you know, their senseof smell, their old factory senses are
just off the charts. I gota whole spiel I can go to about
how powerful their nose is, butlike two thousand times more powerful than our
nose. If you have ever beensprayed by pepper spray, or have any
instance, it freaks you out.Your eyes water, you can't breathe.

(28:11):
It's a horrible experience. We havethe weakest ass nose that you could ever
imagine. Now, take a bearthat has this hugely complex nasal cavity with
all these old factory receptors and alsudden you flood that with capsicum with this
pepper spray that is just it shortcircuits their brain their nose. It's so

(28:36):
powerful. As soon as they hitthat, they pretty much in most situations,
they forget about it. They wantto get out of there because this
is pure health form, and sothey forget everything that they're going to do
and they're just scrambling to get awayfrom whatever is attacking their face. Rain
Again, I'm a huge proponent ofbear spray to know how to use it,

(28:57):
even with the guns that you stillhave to practice being able to draw
a bear spray, But you don'thave to worry about hitting in that perfect
spot. You just got to beable 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 canswhere you can even just I've talked about

(29:18):
this so many times of the podcast, But like practice before you go out
taking it out quickly, like haveit where you can reach it. Because
we the bear attack survivor or thegrizzly bear attack survivor that we spoke to
Jeremy Evans, he had a gunand bear spray. Both were I think
his gun he had out, buthis bear spray was in the bottom of
his bag. But he was like, that bear came at me so fast,

(29:40):
there was no way I could haveshot her. Yeah, and didn't
have his bear spray where he neededit, so like obviously and died not
well for him. Could have beenworse, but didn't end well for him.
But yeah, like just having itsomewhere where you can reach it and
practice so that you know you canpull that out quickly if the worst,
And I will tell you with thosesituations, the readiness is the key.

(30:03):
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 unlikelyto draw anything quickly. Yeah, But
this is why I said the mostimportant tool that you carry with you is
your brain because you know it's thatspidey sense you get like something's not right.

(30:26):
I maybe smell a carcass or I'mgetting into a real heavy vegetation area
and like all the burrs and everythingwent quiet. Something's just not right.
That's where your brain said, youknow what, let's get the bear spray
ready. You're carry it if youwant to. But because if there's a
complete surprise by a bear at closerain, it doesn't matter how fast you

(30:48):
are. If you've got to digsomething out, you're likely not going to
get it out in time. Sothat'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 thingthat's come up on the podcast before,
but like, for example, whendogs get sprayed by skunks, this is

(31:11):
kind of a reach, but I'llget there. So when dogs get sprayed
by skunks, the reason that yourdog 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 thewild, if a coyote is sprayed by
a skunk, they smell like askunk and all their senses get messed up,

(31:33):
they probably won't be able to findfood. Their food can smell them
coming. So I can imagine aperson spraying a bear with bear spray is
also you are helping to teach thatbear not to mess with people, because
you are harming it in a wayso that it feels like that you are
not a safe food source, helpingit learn to stay away from people.

(31:55):
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 thatperson because that hurt, yeah and so,
And the good thing is it hurts, it doesn't kill. Yep.
You could have arguments about shooting abear and killing it in a defensive situation,

(32:15):
but if a bear is protecting itsyoung, it's not doing anything other
than being a bear. A bearspray will is much better at teaching it
a lesson than just completely removing thatbear for being a bear. Yeah,
for sure. So kind of goingalong this line, John had another question,
which was has there been any studiesto show if different sounds made by

(32:36):
humans scare bear off more effectively,for instance, like a roar versus a
yell? And then I was thinkingbear bells and how often do bear bells
work if at all? Yeah,very good question. First off, the
thing with bear bells, there's actuallya couple of things here. Bears are
pretty smart animals. And you knowwhat habituation is, habituation. It's not

(32:59):
a bad thing. A lot ofpeople confuse habituation with being food conditioned,
but habituation is just where a bearis so used to a certain stimuli that
they disregarded. And so in mostcases, 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

