Tag: wildlife

Robin Song

Mornings now are full of robins, some high in the weeping birch where they glow in the sunrise, others in the shadowed backyard oak, but most of them hidden in the big spruce trees that are scattered through the neighbourhoods. Later they will drop into mountain ash trees to feed on wizened fruit, or explore snow-free patches of ground to hunt awakening insects, but at first light they huddle in their roosts and sing together.

Some sing the familiar territorial robin song but most sing variants, like a kind of avian jazz improvisation. Collectively, it’s like a frenzied chorus of excitement but if you spot one, as often as not it will seem entranced, nearly immobile. Only its beak moves.

What are they singing for?

Biologists tell us that birdsong a functional thing: an expression of territoriality. Birds, we are told, sing to warn others to stay away, and in doing so they maximize the survival prospects of their mate and offspring during each short breeding season. It has survival value.  But this is clearly not that; these birds are still en route to their summer homes. The collective cacophony that fills each half-lit morning and evening is from dozens of birds at once, temporarily massed in the riparian woods along the Highwood River as they participate in an annual robin festival which, clearly, fills them with emotion so intense that it spills over into song.  There is nothing territorial about it at all.

Those birds seem to sing simply from the excitement of migration, the thrill of waking to another day of adventuring back across their continent, en masse.  Migration is a great robin tradition, conducted en masse. It stirs hearts to song.

I’m just guessing at that; how are we to know?  We live our own strange lives. But armies have marching songs and families travel to folk festivals and I remember singing in choirs when I was a boy — those moments when a hundred voices would rise into a crescendo of harmony that filled our hundred hearts with glory.  To no useful purpose.  And certainly not to assert a right to a breeding territory. Mostly it was just to revel in the joy and beauty of song — because, like robins, we could.

On the warmer evenings I sometimes take a drink and a blanket with me down to the riverside. There I settle myself into a folding chair and watch the valley fill with shadow as the water murmurs and chatters past me: river song. For the last hour of each day, pairs of geese pass overhead.  Having spent the day on their new nesting territories along the river, they head down-valley at dusk to join up into temporary flocks again. I keep planning to go in search of them to find out what that’s all about, but have yet to do it. Probably it’s feeding time in the big fields.  Or perhaps they spend the night together on the downstream reservoir before returning in twos and fours to their riverside homes in the morning.  But there they go, each evening, enacting a daily ritual that is part of being a goose — looking forward, clearly, to gathering with friends and neighbours for a while, because that is how geese socialize.

When I was younger, I went out most evenings too, in search of other people.  Sometimes to a party, occasionally to a bar, other times simply to wander around downtown.  It was part of being a young adult human in a big city. I did it because I wanted to be around others; it gave me pleasure.

When I started paying attention to those goose couples and their evening flights, I found myself wondering why they did it — what survival value those flights have for them. On further reflection I found myself wondering why I automatically assumed it must have a functional value.  Why do we think that way?  We seem to have conditioned ourselves to look at other animals and explain their appearance, their behaviours and their life patterns in terms of survival value.  In doing that, we reduce them to living mechanisms and elevate ourselves to the only beings whose lives have meaning beyond simple survival.  Well, that’s certainly handy for us; it absolves a lot of sins. Think of all the birds that live and die in cages — not by their choices but by ours.

We say birds with brilliant plumages are colourful because it helps them attract mates or distract predators from their drab-coloured mates.  We say birds with drab plumages are drab because it helps them hide. Birds sing to mark nesting territories. Birds migrate to escape bad weather or to find seasonal food sources.  Everything, in an understanding of nature shaped by Descartian objectivism and Darwinian theory, has adaptive value.  There is no room for spontaneous joy or simple pleasure in that objective, mechanistic view of nature;  things do what they do simply to survive. It’s all DNA and design — for other creatures. Grim.

After a lifetime of observation and reflection, however, I have to believe we have schooled ourselves wrong. Animals are not simply assemblages of genes that sort themselves out into pre-configured behaviours that help them perpetuate the species.  Animals are beings like ourselves, with complex social lives, ceremonies, relationships and simple pleasures. They don’t just survive; they live. They have fun. They feel sorrow.  They adventure.

