After a decades-long comeback, the grizzly bears of Yellowstone National Park appear to be thriving. Should they now be removed from the protection of the Endangered Species Act? This question has provoked one of the most emotionally charged wildlife controversies in America today.

In the mid-20th century, Yellowstone’s grizzlies had been reduced to a relatively small number of bears that had stopped hunting and were living on trash intentionally left by the park’s attendants. In 1972, park officials reversed their policy, and the garbage dumps were closed.

Today, after 30 years of protection under the Endangered Species Act, grizzlies have learned to hunt once again, and have made a resounding return, with an estimated 600 thriving in the 17,000 square miles that comprise the Greater Yellowstone area.

With the rising bear population, however, comes conflict, as the grizzlies interact more and more with encroaching humanity — roaming in residential areas, raiding dumpsters, attacking livestock, and unknowingly inspiring tourists to take chances on roads and trails so they can glimpse the great bear.

In short, the success of grizzly restoration has spawned a complex web of social and environmental issues that many disagree upon. While some lawmakers argue that grizzlies should be delisted as an endangered species, others believe this would be a premature maneuver.

Discover the complex issue of grizzly bear management and conservation from ranchers, conservationists, and government officials who share their stories and insights on The Good, the Bad, and the Grizzly.

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Online content for The Good, the Bad, and the Grizzly was originally posted November, 2004.

The Arctic is changing. As temperatures slowly rise and the ice recedes, the shore is getting further away. Food sources that the polar bear have come to rely on are becoming less plentiful. In this changing climate, the polar bear is already showing signs of distress.

While polar bears struggle, opportunistic grizzlies fare well, as they benefit from the melting Arctic’s effects on its ecosystem. While the grizzly moves into newly opened territories, the polar bear can only wait for the freezing of its one-time kingdom. If the changing world proclaims the grizzly the new king of the Arctic, what will become of the polar bear?

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Online content for Arctic Bears was originally posted February 2008.

Stretching across more than 2.2 million acres of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho is one of the greatest expanses of unspoiled nature and wildlife anywhere on Earth — Yellowstone National Park. Designated America’s first national park in 1872, Yellowstone now receives almost three million visitors each year. Yet only a small fraction of those who glimpse the park’s stunning vistas, geological wonders, and animal residents do so during the winter months, a time when nature’s inhospitality is matched only by its serenity.

NATURE follows in the snowy footprints of Yellowstone’s red foxes, spies on the predatory warfare of wolves and elk, and climbs into the den of a grizzly bear that gives birth to two cubs while deep in hibernation. In addition to mesmerizing footage of landscapes and wildlife, trail alongside author and photographer Tom Murphy, who has been coming to Yellowstone for the past 26 winters, camping and photographing amid the silence and solitude of the park. And go behind the scenes with filmmaker Shane Moore to find out how he kept up with Murphy during an at times harrowing trek, reminiscent of the legendary John Colter’s first journey into the park nearly two hundred years ago.

To order a copy of Christmas in Yellowstone, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Christmas in Yellowstone was originally posted November 2006.

Photo © Tom Murphy

Follow as he travels to a remote Canadian outpost on Hudson Bay, where he investigates the annual invasion of hungry polar bears.

Churchill, in the Canadian province of Manitoba, occupies a spit of land that provides the fastest access onto the ice, and the bears are in no mood for any detours once the waters of Hudson Bay begin to freeze. So they congregate near the town and prowl the landscape for appetizers before the main course becomes accessible.

Ewan McGregor puts himself in the middle of the action as town and wildlife authorities skillfully cope with both the would-be marauders of the furry variety, and the throngs of tourists who descend upon the town to see the bears, often at considerable risk to themselves.

Along with McGregor, viewers get a close-up look at how polar bears that wander into town are sedated, carted off to polar bear “jail,” and eventually hoisted by helicopter onto the frozen bay. It’s a dramatic reversal from years ago, when bears invading human space often were shot, sometimes after lethal encounters with people.