(33:24):
than people. So if they're exposedto a stimulus, say you live in
a really popular tourist town that hasa lot of hikers, a lot of
bears, and every hiker is wearingbear bells. The bear it's gonna sound
like Christmas time in the woods allthe time. You're gonna hear bears bells
ringing, and so the bears willbecome somewhat that it doesn't it won't phase

(33:47):
them as much because they hear itall the time. Now, the main
purpose of bear bells is not toscare bears away, so to speak,
but more or less to alert themto 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 couldpotentially lead to this close encounter because you

(34:09):
accidentally stuck up on a bear.So the purpose of the bear bells is
just to let the bear know something'scoming down the trail, and a bear's
senses are so much better than oursthey'll be able to say, hey,
that's a human. I'm going toget 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 wherethe bears might not be used to

(34:31):
seeing people. It just it's anodd sound that the bear's not used to
hearing, and that will usually freakthem 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 soundswork best. Again, there's no one
size fits all sound that's going towork in every situation. Obviously depending on

(34:54):
the situation. If you have anoffensive bear that is approaching you, you
are trying to scare it away.So the louder, the more aggressive you
are, the better off that soundis going to be. If you're in
a defensive situation where the bear justwants you away, talking softly will put

(35:15):
the bear more at ease than beingloud 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 wayinstead of like, get real aggressive because
she's gonna start to ampuff. Andso the sounds can be very situational and
so there's no one particular sound thatworks best. I will tell you what's

(35:36):
becoming more and more popular. There'ssome people that don't like the idea of
bear spray, and so they carryair horns. Yeah, it will work.
If there's a bear close buying yousuddenly hit it with an air horn,
it could surprise the bear. Theproblem with an airhorn, though,
is if that bear has bad intentions, there's no hurt. Bear spray will

(36:00):
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 yourpack that you use. But I would
not want to rely on a soundto keep a bear away because it all
depends on the intention of that bearat the time. Yeah, And to

(36:23):
me, it's also important to pointout, like you know, the people
who might not want to use bearspray because they're afraid of hurting the bear.
In the worst case scenario, ifa bear hurts you and you didn't
have bear spray, that bear islikely going to be at least here in
New Hampshire. Like bears that attackpeople, they try to find those bears

(36:43):
to euthanize them or move them away. So ultimately, yeah, a bear
hurting you is going to definitely hurtthat bear. So like bear spray is
temporary, euthanasias forever, So bearspray great option. Yeah, No,
that's a great point, and it'sjust not New Hampshire, it's pretty much
every state. If you have asevere attack, there's just too much risk

(37:06):
that state wildlife agencies aren't going totake that risk to allow those bears to
remain out there. And I knowa 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 peopledon't talk about. Yeah. Yeah,
So John, John has so manygood questions, so we're gonna keep wronging

(37:27):
with another one of John's question.So what types of wildlife areas should people
avoid during what seasons to avoid conflictswith bears? That's pretty easy. The
nice thing with bears is they're fairlyeasy to pattern. Bears are gluttons.
Wherever there's food, there's bears.So whether or not it's a BlackBerry field

(37:50):
in the summertime that's ripening, campingin the middle of that BlackBerry field if
there's a potential draw of bears tothat area because of those blackberries, not
a good place to camp in thefall, especially in New England or the
eastern half of the country that hasa large acorn crop. If you've got
a lot of acorns dropping around there, that might not be a good place.

(38:14):
Bears obviously are trying to fatten upfor the wintertime. You go more
out western states and you have thosesalmon runs up some of the streams in
the West, you might not wantto camp, especially if you're Alaska Western
Canada, where those brown bears arecoming in to feed on the salmon.
You don't want to be camping rightnext to the river their favorite food source.