Late one summer afternoon I sat on a log beside the Panther River in the high backcountry of Banff National Park. There was an eagle nest near the top of a nearby cliff.  An eagle appeared to the north, so high it was just a speck in the sky.  As it drew near, something separated from it and began to plummet toward the earth.  It was too small at that distance to make out what it was — probably a dead marmot or ground squirrel.  The eagle twisted into a breathless dive, carving a crazy horizontal arc out of the blue, spiralling down from the sky, intersecting at last with its plummeting prey.  With perfect timing, it scooped its victim out of the air and carved a sharp curve up along the mountain face before lighting gracefully at the edge of its eyrie where it posed for a long moment with both wings extended, before finally bending to feed its hungry youngsters.

I knew what I was seeing. That eagle was proud; he held that pose to bask in joy and glory. His dive had been a celebration of skill and freedom.  It wasn’t necessary, but it was fun.  He was taking delight in being who and what he was. He had given himself a moment of sheer, glorious pleasure, because he could.

Part of being who and what we are, at least in the objectivist, rational Western culture in which most of us were trained to understand the world, is to assume that any non-human other is also non-sentient.  Animals are considered to operate primarily by instinct.  Birds don’t think; they react.  Behaviour is simply a response to external stimuli that helps the individual, and through it the species, survive.  Only humans have intellect or creativity or complex emotions.

That eagle would beg to differ. The geese that gather to enjoy one another’s company each evening would beg to differ.  A hundred robins paying joyous homage to the rising sun as they adventure north across the living face of their mosaic world would disagree too.  At least they would if they cared — if they weren’t so absorbed in the glorious adventure of living in a world that was put here for them to make their own kinds of meaning, and to feel their own range of emotions, while living their own unique experiences.

We have no way of asking or knowing, but it would be interesting to learn how they interpret us. Perhaps their imaginations are more generous than ours.

I recall, one summer afternoon, hearing a robin singing nearby as I walked quietly along an early morning woodland trail. Unlike the usual robin song, this one was barely audible. I wouldn’t even have heard it it, had it not been so near.  Curious, I picked my way forward slowly until, by lucky accident, I spotted it on a branch in the aspen canopy. It was a male robin, motionless amid the leaves, singing so softly it was almost like a whisper — in fact, in my notebook I recorded it as a “whisper song”. 

There was a nest in the next tree, lower down, the tail and wingtip of the robin’s mate protruding over the edge where she sat motionless, patient, the smooth roundness of her four eggs warm against her brood patch; a mother-to-be.

He was singing to her.

I had stumbled into another couple’s love.

Iiníí

“Early in November, 1887, John Nolan and other half breeds were near the forks of the Red Deer and South Saskatchewan when they came across a bunch of eleven buffalo, one of the bunch being a very large bull. They killed the big bull, two cows and a calf and brought them into Swift Current.  J. Grant got the head of the bull and Curry Bros.,  got the two cows heads and hide of the calf. No doubt afterword the half breeds cleaned out the rest of the bunch for they were never heard of again.

“Hine of Winnipeg mounted the bull’s head and in 1893 it was loaned to the government and was sent to the World Fair at Chicago, where it was much admired…

“The country lying between the South Saskatchewan and the Cypress Hills and Old Wives Creek and the lakes and the Vermillion Hills was famous for Buffalo and even now the old Buffalo trails and wallows are to be seen from Moose Jaw to Medicine Hat.“

from a letter by “Wyoming Bill” to the Fort Macleod Gazette, 1902

Treaty Seven was signed in 1877. Barely ten years later, Canada’s last wild plains bison expired its last breath into the prairie sky. 

Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, thought the eradication of North America’s largest land mammal was a very good thing.  “I am not at all sorry,” he said to Canada’s House of Commons in faraway Ottawa. “So long as there was a hope that bison would come into the country, there was no means of inducing the Indians to settle down on their reserves.”

The treaties at least assured the Indigenous tribes of the western plains that they would not starve. In exchange for that and other assurances, they settled on the reserves they had chosen and tried to come to terms with a world turned upside down. How could there be no buffalo? 

The Ghost Dance movement that originated with tribes who lived in the Great Basin region of the US spread through many of the plains nations. It was a spiritual practice whose adherents hoped would bring back the world they had always known, including the vanished bison. They were desperate in their loss; a world they had never imagined could end, had.

But the bison were gone for good. Settlers were coming to populate the empty plains. The newcomer people replaced the native bison with a newcomer animal: the domestic cow.