Online content for The Polar Bears of Churchill with Ewan McGregor was originally posted May 2002.

Bears and humans tread common ground in NATURE’s Walking with Giants: The Grizzlies of Siberia.

Jutting into the North Pacific from Siberia, Kamchatka is a rugged peninsula of volcanic craters and steep valleys. While its impenetrability once made Kamchatka the perfect home of a notorious Soviet prison camp, its isolation also has kept it a haven for one of Earth’s last giants, the grizzly bear.

In fact, there are more grizzlies per square mile there than anywhere else on the planet. The discovery of this bear sanctuary gave two naturalists, Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, the opportunity they’d been looking for — to live among the grizzlies and study them in close proximity to understand their true nature.

To order a copy of Walking with Giants: The Grizzlies of Siberia, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Walking with Giants: The Grizzlies of Siberia was originally posted February 1999.

The polar bear rules the north. To the hardy native people who settled the harsh lands of the Arctic, the powerful hunter with the ghostly white coat is known as the “lonely roamer.” But most of us know the huge mammal as the polar bear. And the story of how the world’s largest land predator prospers in one of Earth’s harshest environments is the subject of the NATURE program Great White Bear.

In extraordinary scenes collected across the top of the world, Great White Bear shows that polar bears are prodigious roamers indeed. Single bears have been known to trek and swim as far as 3,000 miles across icy seas and mossy, treeless tundra in search of food. Typically, however, studies suggest the bears stay within a home range that is just a few hundred square miles. Still, polar bears, by far, range over the largest territories of any bear.

The reason for the huge territories, scientists believe, is the unpredictable availability of their favorite food: ringed seals. As Great White Bear shows, populations of this common, four-foot long arctic seal can build up and melt away mysteriously, much like the ice sheets the sleek swimmers often inhabit. In good years, the bears may not have to travel far to find a seal meal. But in bad years the dark, cream-spotted animals are few and far between.

Though polar bears are excellent swimmers — their scientific name, Ursus maritimus, means “sea bear” — they usually aren’t fast enough to catch a seal in open water. Instead, in winter, the bears creep within striking distance of one of the breathing holes the seals have made in the ice. When a seal pops its head out of the hole to catch a breath, as it must do every ten minutes or so, the bear leaps and yanks the unsuspecting bather out of the water.

Sometimes, however, bears take a more direct route: as Great White Bear shows, they will crash through the top layer of the ice itself in an effort to trap the seals that may be resting in the hollow space below.

Ringed seals are a staple of the polar bear diet. In early summer, when the seals like to bask in the warming sun, hunting bears must use a different strategy. They wait until the seals are asleep and then creep close, freezing in place when the snoozers periodically open an eye to check for danger. Eventually, if the seals don’t spot the stalker, the bear gets close enough to make a powerful pounce.

More often than not, however, the seals escape: some studies have shown that bears outwit their prey less than five percent of the time.

But when the hunting is good, bears can be finicky eaters. They will easily polish off a 100-pound meal consisting of the seal’s energy-packed skin and blubber, or fat layer. But they commonly will leave much of the less nutritious muscle behind. Young bears will sometimes devour the leftovers, but it is often another Arctic inhabitant — an Arctic fox or gull — that rushes in to claim a free meal.

It can take a lot of seals to satisfy a polar bear. Males can be ten feet tall and weigh 1,500 pounds, while females are smaller, topping the scales at about 550 pounds. Remarkably, however, the huge animals can withstand lengthy periods without food. Male bears, for instance, are routinely forced to go without a major meal for three or four months each summer, when melting ice prevents them from hunting seals. And pregnant females apparently go without food for eight months — a record among mammals. Mothers even keep fasting for some weeks after their one-pound cubs, usually twins, are born between late November and January. By the time the cubs have left her care one to three years later, however, the mother has rebuilt her energy stores and is ready for another litter.