(38:36):
So a lot of it it's situationalawareness. 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 andso they'll kind of stick to that edge
that brush line to stay concealed.So it would probably be better to camp

(38:58):
in a more open spot than tuckedaway under the tree somewhere, because that
could just be a chance of dumbluck that and animals just walking through the
thicker stuff to get from point Ato point B. A lot of it's
come in sense. The best thingto do is think about that animal and
know about that animal, have agood understanding of what they like and don't

(39:19):
like, and just say, ifI was this animal, would I want
to be in this spot? Andif 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 fromyour camp should you hang a bear bag
to like put all your food intoso that they can't access it? And

(39:42):
then is there a certain height thatyou should hang bear bags at. You
are gonna hate me because I'm nevergoing to answer your question like succinctly.
Just this is. This isn't thehard and fast rule you anywhere you go,
it may have slightly different guidelines becauseit it's based on it's situational.
It's based on the area. Soyou might be an area that does not

(40:07):
have many trees for you to hanga bear bag from, and so it
all depends on where you're camping forthat night. The thing I want to
stress to people is even when yousee guidelines to hang a bear bag one
hundred yards away from your campsite,it's a guideline. So if you walk

(40:27):
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 feelfor the animals. Just say all right,
I'm far enough away, but whereI'm hanging this pack, it's a
trail that goes right back to mycampsite, So maybe this isn't a good
place. Take those guidelines and kindof just get the gist of what they're

(40:52):
saying. If you have food thatthey recommend hanging in a tree, the
hardest thing, usually Ashley, isfinding 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 ina heavy bag or anything. So
it's just finding a good tree thatwill work to hang your bag in a

(41:14):
way that a bear is less likelyto get at it. Now I say
less likely, because bears are ingenious. If they want to get something,
they're going to get something, andso if you make it hard for them,
hopefully it'll dissuade them. But there'sno steadfast rule of this is how
you do it, this is howyou don't do it, because in some
situations the way you do it herecould be completely wrong the way you do

(41:37):
it over here. So the mainthing is you want to keep the bear
out of your campsite. You don'tthat bag if you have food in it,
no matter how many times you seeit bears sense of smell. It's
gonna smell stuff that's on the outsideof the bag, on your clothes.
That bear is going to be ableto tell that there's something hanging in that

(41:58):
tree. It could draw a bearinto your pack to investigate. The key
to all those guidelines is to keepthat 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 ifyou're traveling to a different state, just
reach out and be like, hey, what are your recommendations for this specific

(42:22):
area too. Yeah. The goodthing is like a lot of campsite trailheads,
well we'll have a guideline or morethan likely you go to their website.
They'll have information on how you shoulddo things in the back country in
that particular area. But you can'tsomewhere out westwar where I go camping a
lot, there's not a tree oversix foot tall in some of the areas.

(42:43):
So you got to be you justgot to be smart with your food
storage because the whole goal of allof 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 moreintense attack. So John, once again
another great question. If one comesacross another person who has been mauled or

(43:07):
someone who is like in the processof being attacked by a bear, what
should you do to get that personto safety with minimal risk to yourself if
possible. And there's a second halfto his question, so we'll get it
to that after you answer the firstpart. Yeah, this was the other
question that I was talking to mybest friend about regarding how to respond to

(43:29):
this, because the first thing thatshe brought up to me is she said,
John, just let John know heis that upper one half of one
percent, because ninety nine percent ofthe people if they come across a stranger
that is getting mauled by a bear, nobody's going in there. Yeah,

(43:50):
it's such a crazy event. Andunless you are this ultimate hero that will
charge into save, which is awhere trait in people. But we would
never encourage it because I think Johnmentioned 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 haveto understand if you have a severe situation

(44:14):
where an animal is or a bearis unfortunately mauling someone or has already killed
someone. It has already done thedamage to one person. We want to
make sure it doesn't do the damageto two people. And so we will
never tell anyone to go in andtry to do what they can simply because
it's a bad situation and you're notprepared a situation like that. The best

(44:38):
thing you could possibly do is tryto get a hold of someone nine to
one one, any agency you canget a hold of as quickly as possible
so they can bring the resources necessaryto 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

(45:00):
a two part episode early on inthis 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 becausehe was like, there's people being attackling,
you got to go help. AndI was like, but the people
don't have bears, brier, theydon't have guns, and he was like,
it doesn't matter. Someone's being attackedand I'm like, I think that