MacDonald’s government wanted to build a new nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, and to secure its control over that nation before the Americans, who had a head start on settling the west, could appropriate the place for themselves. That was the basis of MacDonald’s National Policy.  His government’s problem, however, was that the land was vast and there were people living there already. The decision to negotiate treaties with those native peoples was, from the Dominion of Canada’s point of view, more a pragmatic than a principled one. They needed peace and order, so they had to negotiate.

As soon as the treaties were in place, the Canadian government started cutting other deals to secure its control over the land. First they arranged to build a railroad across the southern edge of the country. Until that was done there was no practical way to fill the place with farmers. So, as an interim measure, the government issued grazing leases of up to 100,000  acres to well-financed eastern Canadian and British investors.

That was another pragmatic decision. For one thing, it pre-empted any move by Americans to settle the lease lands. The new railway could ship beef as a source of revenue to start paying down its debt. And, perhaps most importantly: the government had promises to keep. It needed a supply of meat for thousands of Indigenous people now faced with the prospect of starvation.

The first huge grazing lease went to a well-connected Ontario conservative, Matthew Cochrane. He sold shares in his Cochrane Cattle Company to a few wealthy friends from Montreal and the Eastern Townships, imported some breeding stock from Europe, and arranged for two big shipments of mixed-breed cattle to be trailed north from Montana.  The new lease was centred on what is now the town of Cochrane; the home ranch was at the mouth of Bighill Creek.

Cochrane and his investor friends hired a well-respected mountie, James Walker, to run the ranch. Walker was a rigid, letter-of-the-law kind of guy, which had served him well as a policeman. When his bosses told him to do something, he did it. Unfortunately, that obsequiousness didn’t serve him well in his new job.

The investors had put a lot of their money into this new ranching enterprise, and they wanted to see profit sooner rather than later. They told Walker to get those American cattle onto that Canadian grass as quickly as possible. He followed their orders diligently, pushing a herd of 6800 tired cattle hard in order to get them to the Bow River grasslands before winter.  They arrived in bad shape just in time for one of the hardest winters on record.

Cattle aren’t bison.  When the north wind blows, bison turn their big, hairy heads into the wind and paw away the snow, grazing their way into the storm.  Cattle turn their backs to the wind and drift ahead of it. When snow covers the grass, from a domestic cow’s point of view the grass has gone. They don’t crater down to it like bison, elk or horses do.

Bison would have weathered the hard winter of 1881-1882 easily, but they were gone. The newly-imported cattle piled up against fences or in the deep drifted snow of coulees and river breaks. Most died.

The following year, again following orders from eastern bosses who had no idea of the West’s environmental realities, Walker drove another 4300 head of cows north from Montana during a dry, thirsty summer. The same disaster happened all over again that winter. 

Of the more than 11,000 domestic cows Walker brought north, by the spring of 1883 only 4,000 survived. Coyotes and eagles had a great spring; there was food galore. It was not a great spring for wealthy white men with high hopes for extracting big profits from the far frontier. They blamed Walker, even though he had simply followed their orders.

Only two decades earlier, there had been hundreds of thousands of bison here. They knew how to live there. So did the people who lived among them. But the future had arrived. Nothing about it was going to be easy, now that the place was full of strangers.

A century and a half later, the human population of Alberta has increased from less than 50,000 at the time of Treaty Seven to almost 5 million today. A gridwork of roads crisscrosses the plains and continues to metastasize into the boreal north. Towns have grown into cities and cities have grown into metropolises. It might seem like the buffalo days have been left forever in the past.

That would be a misconception. The buffalo have returned. Their reappearance in a land that had almost forgotten them might seem as impossible as their original disappearance was to the Niitsitapi who had lived with them so long. Even so, it is well underway.  Who knows what might happen next?

I met Wes Olsen in the early 1980s when I was assigned to a bird inventory project at Elk Island National Park, east of Edmonton.  I was still with the Canadian Wildlife Service, and Wes was a park warden responsible for the care of the park’s herds of pure-strain wood and plains bison. Tall, moustached and soft-spoken, Wes comes across more like a cowboy than an ecologist, but appearances can be deceiving: he is North America’s leading authority on the ecology and reintroduction of bison.

Wes was responsible for keeping Elk Island’s herds free of disease and for helping keep the population in balance with the available supply of forage. That meant that the herds had to be culled periodically. Rather than kill the surplus animals, though, Wes and his colleagues arranged for them to be transferred to new homes: bison ranches, small display herds in other prairie parks, First Nations reserves and even an ambitious project to restore some of the original Pleistocene megafauna to northern Russia. The Elk Island animals are considered the gold standard for bison recovery because they contain no domestic cattle genes and are kept free of the diseases that domestic cattle brought to North America.  Anthrax, brucellosis and tuberculosis have infected other conservation herds, including those in Wood Buffalo and Yellowstone National Park.