To survive their forced diets, polar bears burn a thick layer of reserve fat. In some cases, this layer can be up to five inches thick. But the blubber doesn’t just store energy: in winter, it also provides an excellent insulating blanket in temperatures that can plunge to 40 degrees below zero. Other adaptations, such as a small tail and ears and two layers of specialized heat-trapping fur, also help the bears conserve heat. In addition, each hair of a polar bear’s coat is hollow and transparent, helping to draw the sun’s rays toward the bear’s black skin. But when things get too cold, even polar bears must seek shelter, digging out snow caves in which they curl up like giant furry balls.

In summer, however, that same fat can present a problem. Polar bears can easily overheat when they run — which probably explains why they spend much of their time loping across the landscape at such a leisurely pace. In the southern part of their range, where summer temperatures can rise to levels downright blistering for bears, they may even take to the water simply to stay cool. Such strategies have allowed polar bears, which can live for 30 years, to prosper for at least 200,000 years in a challenging Arctic landscape that is by winter enveloped in icy darkness and by summer bathed by a never-setting sun.

But hunting and environmental changes, such as signs that a warming climate could be melting pack ice, may be taking their toll on the bears. And concern is growing about pollutants, such as mercury and other toxic chemicals, that are making their way into the once pristine Arctic food chain. As a result, scientists are keeping an increasingly close eye on the up to 40,000 bears that live in Canada, Russia, Alaska, Greenland, and Norway. “If a polar bear population is healthy, then one can probably safely assume that the rest of the components of that food chain are doing well,” explains a spokesman for the Canadian Wildlife Service, which has sponsored extensive monitoring studies. “However, if problems develop with polar bear populations, it may indicate problems elsewhere in the ecosystem.”

The goal, scientists involved in such studies say, is to make sure that the Arctic’s great white bear continues to roam across the top of the world.

NATURE investigates the sometimes exasperating efforts of people and wild animals to adapt to each other when their worlds collide in Animals Behaving Badly.

The escalating battle for space on this planet between people and wild animals has grown increasingly one-sided, as humanity asserts its domination. But a few intrepid species are successfully challenging, harassing, and even exploiting us on our own turf.

How people are dealing with these incursions — and what we can learn from them to the benefit of both wildlife and humans — is the amusing and enlightening focus of Animals Behaving Badly. The filmmakers traveled to various parts of the United States and Canada, and as far away as New Zealand and Australia, to show us examples of animals behaving “badly,” and of the varying human reactions.

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Online content for Animals Behaving Badly was originally posted May 2003.

The birth and survival of a panda cub signals hope for the world’s most cherished endangered animals, in NATURE’s The Panda Baby.

In late August of 1999, scientists at the San Diego Zoo marked a rare event they had struggled for years to bring about: the birth of a giant panda outside of China. It made headlines around the world. But the time for celebration was not yet at hand. Five other pandas had been born in the United States — and none had lived past the fourth day.

Against the odds, however, this tiny newcomer, Hua Mei, grew and thrived, and her survival has become a hallmark of the desperate international quest to save the giant panda, perhaps the most visible symbol of the world’s endangered animals.

The Panda Baby, with the aid of exclusive footage from the World Famous San Diego Zoo, as the institution is formally known, captures all the tense drama of Hua Mei’s birth and her survival through infancy.

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Online content for The Panda Baby was originally posted September 2001.

Who can resist the magnetic allure of a baby? The presence of little ones of any species invariably generates instant attention and concern from onlookers. In fact, it seems that both humans and animals are hard-wired to find youngsters adorable. The practical and essential reasons why the very young have an ability to play on our heart strings are explored in Baby Tales.

Baby Tales demonstrates how young animals learn and develop, and examines the role of “cuteness” in helping to forge and solidify bonds between mother and offspring. Many newborns in the animal kingdom are entirely dependent upon their mothers — and sometimes their fathers, as well — for survival. And, especially in the wild, nurturing and protecting the young can require enormous effort, courage, and self-sacrifice. The cuteness of offspring creates a strong visual bond that helps evoke a caring response in parents, which must spend months, if not years, feeding, protecting, and teaching their young to survive on their own.