(45:21):
makes it worse. Yeah, AndNick was thinking like but in real life.
It's it's something that it'd be hardto do. Now, I understand,
like if it was if it wasyour child, if it was someone
that you knew, then that actof heroism definitely increases. But to stumble

(45:44):
upon someone, your best bet isto try to get someone who's better prepared
to handle that situation, because ifyou're not prepared, you're just increasing the
likelihood there's going to be too bada situations. Yeah, I think the
link between John and Nick is thatthey're both veterans, so I think they're
already the type of people that wouldrun in and try to help a situation.

(46:06):
So maybe to all the veterans outthere, still leave it and wait
until someone else comes in. There'snothing 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'sgoing to take you out too. But
yeah, if you want to tryto get the bear off by yelling,
scream and throwing things, but ifyou don't have anything to immediately deal with

(46:30):
that bear, you just can't interjectyourself into that particular encounter. Yeah,
and his second part of the questionwas like, in this situation, like,
how do you get that person outof there? And I think some
wilderness like first aid training would bereally helpful to know if that's the kind
of thing that you're worried about,because handling someone who has been brutally attacked

(46:54):
by an animal, like, there'sa lot going on there that I don't
know if either of us are qualifiedto 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

(47:16):
of one of the things that Iwanted to touch on because when you're talking
about these severe attacks, it issuch devastating, a personally devastating experience for
the not just the person that hasattacked, but their friends, their family,

(47:36):
all the first responders. And Iknow 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 arampage and just make light heartedness, because
there are situations where it just it'slife changing, and so we want to

(48:00):
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'rehorrific. Some of them will break up

(48:22):
when you mentioned specific cases. Andwe wanted to prepare all these first responders
from all these different Southeastern states andfederal agencies about what you're likely to get
into. So we had these differentscenarios set up around Gallenburg, Tennessee,
and I worked one of those scenarios. And they go all out with this

(48:45):
training. They want to make surethese first responders are prepared. And so
the particular scenario we set up wasjust on the outskirts of town. There
was a restaurant there and behind therestaurant 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 ayoung three year old girl playing on the

(49:07):
swing set and a bear grabbed herdragged her off into the bushes, and
so they use all the props theyhad the baby dolls, the everything in
there. And as soon as youset that up and you look at it
right away, you're like, ohGod, I hope I never ever have
to encounter this. So we gotthe scene all set up and the particular

(49:30):
group of students who are mostly wildlifeofficers or first responders, started coming in
to They were told there was abear incident and to come investigating. So
they approached the scene and they startedpiecing it together what was happening, and
they saw the doll where it was, they saw the drag marks, and

(49:52):
they're clicking like a young child withtaking and all of a sudden, we
cueued up the actors. And mygood 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 thananyone ever. And she comes out of
the restaurant and she screams and sheruns over there and she's trying to go

(50:14):
find her baby, and the officerspanicked and she's screaming, where's my baby?
Where? And Ashley, it wasthe most amazing thing. Here was
a simulation and you look around andI'm crying. The officers are everybody's crying
because there's this mom that's trying tofind her bab, and so the lightheartedness

(50:37):
of these attacks can sometimes like anyonethat's been involved with it just it doesn't
sit well. Yeah, but Iunderstand the general public has this interest in
them, But we just got totreat all of these situations with that most
respect because they're pretty pretty serious situations. Yeah, for sure. Yeah,

(51:00):
we spoke to Jeremy Evans, theGrizzly Attack survivor. You know, it's
funny, it was his first timeever going on a podcast and like really
ever talking in public about what happenedto 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 gethelp, and the first thing that made

(51:22):
him cry was talking about his wifeand how like she responded and how she
helped. Oh my god, I'mlike teary up thinking about it. But
yeah, I think something that canget lost often in podcasts when you're talking
about even true crime like people killingpeople, is like there are real people
involved in these stories that are stilltraumatized by these events. So like it's