When Pierre Trudeau’s federal government established Grasslands National Park in the Frenchman’s River area of southern Saskatchewan in 1981, the park had no bison. Parks Canada imported plains bison from Elk Island in 2005 and, soon after, imported Wes Olsen too.  As the herd grew, Wes and his wife Johane Janelle studied the ways in which the big animals changed the prairie and its wildlife fauna. They soon realized that, just as the absence of bison had changed everything, their return also changed everything — for the better.

Bison wallows create small hollows that fill with meltwater each spring and create breeding habitat for frogs and insects. Bison shed their wooly underfur each spring; songbirds use the wool to line their nests. Bison wool not only provides superior insulation for eggs, it also disguises the odour of the nestlings, increasing both hatching rates and nestling survival. Literally hundreds of species of insect and other arthropods are attracted to bison droppings. Some of those insects burrow into the ground, increasing the soil’s porosity and enabling rain to soak in more thoroughly. Others are vital food sources for horned lizards, loggerhead shrikes, sage grouse and other species that were once abundant but are now endangered. In winter, pronghorns, deer and grouse feed in the snow craters that grazing bison carve out of the snowpack.

Wes describes the plains bison as a keystone species — a species whose presence or absence has much more far-reaching effects on their ecosystem than other animals. Beavers are another keystone species. So are we.

In 2022 Wes and Johane released The Ecological Buffalo, unquestionably one of the best books of applied ecology ever published in Canada.  It details the many threads of connection linking plains bison and the rest of the prairie ecosystem. The sheer complexity of the relationships Wes and Johane describe is a sobering revelation of what was lost when that last prairie bison fell to a hunter’s bullet a century and a half earlier. But it is also an awe-inspiring revelation of what prairie Canada might again be, if the bison were to return.

And it’s not a question of if, any more. It’s happening. 

In 2005, bison returned to Grasslands National Park. From an initial release of 71 young animals from Elk Island, the herd has grown to more than 500. Their trails, wallows, dung and grazing patches again shape that relict prairie ecosystem. They graze among prairie dogs and long-billed curlews. Their odour mingles with that of sage and wild rose. The place is real again.

Thirteen years later, another 16 plains bison went from Elk Island to a new home in the wilderness of northern Banff National Park. That herd, which regularly encounters grizzly bears and wolves, has since grown to more than 100. They range widely from alpine meadows through burned-off mountain slopes to the fen meadows along the headwaters of the Panther, Dormer and Red Deer Rivers. The herd may soon outgrow the available range. The need to trim the herd has led to another restoration — that of the age-old hunting traditions of the Iyarhe Nakoda and Siksikaitsitapi.  The return of bison to Canada’s first national park — a park whose origin story includes the ejection of those Indigenous people whose homeland it had always been — may help heal more than just the land.

“What would happen if you took the cross away from Christianity?” Kainai elder and teacher Dr. Leroy Little Bear said when I interviewed him in 2017. “The buffalo was one of those things.  The belief system, the songs, the stories, the ceremonies are still there, but that buffalo is not seen on a daily basis…The younger generation do not see that buffalo out there, so it’s out of sight, out of mind.”

Little Bear played a pivotal role in drafting the Northern Plains Buffalo Treaty, the first Treaty among Indigenous nations in over 150 years. Initial signatories in the fall of 2014 included the Siksika, Piikanii, Kainai and Tsuu T’ina First Nations as well as Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Sioux, Salish and Kootenai tribes from south of the 49th parallel.  The Stoney Nakoda First Nations signed on a few months later. Other First Nation groups continue to join the treaty each year.

“The Buffalo Treaty is very historic,” says Little Bear. “A treaty among just Indigenous cultures to work together on common issues: conservation, culture, education, environment issues, economics and health research. In the centre of that is the buffalo.”

“Our elders said, we want to restore the buffalo. But it’s a big job. We can’t do it on our own. We need partners.”

