Frontier myths denigrate California grizzly bears. Science tells a new story.

A century later, that report remains, in the opinion of most experts, the last credible grizzly bear sighting in California. The state was once home to as many as 10,000 animals, living in nearly all of the state’s diverse ecosystems and gracing the state’s flag, but are now hunted to local extinction.

The grizzly bear, a subspecies of the brown bear, has long held a place in mainstream American mythology as a dangerous and even bloodthirsty creature. Its scientific name, Bear, meaning scary bear. But that image is being challenged by a series of new studies that combine modern biochemical analysis, historical research and Aboriginal knowledge to transform the California grizzly bear story from fiction to fact.

In January, a team of experts led by ecologist Alexis Mychajliw of the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B about the diet of California grizzly bears and how it might affect their extinction. The results challenge nearly every aspect of Bear’s established story.

‘Almost everything I thought I knew about these animals turned out to be wrong,’ said study co-author Peter Aragona, an ecologist and historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. .

The Myth of the Scary Bear

Many of the long-standing narratives about grizzly bears come from stories, artwork, and early photographs that depict California grizzly bears as large, ferocious animals. Many of these reports were written by what Aragona called California influencers of the day, and they had a wide readership in newspapers elsewhere in the West and in Eastern cities.

Aragona said they tried to become rich and famous by marketing themselves as symbols of a declining frontier. A lot of the historical information we have about grizzly bears actually has nothing to do with grizzlies. They’re about the strange celebrity culture of the 19th century Victorian era.

A team of ecologists, historians and archivists compared the California grizzly bear images in these cutting-edge reports to harder data in the form of bear bones in museum collections across the state.

Frontier myth describes California bears as larger than grizzly bears elsewhere in the country, but skeletal analysis shows they are the same size and weight, with adults averaging about 6 feet long and weighing 440 pounds.

The bones show that before the first Europeans arrived in 1542, only about 10 percent of the bears’ diet came from hunting land animals, an even bigger blow to popular stories about ferocious grizzly bears. They are primarily herbivores, surviving on a variety of foods including acorns, roots, berries, fish, and occasionally larger prey such as deer.

As European-style farming and ranching began to dominate the landscape, grizzly bears became more like the stories told by those avant-garde influencers. The proportion of meat in their diet rose to about 25%, probably in large part because it was relatively easy to capture cattle or sheep in pens compared to wild elk.

Colonialism forced so many changes on California’s landscape so quickly, affecting every species that bears ate and interacted with, that the exact causes of this change will be difficult to fully understand.

Despite this, grizzly bears are never as evil or purely predatory as they are portrayed in the story. Instead, the story of the giant killer bear tells a larger settler story, about a landscape and people who were unable to coexist with the settlers. This story isn’t just disastrous for the bears.

Genocide, survival and recovery

Although we will never have exact numbers, experts agree that hundreds of thousands of native people lived in what is now California before white settlers arrived. One oft-cited estimate puts the population at 340,000.

By 1900, the number of surviving tribal members across the state had declined by more than 95 percent, to about 16,000. The eradication of bears and the vast majority of California’s native peoples can be seen as part of a concerted effort to replace one landscape and one set of stories with another.

Aragona said the eradication of grizzly bears in California is part of a larger eradication effort. I think what happened in California clearly meets the legal definition of genocide. But in a way, it’s more than that, because these aren’t just attempts to exterminate a population. These are attempts to destroy the entire world.

With the region almost completely destroyed, sweeping changes have taken place in the way the land is managed by First Nations and its dozens of language groups and hundreds of communities and tribes. For thousands of years, people have used cultural fire to maintain wildlife habitat and food supplies across large swathes of the region. Relationships and practices developed over thousands of years were replaced in just a few decades by European agricultural and land management systems that had no history or connection to the West Coast landscape.

But even after devastating outbreaks of introduced diseases and centuries of concentrated violence, indigenous people remain in California today, and descendants of people who lived with bears for thousands of years are now helping researchers understand Various relationships, and how it might inform the Grizzlies’ future.

Tejon Indian Tribe Chairman Octavio Escobedo III said we know the southern end of the valley is rich in resources. Has more than 1,200 members. We know that bears are revered here, especially by the Tihon people.

According to Escobedo, the Tejon’s relationship with bears was far from the fearful and hostile relationship adopted by white settlers. He tells an oral history of bear cubs being given as gifts to the leaders of neighboring tribes. Escobedo said that while most large animals are hunted for subsistence, his people do not eat grizzly bears.

We coexist peacefully here, he added. There is almost a symbiotic relationship between Native people and grizzly bears as long as we respect their space and they respect ours.

Further north, the Yurok people also have a long history of coexisting with grizzly bears. Even their homes were designed with bears in mind, said Yurok Tribe Wildlife Director Tiana Williams-Clawson.

In fact, our house is built with a small circular doorway that’s too big to fit through so you don’t find them eating your salmon in the middle of the night, she said.

Now, the idea of ​​reintroducing grizzly bears to California, once an impossible dream, is gaining momentum. About 95% of America’s brown bears live in Alaska. There are also stable populations in and around Yellowstone National Park, and rare sightings in northern Montana, Idaho, and Washington state. These bears are listed as a threatened species in the lower 48 states.

The Yurok tribe is leading the effort to reintroduce another iconic California species that was once extinct in the wild: the California condor. In 2022, after 16 years of preparation, research and habitat restoration, the first bald eagle in more than a century soared over Yurok land. Williams-Clawson is quick to point out that while there are lessons to be learned from her bald eagle research, grizzly bears are a very different species.

She said while the tribe is committed to such repairs, we know it must be done in the community to have a chance of success. I think this is even more true for a more controversial species like the grizzly bear.

Everyone involved with the grizzly bear research team agrees that the process, if it moves forward, will be a lengthy one.

Regardless of whether one thinks grizzly bears should be reintroduced to California, I still think it’s a productive conversation, said Andrea Adams, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a co-author of the paper. It brings all these things to light: about extinction being real, about carnivores being persecuted, about California’s history.

Escobedo, for his part, is cautiously optimistic about the early stages of the reintroduction plan.

“I think it’s a great concept,” he said. I don’t know if the average California resident is ready to have these conversations, but there has to be some education first, and I think that’s where we are right now.