(51:42):
not a big thing to joke aboutor like you know, and I know
the humor of the joking is kindof like a coping mechanism even for the
general public, to make it notso scary. Yeah, but I will
tell you, I told you likeduring that situation, I cried. But
even sitting through that class, wewe would go over different case studies,

(52:06):
and there's there's a cell phone videoof a person who was recently attacked by
a bear. He did not hanghis 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 goodbyeto his wife. And you're just

(52:27):
sitting there and you're just you're intears. 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 actuallya for service worker coming up the trail
on a horse that was able tohelp him out. So yeah, started
to going a downward tangent. ButI enjoy talking about them. I think

(52:50):
they're fascinating. But yeah, wheneverwe talk about we're always trying to just
put in perspective of this is seriousstuff. Yeah, and I think it's
a good reminder too, Like goingoff 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 becauseone, it's so rare into it's so
horrific if you do come across itonly cow And for a second there,

(53:13):
I forgot why I've got on thattangent. But it's basically the question because
even in that training, the professionalsare taught like to approach a situation,
especially if the bear is still overa victim or near a victim. It's
almost like military training about you gotto be in specific positions to watch all
your guards, and even the trajectoryat which if you're to put a bear

(53:37):
down in which you angle that gunso 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 thegun is the best thing, there's a
lot of situations where they shoot theirfriend trying to shoot the bear. Yep.
So yeah, and I believe Ican't think of specific one off the

(54:00):
top of my head, but Ihave heard of bear attacks where that exact
thing happens. Someone goes to shootthem there and ends up shooting themselves or
their friend. So yeah, ithappens, all right, So to move
on similar one of our patrons,Ali asked, what do you think is
causing the increase of bear attacks inJapan in the last year? And I
don't know exactly what she's referring tobecause I haven't heard of this. I

(54:20):
don't really keep up with the newsin Japan on bears. Maybe I should,
but I don't know if you knowwhat she's referring to. Well,
no, I wasn't. Sorry,I kind of researched it, and pretty
much all I saw was over thelast few decades, the amount of encounters
and the tacks of her attacks hasincreased in Japan, and I think it's
pretty simple. It's the exact samething that's happening here, because if you

(54:43):
look over the decades, we're havingmore and more bear encounters, bear attacks,
and that's just I would imagine asjust a simple product of human populations
going up, bear populations also goingup 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 whenyou say, what about bear populations,

(55:06):
Oh they're going down. That's nottrue. Look at black bears. Black
bear populations have exploded over the lastcentury, and so it's just I believe
it's just simply a product of moreencounters. So it's just a population statistic.
Yeah. Well, that's really allthe questions I had on bear attacks.
So I know there's some misconceptions thatwe should get into that maybe aren't

(55:30):
bear attack related, but just bearrelated. So before we start recording,
you and I were talking a littlebit 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'lldo it quick. And I can't thank
you enough, Ashley, because whenI brought that up a few months ago,

(55:51):
you brought up on the Treadwell episodeabout making that clarification. And I'm
glad you referenced bearwise dot org becauseis 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

(56:13):
when you say, or when peoplesay, bears don't hibernate. Let me
ask you, how do you definehibernation? And there's two different definitions.
You could use the general term thatthe general public would like, or if
you would rather use the biology likethe biological definition, either one. How
would you just define hibernation? Yeah, generally, I would like broadly,

(56:34):
I would describe it as a longterm period of sleep or the animals respiration
and like heart rate decrease and theirmetabolism 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,

(56:58):
and that's fair. So yeah,And if you look at Miriam's or
Merriam Webster dictionary, it'll say adormant or torpid time through the in which
animals sleep through the winter. Sothat'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 thereis a biological aspect to hibernation. And

(57:24):
what it is. It's a lotof 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 offood. And so you all know in
North America, in most parts ofNorth America, during the wintertime, trees
lose their leaves, plants stop growing. We have this period of months and

(57:46):
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, theygot to figure out how to survive.
They're not going to fly, they'renot going to migrate deer during the wintertime,
their diety changes, so instead ofeating forbes and leaves, they're eating