Marie-Eve Marchand, a passionate conservationist of Quebec settler stock, is one of those partners.  She was a founding member of Bison Belong, an advocacy network formed in 2008 to pressure Parks Canada to follow through on its commitment to bring bison back to Banff National Park and to build social license for the initiative.  That work successfully completed, Marchand moved on to provide administrative support and media coordination for the Buffalo Treaty. She worked with both Niitsitapi and their allies from among the newcomer peoples on the Iiníí Initiative, which was meant to rematriate bison in Niitsítpiis-stahkoii — Blackfoot territory. 

“We eliminated the beaver and the bison, both keystone species,” she says. “Now we are turning that around.”

“With the return of the buffalo,” Dr. Little Bear adds, “those things that were part of those regularly occurring patterns in nature, the buffalo was part of it. So we’re bringing back those regularities and those regularities are part of what anchor our societies.”

“But there’s a whole lot more. There’s also their larger role in the ecosystem.  As a human species, we play a very small role in that ecosystem. And it’s a big job to bring about an eco-balance. So we need help and the buffalo will do that.”

Two years after the initial signing of the Buffalo Treaty, the homecoming of Iiníí became more tangible, with the arrival of 88 plains bison in northern Montana from Elk Island National Park. Their new home was a tribal ranch on the Blackfeet Reservation. They were home, but still behind fences. Then, in 2023, the Blackfeet released 25 bison into their ancestral range on the foothills slopes below Ninaistako. Wild bison were back in the Crown of the Continent.

Tristan Scott of the Flathead Beacon was present to report on the homecoming. Tribal elder Ervin Carlson told him, “To see them out here, it just choked me up. It’s a real good feeling. It finally feels right, after feeling wrong for a long time.”

It finally felt right. But for most of the twentieth century, it was unimaginable. Our only bison story was one of loss. What else might we imagine? We live in a landscape our choices shape, and in a landscape of possibilities our stories create. We have a new story now, a better one. Those landscapes are changing for the better.

If the bison can come home, perhaps we can too. All of us, together, as the Treaty People we are meant to be.

Good Relations

One rainy morning in the Front Ranges of Banff National Park, having just waded the icy-cold Panther River, I rounded a bend in the trail, and there was a grizzly bear.  The slope had been burned a few years previously, and the bear was rooting in the lush greenery among the black snags.

I had no intention of turning back, but neither did I feel it would be respectful or wise to try to pass so close to the oblivious bear. After a bit of thought, I pulled out the black plastic garbage bag that was protecting the top of my backpack and tied it to the end of one of my hiking poles.  Then I waited until the grizzly finally turned in my direction and spotted me. I waved the garbage bag over my head; the bear flipped ends and took off at a trot up the trail.

Fifty metres on, it half-turned and raised up on its hind legs, then leaned forward in a rabbit-like pose, and projectile-pooped a gusher of green into the woods. Having jettisoned its ballast, the bear dropped to all fours and bolted away up the mountainside.  I didn’t bother examining the deposit as I walked past, but the odour was a fecund mix of decomposed greenery and grizzly bear digestive system.

A normal odour for that country.  Bears eat a lot of vegetation — young grass and horsetail shoots, dandelion flowers, sweet vetch roots, glacier lily and spring beauty bulbs, and the berries of saskatoon, huckleberry and strawberries.  Their digestive systems aren’t suited for breaking down cellulose and other stringy bits, so a lot of what goes down the hatch comes out the other end relatively unchanged.  The good bits — sugars, proteins, easily-digested chemicals — remain behind. One reason bears are so food-obsessed is because they eat a lot to get relatively little.  Deer, elk, bighorn sheep and bison digest a lot more of what they eat because of their ruminant stomachs — fermentation vats where bacteria and other simple organisms help to turn the unpalatable bits into digestible material.

In order to let their rumen stomachs get that job done, ungulates have to spend a lot of time just lying around, chewing their cuds.  Bears, on the other hand, need to keep travelling around to get the nutrition they need.  They eat, they excrete, they eat some more.

Hiking the Wishbone Trail in Waterton Lakes National Park one day, Gail pointed out a tiny forest in the middle of trail.  The blob of newly-sprouted seedlings, like a flattened chia-pet, was bear poop.  The autumn previously, having filled itself up with chokecherry and saskatoon fruit, a bear had paused in the middle of the trail to deposit the remains and make room for more. The resulting pile, after spending the winter under the snowpack, had sprouted dozens of baby shrubs from seeds the bear had failed to digest.

