It is so uncommon to have a bear found dead in the woods that I have never heard of it happening. Not ever, not ever, not even since this story.
As the mystery became more and more uncovered, it became more and more interesting and ultimately pretty tragic.
::Putting our hands deep into the cavity of the animal where it was still warm, pulling out things like a heart… and as sick and as gross as it sounds… It was awesome!::
I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant and this is a different kind of nature show, a podcast all about the human drama of saving animals. I want to tell you my story and what it’s actually like to track bears in the Sierras, chase Lemurs in Madagascar, live with lions in Tanzania, and do all of that as a Black female scientist. This is “Going Wild.”
The first time I trapped a bear was in the summer of 2011. And honestly, it was just a couple of days after I had arrived in Nevada. So I was super, super, super new to everything. So how did I learn how to do it? That was from my very hands-on training with John.
He is someone who basically could not be more different from me. At the time, he was a middle-aged white man from this small town in Nevada. If you say his name to other folks in the bear biology community, they know him for sure and respect him very, very much. We’re probably the first, if not the only, ever in the history of the world, middle-aged white guy, mid-twenties, urban black woman bear biology duo.
John taught me how to do everything “bear.” He taught me how to identify bear habitat by looking for bear footprints or scat or claw markings. He taught me how to set traps for bears so that we can tranquilize them, take the data we need, and then re-release them back into the forest. And probably most importantly, he taught me how to attach a GPS collar to a bear so I could track their movements and ultimately work to save them.
I ended up working with John every summer from 2011 to 2013. So by the time 2013 came around, I had trapped probably 20 to 30 bears and I felt like an expert.
I would always wake up really, really early. And that was mostly because John would wake up really early and he would call me at the crack of dawn to give me a sense of what to expect that day.
Phone rings. I answer, I see that it’s John.
And he explained that the Department of Wildlife had received a call early in the morning from a person who was hiking with their dog. And the person had described what they thought was a dead bear.
It’s probably a good idea that we check this out. Even if it’s a living bear, maybe it’s injured. You know, we just need to do our job.
He mentioned on the phone that He wasn’t even sure if we’d be able to find the dead bear, but it was just important that we give it a shot to try to look.
You know, one of the great things about bears is that they’re very long-lived, especially in the wild. They can live to be, you know, more than 30 years old sometimes.
And I knew that there were dead bears in this area every so often. I knew that because there were so many highways, unfortunately, that had been built into this area, that bears were getting hit by cars fairly frequently. You know, there were some years where maybe there were a hundred bear deaths in a year from vehicle collisions, which is a lot. But when that happened, we did not get the call. That was a whole other department that got the call about roadkill.
So for them to just randomly be dead, it just never happens. Never happens. And so it was already shrouded in mystery even before I linked up with John.
We get to the trailhead and we just start hiking. We were able to stroll on a trail that wasn’t bad, we were definitely climbing in elevation, but nothing crazy. And again, we were really quiet, so although there was room for chit-chat, we were keeping our eyes peeled for what a dead bear could look like, so every little boulder that had a shadow cast on it. And you know, every little bush that wasn’t moving in the breeze, you know, looked like a dead bear. We were walking much slower than normal, but we kept walking and we kept trudging on.
Eventually, probably 20 yards from the trail is a little creek. This was maybe a sheep-sized hump that was right in the middle of the stream, not moving.
And we both stopped on the trail and slowly walked over.
It looked like the bear had drowned. Its head was right in the water, but there wasn’t enough water for it to have drowned. It’s probably three inches of water. A bear doesn’t kill itself on purpose and definitely didn’t drown here. And yet was squarely in this water as if it had drowned. So we walked up very slowly thinking maybe it’s not dead. You know, maybe it’s drinking. Maybe it’s sick. Maybe this person who called it in was wrong. But as we got closer and closer, we could see very clearly it was not moving. It was completely frozen still.
When we eventually took our hands to touch it, to pull it out of the stream, it was not ice cold. It didn’t have much body temperature, but it definitely had died recently and we were estimating, maybe earlier that morning.
I have to say I had a much greater emotional response than I thought I would. It caught me off guard. It almost felt like seeing a dead body, a dead human body, because although I had been around these animals, I’ve been studying them for so long, in that moment, I realized I had only been around them living and breathing.
And the mystery around it was really unsettling and unnerving.
All of a sudden it became very, very real instead of this hypothetical, maybe we’ll find it, maybe we won’t. It became much more like, Oh, you know, is foul play afoot? Are we in danger right here? You know, there’s something that just wasn’t adding up and there was an eeriness to it.
And the first thing we were going to do is check the entire bear’s body for a bullet hole because he concluded that more than likely this bear was shot. That’s the only thing that makes sense. Someone shot the bear. Maybe it didn’t die right away and it went into the stream and that’s where it died.
And although there’s a legal bear hunting season, and this incident happened outside of the bear hunting season, it’s not so far-fetched to think that someone had done some illegal hunting and maybe did a bad job of it.
