All Things Connected: The nature of black bears

With a heavy pack cinched tightly to my back, I dropped to one knee to investigate the pile of scat before me. This was an ecotone of sorts, and I was hugging the edge of a dense stand of hawthorn berry bushes. Calling it a “stand” feels a bit like calling an aircraft carrier a boat, however. This was a dense tangle of thorns and tiny purple berries that seemed to unfold forever. Countless birds flittered about overhead, gorging themselves on the fruits in the crips autumn air.

A black bear inside a dense stand of hawthorn berry bushes. There is something almost cathartic for me in watching black bears eat berries like this. For me, it's likely the juxtaposition of how our culture fears bears while watching them so delicately pluck one berry at a time with their tongues and mouths. Photographing in situations like this can be challenging and requires patience. The nature of these environments is one of chaos, with sticks and twigs and leaves swirling about our subjects. 

To the right of all this was a terminal moraine covered in boreal forest. Engelman spruce mixed with sub-alpine fir mixed with aspens. All of which found purchase on this giant pile of dirt thanks to the glaciers that once spilled down from the mountains into this part of the valley, pulverizing everything in their path and pilling it all back up again into a gigantic earthen dam which now holds back the icy waters of a lake.

Moraines like this have a different soil composition than the valley floor. The valley is all polished cobble stones created when the entire valley was one big river following the last ice age. With that sort of geology, very little can grow outside of sagebrush. But on the moraines, things are different. The soil is looser, it’s mineral rich, holds water, and trees take root creating forest primeval.

All this forest holds snow. Snow that slowly melts, percolating down through the moraine and draining out at the swale along the base where I’m studying a pile of poop. It’s this runoff from the moraine that allows for the water that quinches the thirst of the seemingly never-ending tangle of hawthorns here.

The hawthorns themselves help to perpetuate the whole thing. Dense vegetation creates a cooler and more humid microclimate. It protects the precious water from the impossible dryness of the air, thus helping to create the hearth and home so necessary for more hawthorn bushes to grow.

And when it comes to the intermountain west, I couldn’t design better black bear habitat than this.

It’s easy to say that food and sex drives all life on Earth. Understand the food choices for the species of your desire, and you can fill memory cards with photographs. But geology drives biology. And here, this fact is writ large upon the landscape and the species who live within it.

If not for the glaciers, this moraine and subsequent forest and glacially fed lake and the cutthroat trout whose fry swim within it and the berries and the cottonwoods around me would not exist. And without all of these, neither would the black bears.

Black bears are a prolific species that can be found across North America. I’ve watched as they swam across black water rivers coursing through swamps barely 10 feet from the nose of my kayak. I’ve seen them prowling the open sagebrush in search of thatcher ant mounds to raid, unknowingly affecting populations of leafhoppers and aphids, which in turn impacts the density of bitterbrush and thus moose populations in the late fall and early winter.

Likewise, I’ve watched black bears prowl the banks of rivers in the Pacific Northwest searching for spawning salmon for which the health and the wealth of the surrounding old growth forests depend upon.

Bears drag salmon carcasses into the forest to eat. When the salmon run is good, the bears only eat the brains of the males and the eggs of the females, discarding the rest. This discard equates to metric tons of nutrients left to decay and feed the soils and trees and understory. Because of this redistribution of nutrients, great hatches of insects explode onto the scene at exactly the right times of year that will feed the salmon fry that four years from now, like their parents, will be redistributed along the edges of the forest by black bears to feed the next generation of their species.

Despite all of this, despite the fact that the health and wealth of an entire forest can rest upon the shoulders of black bears, they are not considered a keystone species. But kneeling here next the giant pile of purple poop, I know without a shred of doubt that the entirety of this vast tangle of hawthorn berries is the product of black bears (and glaciers, of course).

The scat I’m studying is filled with countless hawthorn berry seeds, seeds that now sit in a container of fertilizer, for which thousands will germinate and maybe 1 or 2 will grow to maturity, creating more berries to sustain more bears who will poop out more seeds and sustain more berry bushes. And all of this, in turn, perpetuates this critical habitat so needed by moose (once again), songbirds, trout in the creek running through it all, and the rest of the life in here that I cannot even begin to quantify.

The berry stands help shade the ground and hold snow and snow melt well into summer much like the forest on the morain above. This keeps the soil cooler and wetter than just 1 foot outside of the berry stand. This is why the creek is so full of water and fish and insects. And this is what aids in the massive and extraordinary growth of the cottonwoods springing up from it all here and there. Fed by the fertilizer of the bears, watered by the shade of the berry bushes in conjunction with the runoff from the moraine, the cottonwoods are both the product of the bears in here and their savior at the same time.

It's when we are not photographing that we actually learn something.

Time spent observing with nothing more than a pair of field glasses (binoculars) and a notebook, can teach us so much about the animals we love to photograph and the world in which they live. In the middle of the day, black bears will typically climb up into large trees until late afternoon. When I am looking for bears, I often spend much of the day searching big trees near places with great food sources come the middle of the day. Once a bear has been located, I simply hike in and wait for them to come down and go back to eating. 

Wherever black bears live, they have a direct association with some species of tree. In the Southern Appalachian mountains, it’s with white oaks. In the swamps, it’s cypress trees. Around the Great Lakes region, it’s old growth white pines. And here, in this Wyoming landscape, it’s cottonwood trees.

While the bears of the Southern Appalachians depend upon the white oaks for their acorns - one of the most important food sources for them throughout the year - the cottonwoods are different. Cottonwoods play refugia to black bears in this ecosystem. Evolved to climb and hide in the face of danger, black bears evolved in a landscape filled with so many predators that North America, before the Pleistocene extinctions, would have made Africa seem quite tame. Today, most of those big predators are long gone except for the grizzly.

But epigenetic habits are hard to kick. All of us are subservient to the ghosts that haunt our DNA.

The beauty of this garden of the bears is that the cottonwoods become the place of rest and respite for bears. Come late morning, once bellies are filled, bears begin the ascent into the cottonwoods where they will splay out on a big limb to sleep off the sugar coma. All black bears take advantage of this, but it’s especially important for the moms with cubs as these trees become something of a nursery for the little ones who remain safe from would be predators down below..

Know this fact and you will find bears.

You will find cubs.

You will find adults lounging around in the middle of the day sleeping.

You will find little ones playing and fighting and jumping from limb to limb like so many monkeys.

Know this fact and you will be able to setup up and wait for bears to make their way down the trunks of the trees in the afternoon when they return to eating.

Know this fact and you can find and locate bears without all the hunting, the searching, the fighting your way through jacket tearing thorns, and boot staining purple bear poop.

A good set of field glasses and a little bit of patience searching these trees here from late August through the beginning of October will almost always produce photographs. You need only know to do this.

If you want to become a better wildlife photographer you must become a better naturalist. If you can’t find the animals to photograph, then no amount of technical savviness is going to help you. It doesn’t matter how expensive and sophisticated your camera and lenses are. If you can’t consistently find and put animals at ease with your presence, you will have a very difficult time being a wildlife photographer.

Understanding why bears are here and how they interact with this landscape allows me and anyone else with this knowledge unlimited opportunities to photograph bears. This concept isn’t unique to this patch of berry bushes, however. Every place, every species, has their own unique story of interconnectedness. Understand this, and you too will find infinite opportunities. If you want to be a better wildlife photographer, the best place to start is by putting yourself in better opportunities.

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