A BC researcher, Aza Fynley Kuijt, tracked 74 grizzly bears and conducted germination experiments on wild huckleberries.1 She found that berries need bears as much as bears need berries.  “Bears don’t just eat huckleberries—they help them grow in new places,” she said. “Our findings show that this mutual relationship is crucial for both species, especially as climate change shifts suitable habitats for huckleberries.”

Left to themselves, huckleberries usually fail to reproduce. Less than 1 in every 500 seeds in a huckleberry fruit can actually sprout without help, because the seed coats have chemicals that inhibit growth. In the gut of a grizzly, however, digestive juices remove those chemicals. Kuijt’s research team found that at least a third of the huckleberry seeds excreted by bears subsequently sprout.  And since bears travel a lot, those berries often sprout in new places — half the seeds excreted by bears were more than a kilometre from the bushes that produced them, and some got deposited as much as 7 km away. 

Bears and berries live in dynamic landscapes. Trees invade meadows and gradually shade out berry patches, enabling other more shade-tolerant plant species to take over. On the other hand, fires and avalanches sometimes kill forest stands, creating new openings of the sort in which berry bushes thrive.  Bears, in exploring their home ranges, help bushes like huckleberry, saskatoon and chokecherry find and colonize those places.  In turn, the vigorous new berry stands help bears build up their fat reserves each summer and fall, helping them survive through the winter hibernation period. Berries and bears would both be less abundant if they didn’t have one another.

As a student of ecology in the late 1970s, I was taught about symbiosis, a process by which two species come to rely on one another. Symbiosis was considered a bit of an anomaly in a world of inter-species competition. The belief that nature is usually red in tooth and claw — with relationships among plants and animals defined by competition, not cooperation — flowed naturally from the dominant paradigm of the culture in which I was raised, one based on competitive capitalism and a cutthroat market economy that yields winners and losers. 

Cooperation between species was so….socialist. And surely that couldn’t be natural.

A half century later, the competitive paradigm has been turned on its head.  Symbiosis is no longer seen as an unusual phenomenon — it is the very nature of life and place. Nothing exists in isolation. We are all in this together.  Competition among organisms may help drive change and evolution, but the mutually-sustaining relationships among organisms are what keeps everything working.  Things don’t exist in opposition to one another; they exist in communion with one another.

The relationship between grizzly bears and berry bushes wasn’t considered to be an example of symbiosis back in my student days, because it was assumed that the benefits only flowed one way: from berry to bear.  In reality, as Fynley Kuijt wrote, “Considering the ecosystem services bears provide to the germination and dispersal of shrubs such as huckleberry, the mutualistic relationship between bears and huckleberry should be recognized as an important ecosystem function.”

It should be considered more than that. It should be considered a defining element of what it means to be a real bear, and of what it means to be a real huckleberry.  An individual does not exist in isolation from its relationships; it exists as a consequence of them. Without the huckleberry, grizzly bears would still be bears, but they would be less complete ones.  Without bears, huckleberries would still be bushes, but incomplete.  And neither would live where they do today, and in the ways they do today. They help make each other who they are.

One summer Gail and I took our children on a road trip down the Rocky Mountain chain to the southern edge of Colorado, a journey that took us through the San Juan Mountains. This was where Colorado’s last known grizzly bear died in 1979. The old female bear attacked a hunting guide in self-defence after having been surprised at close range. Against all odds, he managed to kill her by pushing a hunting arrow into her throat as she mauled him.

That incident happened in the southern edge of the San Juans, but as we drove through those mountains it seemed to me it could have happened anywhere there. The San Juans are some of the finest-looking grizzly bear habitat I’ve ever seen: long, steep green avalanche meadows, rich riparian mosaics along tumbling trout streams, aspen forests and dark timber. Grizzly bears simply belong there. But for almost half a century, they have been gone. There are still plenty of black bears to gorge on saskatoons, huckleberries and other wild fruit crops there, and to deposit the undigested seeds in new settings, but the once-abundant grizzly bears are gone. A relationship that once defined both the grizzly and the San Juans has been ended.

Those mountains had a forlorn beauty about them. Like faded paintings, they were less than they should have been. There was a smallness that hadn’t always been there; like an empty chair at the family table, when someone won’t be coming home again.

Grizzly bears have many relationships that make them who they are, and that help make other things who they are too.  A few months after that Colorado visit, I rode up Yarrow Creek with other park wardens, heading for a trail that follows the Waterton Lakes National Park boundary west from the head of the valley.  For well more than a kilometre, the floodplain meadows looked as if they had been rototilled by some wilderness gardener.