(58:09):
twigs because that's all that's out there. Bears will and other animals will hibernate,
and so pretty much the biological definitionof the hibernation is where the body
will go dormant for a while,and there's certain changes within that animal,

(58:29):
like you mentioned lower respiration, lowerheart rate, and what all that does.
They kind of put their body inkind 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. Sothere's that metabolic decrease. So when bears

(58:53):
hibernate, all those hibernating animals,the true hibernators, they lower the respiration,
they lower their heart rate. Theirmetabolism decreases tremendously. But the key
with a lot of those is theirbody temperature drops from around say ninety five
to one hundred degrees, and itdrops to almost freezing, so their body

(59:15):
temperature goes way out. The thingthat 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, buttheir temperature stays relatively high. It only
drops about ten degrees, so they'restill hovering high eighties, low nineties.
All that means is they can wakeup real easily. So if they're disturbed,

(59:37):
then it just takes them a fewminutes. They'll still be really wobbly
and groggy, but they can getout, move around, but then they'll
go back to sleep. The reasonit'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 theirtemperature doesn't drop public things. Oh,

(01:00:00):
they don't hibernate. They're out allwinter long. And believe it or not,
we have folks that hear that thatwill go visit the Smokies in January
and February because they heard bears don'thibernate and it's like, no, they're
they're sleeping. There might be abear that is awake or has access to
food. That's a big problem isif they constantly have access to food,

(01:00:22):
then they don't have to sleep asmuch 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 hibernatethe same way other animals hibernate, but
they still spend most of the wintersleeping. Because if it was true that

(01:00:45):
they didn't, the best time tosee 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 thankyou for that. Thank you. I've
also heard in recent years there's beenlike maybe it's just the fact that it
reported more and now I'm keeping moreof an eye on it, But I've
heard more people say that grizzlies arewaking up during the middle of the winter

(01:01:07):
very hungry and are like going afterpeople or bird feeders or whatever. Is
there anything happening with brown bears andlike why they're waking up early or hungry.
I haven't heard it like as muchof it being a whole species wide
phenomena, But if you have areas, one of the biggest food sources is

(01:01:30):
that there's a beetle. There's aninsect that a lot of the bears will
gorge themselves on. And when youhave specific situations, whether or not it's
due to climate change or just badweather or something where an animal's food source,
especially in the fall when they're tryingto fatten up, has been tremendously

(01:01:50):
impacted by another event, and thebears don't get those fat reserves that they
need to stay sleeping, Then bearsin a particular area might a lot of
them might be underweight and get upto 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, butdefinitely in some areas you could have some

(01:02:16):
winners that bears are more active becauseeither there's more food around or something happened
to their food source. So thething with social media is we hear a
lot more of the anomalies. Beforesocial media. If something happened in somewhere
Iowa, you never heard about it, but now it's front page news because

(01:02:37):
something weird happened in Iowa. Yeah, all right, are there any other
pet peeves or misinformation things about bearsthat 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 ittoo long. But cool. Well.
One of the last fun questions,which I think could lead more into some
things that you have worked on thepast. Kim, one of our patrons

(01:03:00):
asked, what cartoon bear is yourfavorite? 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. Hopefullyshe'll hear it soon. But it's not
a cartoon either. I was akid, I loved Yogi and smoking all
that, but my favorite bear ingeneral. I actually wrote a book.

(01:03:22):
Released the book last year. It'scalled Spooning a Bear, and it's just
a series of short stories about someof my adventures being a bear biologist,
and a lot of them came fromwhen I was working at the rehab and
research facility in the Smokies. Nowunderstand, when you're doing bear rehab,

(01:03:44):
the best way to do it ishands off. You don't want any contact
with the bears. You don't wantthose 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 closeto fifty bears, but never had
any contact with them. Everything wasdone behind blinds. You didn't get in
there and crawl in the cage withthem or anything like that. But there's

(01:04:08):
one bear that was brought to usearly on. It was probably about a
twenty pound cub is. It wasalready about six seven months old, but
it was captured by the State WildlifeAgency. They grabbed it off the porch
of someone's house and sure enough,we found there some wrong. The bear

