The Story
“Frontier myth vilified the California grizzly. Science tells a new story.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/04/25/california-grizzly-bear-extinct-reintroduce/
by Ian Rose
Washington Post, April 25, 2024
The Pitch
The California grizzly bear might be the most commemorated extinct subspecies of wildlife in the United States. Aside from its prominent place on the state flag, it is also remembered in countless place names and as the mascot of several high schools and universities. This year marks a century since the last sighting of a grizzly in California, in 1924. It’s easy to assume that the story of the bears’ extirpation is a simple one: big predators and growing human populations don’t mix. But there’s more to the story, and a new paper helps to explain the complexity of how such an iconic animal disappears from the wild.
In this month’s issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers from the La Brea Tar Pits Center and UC Santa Barbara describe the collapse of California grizzly populations. Their research suggests a complex story, implicating colonial land use not only in the direct killing of bears, but also in changing bear behavior and diet. Before Europeans arrived in California, evidence suggests that grizzlies were largely herbivorous, getting about 10% of their diet from land animal prey. As California’s colonial population exploded, and massive areas of habitat were converted to both residential and agricultural use, the bears shifted to become more predatory, raising their land prey diet to over 25%. The more important shift, though, was in colonial attitudes and understanding of bears. They started to be seen primarily as predators, especially of livestock, a lifestyle which was not a natural state for the bears, and to the extent that it was true at all, was a product of the changes we forced on them.
I would like to interview the authors as well as an outside bear expert in California, and a local Indigenous source to talk about the relationship with bears before settler colonialism. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Ian Rose