Indeed they had; the churned up meadows were the work of grizzly bears. Constantly rearranged by spring floods, mountain streams tend to meander along their valley bottoms, every so often changing course and leaving their former channels to fill gradually with vegetation.  Some of the colonizing plants are valuable bear foods.  Sweet vetch is a particular favourite in early spring and late fall, when the stringy roots are full of stored starches and proteins.  Glacier lilies and their bright little companions, spring beauty, similarly store nutrients in underground structures – bulbs and corms.  Grizzly bears follow their noses through the meadows and use their powerful forelegs and long claws to tear up sods and eat the hidden treasures.

But just as is the case with berry bushes, those bears are not exploiting that food source; they are sustaining a relationship.  Sweet vetch and other floodplain plants are pioneers.  They thrive best on recently disturbed ground where there is little competition from other plants.  As the meadows mature, those other plants take over and the pioneers gradually become scarce.  When a grizzly bear digs its way through a meadow, however, it sets the successional clock back by creating anew the raw, fresh soil in which those plants thrive.  At the same time, it leaves fragments of roots and bulb in the newly cultivated soil.  When human gardeners do that, it’s called dividing perennials. When bears do it, it’s the same thing. Bears are gardeners too.

Sweet vetch would still exist if there were no grizzly bears. It still grows in the San Juans, after all. But its distribution and abundance are different there than when its relationship with the grizzly bear was still intact.  Along Alberta’s Rocky Mountain front ranges, whole slopes of yellow and purple sweet vetch offer mute evidence that the great bear still lives here; they would be limited only to soils renewed by other kinds of disturbance if it didn’t.  Like in Colorado.

Popular hiking trails like Chester Lake, in Alberta’s Kananaskis Country, are closed annually to allow grizzlies to forage in peace in glacier lily meadows that would have become grass and willow long ago if it weren’t for the annual renewal of a relationship that benefits both the flowers and the bears — and hikers, who thrill to the sight of the bear diggings, watch the forest edges warily, and take pleasure in the delicate, golden beauty of the lilies.

Those relationships do more than benefit the plants, the bears and the hikers. They define them. Each is, in part, the other because each helps make the others whole.  Flowers, bears… hikers too.

Hikers in the San Juans don’t see roto-tilled meadows any more. They don’t worry about surprising a grizzly bear. “It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear,” wrote legendary conservationist Aldo Leopold back in the 1940s. Grizzlies still occupied the San Juans then, but Colorado was well on the way to achieving the poor life of which Leopold warned. Colorado’s mountains today remain no less beautiful, but there is a hollowness there that makes them less than they were, and that makes those who sojourn there a little less whole too.

The bear makes the huckleberry more of what it was meant to be.  The huckleberry makes the bear more of what it was meant to be.  And both, I would argue, make us more of what we were meant to be.  Our relationships, after all, are who we are.

One August morning Gail and I hiked in to a sunny mountainside in southwestern Alberta to pick our winter supply of huckleberries.  It was a bumper year; the bushes were heavy with fruit. We were soon lost in the task, hunkered down a few metres apart, surrounded by the peace and beauty of the place. Birds rustled in the bushes around us, filling up with fruit that would help to power their fall migration flights. Huckleberries have many relations; some have feathers.

A particularly loud rustle made us look up. Maybe ten metres away, a grizzly bear had just stepped around a spruce tree and discovered that this berry patch was already taken. We were all taken aback, especially Gail who was closer to the bear than me and had also left her bear spray by her pack.  But the grizzly evidently had the same understanding of berry-picking etiquette as we did, and it turned and retreated into cover, leaving the patch to us.  Not entirely fair, as there is a good chance that one of its ancestors had relieved itself there and helped get those berries growing, but the whole mountainside was covered with fruit, so there was plenty to go around. The bear huffed its way past us a few minutes later and was soon comfortably ensconced in his own patch, farther up the slope.

The mountains paid no attention to the encounter. They have their own relationships with the world and they live in far deeper time than the rest of us. To the mountains, we were probably all one thing; part of its coat, as it were. The berries, the bear, the humans — I suspect those mountains saw us all as one.  In ways that matter to the workings of this world, we are.  And we’re all the better for it.

  1. Kuijt AF, Burton C, Lamb CT (2024).  Effects of bear endozoochory on germination and dispersal of huckleberry in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. PLoS ONE 19(11): e0311809. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0311809 ↩︎