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Online content for Baby Tales was originally posted March 2001.

A roaring waterfall may not seem like a promising place to raise a child. The rocks are sharp and steep, and the frigid water speeds by faster than a freeway, threatening to sweep away toddling youngsters.

But in the Alaska wilderness, the powerful McNeil River Falls is a very popular nursery spot — for growing grizzly bears. Every summer, hundreds of the huge animals gather at the falls to feast on migrating salmon and find mates. And mother bears bring their youngsters to the frothy cataract for the most important summer school they’ll ever have: a crash course in survival that must last them the rest of their lives.

NATURE’s Showdown at Grizzly River tells the story of one bold little bear’s coming of age at the falls. It follows an 18-month old cub named Toughie as she spends her last few months with her mother, learning to pluck salmon from the fierce current, eat nutritious marsh grasses and, most importantly, how to behave around other bears. Besides tangling with cubs her own size, Toughie also learns how to deal with the towering adult males that threaten her young life, but may one day father her own cubs.

Showdown at Grizzly River also provides an unforgettable portrait of the older bears who, like regulars at a neighborhood diner, routinely gather at the falls. Their personalities are so unique that biologists who have studied the McNeil Falls bears for decades have given them nicknames. The cast includes Woofie, an expert thief who spends his summers stealing salmon caught by other bears, and his rival Creek Bear, a master of the intimidating behavior called the “cowboy walk.” Then there is Teddy, a mother bear who is desperately trying to provide food for her cub, while teaching her the survival skills she will soon need to survive on her own.

Luckily, there are usually enough fish to go around. Indeed, it is salmon that have made McNeil Falls one of the most famous grizzly bear gathering grounds in the world, where visitors can see up to 40 bears at a time fishing for their silvery meals. The migrating fish pile up beneath the falls — which are just 2 miles from where the river empties into the sea — creating a bottleneck that gives the bears easy pickings found at no other nearby stream. So many grizzlies line up along the rapids that some native Alaskans are said to have called the place “the river of bears.”

Today, however, the river is named after Charles McNeil, a gold prospector who lived in a nearby cabin in the early 1900s. Located in a roadless wilderness area 100 air miles west of Homer, beneath a towering active volcano, the river became a favorite destination for bear hunters, who were amazed by the number of potential trophies. But in 1955, Alaska officials closed the unique area to hunting to protect the bears, and in 1967 it was set aside as a special wildlife reserve.

But that wasn’t the end of the bears’ problems. By the early 1970s, hundreds of tourists and photographers were flying into the area to capture the remarkable sight on film. Soon, the visitors outnumbered the bears. It wasn’t long before some overzealous tourists got into confrontations with mother bears protecting their cubs, and males protecting their territory. Other campers stored food incorrectly, attracting bears, who then destroyed their tents. Disturbed by the crowds, the bears soon began leaving the area or fishing at night.

To solve the problems, in 1973, Alaska officials decided to limit visitation by issuing just a few hundred visitor’s permits a year. Today, just 250 people a year are allowed to visit the reserve, usually in groups of ten or less who are confined to small observing platforms. An annual lottery for the permits attracts thousands of entries, and interest is growing. “Some people have tried for ten or more years to get a permit,” says one Alaska official. “They never give up.”

Those lucky enough to win a permit are treated to a memorable adventure. After flying into a base camp, every morning the visitors don rubber boots to make a wet trek across marshes and streams to the viewing areas, which are just a few hundred feet from the bears. Then, for hours at a time, they have a front-row seat on the captivating and often dramatic stories that unfold before them. As one visitor once told a journalist, “every day at the falls is a soap opera,” whether it’s older bears fighting off challengers, or baby bears like Toughie getting the education of a lifetime.

To order a copy of Showdown at Grizzly River, please visit the NATURE Shop.
Online content for Showdown at Grizzly River was originally posted February 2000.