(01:04:28):
had aspiration pneumonia, which is indicativeof being bottle fed the wrong way.
They had the bear tilted the wrongway and it got liquid in and the
bear's lungs and that bear we tookit to the vet to make sure it
is going to be okay, andthe vet was pretty serious with me.
He said, Darryl, don't betoo upset if the bear doesn't make it
through the night, because it's it'snot doing very well. And so here

(01:04:54):
I am. I'm one of thebiggest 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 goingto make he couldn't be released back to
the wild. I wanted to makesure he had a really good last night.
So instead of feeding the natural foods, the acorns, the grapes,

(01:05:16):
whatever the natural foods we typically gavethe 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 andso I did something you never ever,
ever should do with wildbear. ButI let him out of the cage and
he would go on my lap.Because you have to understand, whoever ruined

(01:05:40):
this bear handle this bear quite abit, and so it thought that I
was the mama bear. And sothere's one and only time I ever got
to handle a real bear. Andwhen I went to put him back in
the cage when we're all done kindof comforting each other, he would have
none of it. Like he wouldgo spread eagle with both and paused holding

(01:06:00):
the door and is like a littletrampoline, 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 couldfeel his claws digging in, and I'm
like, holy cow, I've gota real bear here. And so I
ended up. I was in astorage shed at the facility, and I
ended up throwing a blanket on thefloor and I let him play around and

(01:06:24):
dummy me. I was exhausted froma 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 thebear. The bear had fallen asleep in
my arm. So Deacon is myfavorite bear because this is the only time
I ever actually handled and got upclose and personal. But the happy ending

(01:06:46):
to the story is we say thatthe bear ended up living, but it
was still a heart wrenching story becausebear that is fed by humans and wants
to be around humans can't be releasedback to the It's a way to find
a sanctuary for that bear to goto. But Deacon is probably my favorite
bearon if you want, if yougot to read about Deacon, it's in

(01:07:09):
my book Scooting a Bear, whichyou can just google it or look it
up on Amazon. So nice.Well, in speak, you don't just
have a book, You also haveyour own business. So can you tell
us a little bit about your businessand why you started it? Oh yeah,
back in back in twenty sixteen.I moved from Tennessee to New Mexico

(01:07:29):
back in twenty fifteen, and bytwenty 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 theeast, so when you got to drive
from one town to another, it'sthree hour drive this way or that way.
And I was loving it. ButI mentioned on my Facebook page back

(01:07:54):
then, I've got to go toLos Alamos to give a bear talk tomorrow
night, and someone said, man, I would love to sit in on
your talk. Can you do itonline? And the light bulb went off,
and so I started a business calledWildlife for You. It's just an
educ wildlife education where I would justgive talks. And I started doing webinars
back in twenty seventeen. General webinarsair safety, but different species talks about

(01:08:20):
maybe foxes or people would send incan 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 myson, my youngest son, is in
college to update that and he promiseswithin the next few months he'll have it
updating. But I used to teacha lot of online classes and I've got

(01:08:43):
over eighty different online classes available.If anyone, I'm going to have all
those available. But we also dida podcast, there's a Wildlife for You
podcast. I don't want to competewith yours a couple of years ago.
It's over and done with. Istarted with the brilliant friend of mine,
Stephanie Payne, who was my cohost, and we talked about a whole

(01:09:06):
different slew of different topics and thatwas 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 billsas a wildlife biologist. But my true
passion is the education side of things, because unfortunately, and I know you

(01:09:26):
know this too well, some ofthe smartest people in the business are not
the best communicators. And so mypassion is taking that hard, good sound
science, translating it and providing itto the public so they can understand it
better. Yep, because sometimes whatwe put out it doesn't always carry over

(01:09:47):
in the best way. And soyeah, 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 wildlifebecause it's my passion. Yeah, I
mean, first of all, thankyou for doing this in general, but
yeah, that's why I want todo this too, because I mean things
like the if it's black fight back, if it's brown led down, like