I grabbed a paw from the leg and a paw from the arm, he grabbed the other ones and we hoisted, I mean, we had to really pull and drag and I’m sure in that moment, John was not happy that he was with someone who barely had any muscles. But we pulled and it worked and we really dragged this poor bear’s body up onto the banks of the stream on its back so that its arms and legs flopped open and we were staring at its belly.
Best case scenario, he explained, there’s actually going to be a bullet lodged in the body of the animal that we’ll be able to feel when we kind of massage its skin. So, okay. I can handle that task. I know what that means. And I start with one of the bear’s legs, and I just use my hands to kind of piece through the fur bit by bit.
Feeling almost like massaging this dead bear, trying to feel for something abnormal that could signal a bullet. This takes a long time. He kind of starts off doing it really fast. And to me, that makes sense because I’m thinking, Oh, he’s an expert. But then I notice that he really slows down and becomes much more meticulous about it because we’re not finding anything and we’re lifting up legs, we’re looking at armpits, we’re folding flaps of skin. While we’re going through this bear’s fur, we’re able to identify, okay, well, this is a male. It is, you know, a juvenile male. It does not have a collar on it nor an ear tag so it’s not a bear that’s ever been captured by the wildlife authorities for research or anything before. It’s in pretty good shape. I’m not seeing any parasites. I’m not seeing any dirt. I’m not seeing anything that would signal that anything killed this bear slowly.
And I looked at him, I’m sure I had this look on my face. Like, tell me what to do. Tell me what happens next. I have no answers here. And he reaches into his pack on his back and pulls out the biggest switchblade I had seen, ever. And he explains to me that, you know, with so much certainty, he still had all this certainty that it’s a bullet that killed this bear.
And we’re not finding its entrance point, you know, in the fur, but it’s gotta be somewhere lodged underneath the fur, just in the flesh of this bear, in the muscles, you know, somewhere. And so what we need to do is skin the bear.
We are on the side of a mountain. Here we are kneeling on the ground. He has the big switchblade. He hands me a much smaller one, thank goodness. I don’t know how to do this. I’m going to have to ask a question every inch of the way.
So, I switch it up and I watch him first make an incision. He didn’t go too deep. It was a very, very shallow incision in the sternum of the bear. And then he pulled the knife all the way down, basically to the bear’s pelvis. So he was then, if you can imagine this, using the knife to kind of cut the little layers of fat so that you could pull the skin from one side to the other. I tried to do the same thing on my side. So I was taking little swipes of the fat and of the tissue that, you know, holds the skin to the muscles and pulling as best as I could.
It took a while, but we were quite successful, and this is when it started becoming so real to me, what if someone comes walking down this trail and sees us? Are they going to, like, run away screaming?
So we had this crazy, just monster-looking carcass of an animal with a pile of skin and fur next to us, and we still had no bullet.
At this point, I could tell that John was confused because there’s no reason to completely dismember an entire animal if you’re going to come up empty-handed. So it’s not that he was becoming desperate, but it became very, very serious, very quickly that we had to find an answer. Otherwise, all of this work was in vain and we are going to have a lot of explaining to do.
John let me know right at that moment that we were going to have to dissect the bear: full-on forensic necropsy. And I remember that was the moment when I learned the word, “necropsy.” I had heard “autopsy” a million times, you know, from watching TV and apparently a necropsy is the exact same thing, just done on a wild animal. There you go, who knew? They don’t teach you this in ecology school! So, this was like a makeshift, necropsy. And luckily we couldn’t hurt this animal. Luckily this was in the name of discovery, but again, I realized to myself that, wow, I know near nothing about the inside of this animal, even though I’m an expert in this animal.
And so he started. Maybe there is something weird about its organs that could tell us how it died. Maybe one of its lungs got punctured, right? Maybe it had a, you know, fatty heart, I don’t know. So we’re going to go for all of its organs.
Although I’m willing to bet that he still thought it would be a bullet and it wouldn’t take very long. Boy, were we wrong.
John had probably taken apart a wild animal in his days hunting, but probably never to look for something, where you have to be careful, almost surgical with how you do it.
And because of that, we were making these tiny incisions and then they would fill up with blood, and then we’d have to kind of lift it up and drain the blood away, looking for these different parts of the bear.
It became super interesting. Putting our hands deep into the cavity of the animal, where it was still warm, pulling out things like a heart, pulling out things like a lung, pulling out these parts of the animal, and as sick and gross as it sounds, it was awesome. It was cool. I really felt like a forensic scientist. We were doing it. And it was like everything around me melted away. I can’t remember hearing the birds chirping. I don’t remember feeling cold anymore. I don’t remember being worried that we weren’t going to find the answer because I was holding a bear heart.
And as soon as we would hold one of the organs in our hand, check that it was doing just fine, we would toss it, like, toss it back behind us onto the ground. We were surrounded by different parts of this wild animal that we were taking apart bit by bit. And then in front of us, we were arms deep into the cavity of this bear.
And finally, we got to the stomach.