(01:10:10):
there's more nuance to that statement thatyou can't get out of, like the
government just issuing that statement. Andthat's why broadcasts are great. Yeah,
that two sentence nursery rhyme doesn't coverat all, but if you listen to
someone explain why it doesn't work inall situations and what you are supposed to
do. I'm trying to reach thosepeople that love wildlife and love to learn,

(01:10:34):
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 goesoff, those folks are a thousand
times in better shape being in thewoods than someone that's just reading a two
sentence nursery rhyme. Yeah, andyou know, I know some people may

(01:10:54):
not agree with like the branding ofour podcast where like it's branded as an
animal attack pod, But the wholepurpose 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 willlead them to this where you can actually
learn about like Okay, here's actuallythe statistics on whether or not this is

(01:11:15):
likely to happen to you and howyou 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 gotto capture people's attention. And I will
tell you I've written a ton ofarticles. The one I wrote it was
about wildlife photographers because oftentimes they dovery very bad things, and sometimes they

(01:11:42):
think what they do is so unobtrusiveit 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 shocktitle that once people read it, they're

(01:12:02):
like, oh, I had noidea we had we could potentially have that
impact on an animal, because ifthey're changing that animal's behavior, they can
definitely have a negative impact on thoseanimals. Yeah, so I totally get
and understand your marketing strategies to drawpeople in just to get them to listen.

(01:12:23):
And again, I can't thank youenough Ashley for reaching out trying to
get the most current, up todate, best information out there. Yeah.
Truly wonderful. Yeah, Well,thank you, Daryl, Thank you
so much for doing this. Iwould love to have you back on another
time. There's so many things wecould talk about, so yeah, anytime
you want to come back, youlet me know, even if we're not

(01:12:43):
on air, if you have anyquestions or one or anything, by by
all means, please feel free toreach out. Yeah, and how can
other people reach out and find youif 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 beendealing with some family issues with my dad,
so it's kind of been quiet,but wildlife for you. On Facebook,

(01:13:04):
it was pretty active for a while. We got a pretty good following
on Facebook. I think there's wehad over eleven thousand people following that right
now. Yeah, and I seeyou. Also, if anyone's listening and
they are part of the Science CareerNetwork 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 thatI usually do not find people from

(01:13:26):
Facebook, so it's funny that that'show we connected. But it worked out
so all right. Well, thankyou so much, Daryl for doing this.
It was great, haven't you.I had an absolute blast, Ashley,
And if you ever need me againand be happy to talking about any
other thing you want. I thinkwe got to touch on Krueger's before too
long. Oh absolutely, yeah.I hope you all enjoyed the interview with

(01:13:47):
Darryl. And my favorite quote fromthe episode was, if you have a
close encounter with the bear, yourresponse to that bear should not be based
whatsoever on what species of bear itis. 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 animalsaround us, the world around us,

(01:14:08):
and just if you're going out inthe woods, just get a better sense
of what's going on around you andwhat 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 theepisode, we can't predict exactly how every
animal is going to act, butin general, you are not likely to
be attacked by a bear, especiallyif you go out prepared with bear spray
and you know basic bear behavior.So in our next episode, I will

(01:14:31):
be telling a story of someone wholived very close with black bears, and
we will dive a little deeper intotheir behavior and maybe things to keep an
eye out for. Also, ournext bonus episode on Patreon will also be
a story about bears, one thathas been very highly requested by a lot
of you, so stay tuned forthat. And I figured, you know,
we're having basically this entire month dedicatedto bears. But tis the season

(01:14:55):
bears are waking up from hibernation,so that means take down those bird feeders
there are already hitting them, soplease get those in so it doesn't cause
a problem for the rest of thesummer. So take what you learn from
this episode, put that to useas 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 descriptionfor links to find Darryl, links

(01:15:15):
to find us on social media.And thank you to Josh Walsh for making
our intro music, and thank youto 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 timecoming. Thank you all right, I
will catch you all in two weeksfor another animal attack story. See yeah