This bear’s stomach was really, really big. And that wasn’t necessarily surprising because bears can eat a lot. John suggested let’s make an incision into the stomach and see what’s in there.
He made a small incision into the stomach of the bear and a whole bunch of the stomach contents poured out. But instead of food that poured out, the stomach of the bear was full of ketchup packets.
You know, those like aluminum kind of foil ketchup packets that you have to tear open in order to put ketchup on your french fries, to the point where it was almost going to explode and to the point where we had our answer of what killed the bear.
John, this big, outdoorsy non-emotional guy, and me who is kind of the exact opposite couldn’t believe what we saw. And I think it hit us in the exact same way that this was a young juvenile bear who didn’t have a lot of experience out there, tasted some ketchup and loved it, just like any of us, and gorged itself on probably 40 or more ketchup packets, felt really sick, went to get a drink of water in the stream and died what was likely a really painful death in its young life.
And at first, we started taking ketchup packets one by one out of the stomach and probably 10 packets in, we just stopped. It was pointless. The animal was dead. It had died earlier that day. There was nothing we could do but maybe take some pictures, you know, for official reasons. And we did. We took pictures. We kind of put all the discarded organs back into the cavity of the bear, brought out the walkie-talkie to call and tell the authorities that we had found it, this is where it was, the body needed to be picked up and we headed back on the trail.
And we didn’t really talk about it during that walk. It was, you know, a good 45 minute to an hour walk back to John’s truck. And all of those emotions and all of that change and adrenaline, made me feel so emotional. And I remember I was silently crying as I was walking with John back to the truck. I’m sure he was not silently crying, but I have never seen him so stoic before. It’s frustrating. And it’s not fair. You know, that little bear didn’t deserve it. And who knows how many other little bears, big bears, mama bears, papa bears had succumbed to the same demise.
It brought up so many important questions, like, why are we spending so much of our time and energy and effort trying to figure out what science we can develop to save bears in this area if they’re just going to die because of human negligence? Because 10 miles from where we were standing in the middle of the wilderness, 10 miles away, were fast-food restaurants. And the smells from the restaurants attract these really hungry animals, especially the little ones who are spending their first fall away from their mothers and are trying to find food wherever they can and are eating it and being killed and crossing roads and highways to get to that food and being hit by those cars and being killed.
Just the whole thing kind of created a cloud in my mind, you know, about this work. I was kind of like, Oh God, you know.
I remember, when I was a kid and a lot of the environmental problems that existed when I was a kid, one being such tremendous air pollution that we had a hole in the ozone layer, you know, and another being that, our national symbol, bald eagles, were on the brink of extinction because we were using these strong pesticides that were harming the eggs. And I was thinking a lot about that and realizing, Oh, there is some hope because we reversed both of those trends. The hole in the ozone layer is no longer a huge threat. We have other atmospheric threats, but that was something that scientists like communicated the problem, society rallied together, and we reversed it. Even people in their homes, you know, played a part. Definitely, industries and governments had to do the most work, but people stopped using, you know, aerosol cans and whatnot, and it worked. And bald eagles, you know, we realized, this important animal, this important species is on the brink of extinction for human-caused reasons. Let’s reverse that. Let’s make the change. And we, as a society, did and it worked and now there are bald eagles all over the place. They’re not an endangered species and they are large carnivores.
And so thinking of those conservation successes helped me. And I got back on the horse, you know, mentally, emotionally, I got back on the horse. I never actually quit, but I, you know, was able to kind of reroute my brain into believing in this work and believing that communicating messages about what bears need and how people can play a role in keeping animals safe is a worthy cause. And I’m still out here doing it.
For me, the takeaway that I want the public to have from this story is to put a little extra effort in. Just a little bit.
Humans make a huge impact on bears. And let me put it this way. Bears have no natural predators, like no enemies in their environments. So anything bad that happens to them is almost always human-caused. So having this experience really helped me to truly understand that humans impact bears in these broad and also really narrow and specific ways.
There are so many ways that we can keep bears safe. And the cool thing is that when we keep bears safe, we’re actually keeping all kinds of other smaller animals safe, too. So the biggest thing is to make sure that we’re responsible with our waste and our trash. And absolutely, restaurants need to have bear-proof garbage cans, and that’s that.
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This episode of “Going Wild” was hosted and written by me, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, production by Rachel Aronoff, Danielle Broza, Nathan Tobey, and Great Feeling Studios. Editing by Jakob Lewis. Sound Design by Cariad Harmon. Danielle Broza is the digital lead and Fred Kaufman is the executive producer for Nature. Art for this podcast was created by Arianna Bollers and Karen Brazell. Special thanks to Amanda Schmidt, Blanche Robertson, Jane Lisi, Chelsey Saatkamp, Natasha Padilla, and Karen Ho.
“Going Wild” is a new podcast by PBS Nature. Nature is an award-winning series created by the WNET Group and made possible by all of you. Funding for this podcast was provided by grants from the Anderson Family Charitable Fund and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
