A grizzly's place - destruction of grizzly habitats - includes related information

Sierra, Sept-Oct, 1992 by Geoffrey O'Gara

It is early spring in Wyoming's Absaroka Mountains. Broken Toe has been up and around for a few weeks now. He ambles down from his rocky den into the mixed forest at the foot of Ramshorn Peak, following his memory map to whitebark-pinecone caches and his nose to the coyote-ripped carcass of an elk buried under snow sometime last December.

The warm sun, having melted all but a few snowbanks, glints on his cinnamon fur, which slides over his big haunches and rippling fat. Some grizzly bears emerge in spring thin and lustreless, but Broken Toe is a hefty, healthy 600 pounds, and his movements grow quicker and more impatient as his great passion--food--takes hold.

He is assaulted by smells carried on a breeze that riffles the tree limbs and grasses in the foothills above the Du Noir Valley. During Broken Toe's 20 years of life, his range has extended from the meadows and trout-rich streams of Yellowstone National Park's high backcountry to these slopes on adjacent national-forest lands below the crooked peaks of the Absarokas. Now he emerges from a forest thick with deadfall to search an open, south-facing slope for a clump of biscuit-root.

With the cliffs of Coffin Butte on one side and the roads and fences that mark the bounds of civilization on the other, Broken Toe ambles through a band of forested foothills at the upper end of the Du Noir, a narrow corridor for migratory wildlife such as grizzlies and elk.

At twilight, Broken Toe wanders out of the trees into a grassy draw, keeping his profile below the exposed flanks of the valley. He rises on his hind legs and sniffs hopefully for fondly remembered odors--coffee grounds and grease and rotting vegetables. The smell this year is different, though equally enticing: a dead horse, north of where the garbage used to be. The Diamond G--the outermost ranch in the valley--has dosed its dump, but someone who understands grizzlies knew Broken Toe would be coming back. The bear finds a young sow grizzly already on the carcass, but when she hears him whoofing she runs, trotting sideways and dropping her head and shoulder in clumsy servility. (More and more often, Broken Toe is running into other, younger grizzlies in his range.)

His ruff standing, Broken Toe takes a few halfhearted steps after the fleeing sow, then stops to sniff. She is only three years old, not yet in estrus. He ventures toward the old dump, within view of the ranch, hearing the plaintive lowing of the cattle and seeing a light-colored shirt moving among the buildings below. This is familiar--for the last two years humans have been at the Diamond G in March, and they have left him alone. Griz that he is, he remembers and adjusts. He follows the tantalizing odor of decaying horseflesh, finds the carcass, paws and probes, and starts his meal.

Jon Robinette, the foreman of the Diamond G, sees Broken Toe at twilight. He knows the bear: During the past two years, grizzly tracks have sometimes appeared in the mud between the barn and the cabin where Robinette lives. He stood by last year as biologists from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department trapped and drugged Broken Toe and pulled one of his teeth; Robinette's kids admired the softness of the tuft of fur that he brought back to their cabin.

Robinette is trying to get used to Broken Toe's official designation: Bear 34. The bear has a number for a name because he's been trapped by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, a brigade of federal and state bear biologists that has been radio-collaring and studying grizzlies in Yellowstone since 1975. His relatively low number indicates that Broken Toe was caught early in the program--back in 1978 near Brooks Lake, about ten miles west of the Diamond G.

Robinette, stubble-bearded and sunburned during the calving season, says bears visit the ranch often in the spring, but he has yet to lose a calf. Strategically placed carrion lowers bears' interest in livestock, and Robinette--who keeps a spotting scope by the kitchen table trained on the northern pasture--goes out at night to shoo off uninvited visitors. In May, ranch life gets a little easier: There's less midnight midwifery, and the grizzlies move to the west along Wolf Creek, where the elk are calving.

The Diamond G's owner, Steve Gordon, is a recent New York refugee, and surprisingly tolerant of the grizzlies in his new neighborhood, abjuring the tradition of "shoot, shovel, and shut up" that some ranchers follow when they feel their livestock is threatened. Gordon, who wasn't told of the grizzlies when he bought the Diamond G, admits that bears scare him, but he's trying to put up with them. "If you live at the end of the road, you have sympathy for the bears," he says. "From the other direction, this is their end of the road."

His foreman knows by sight or track about 20 other grizzlies that have shown up in the last few years. The concentration of bears in the valley is one of many signs that the Yellowstone grizzly population--placed on the "threatened" list under the Endangered Species Act in 1975--is making a comeback. Its numbers are up from a low of fewer than 200 grizzlies in the 1970s to more than 228 today. Human-caused mortalities--at least the ones we know about--were down from nine in 1990 to zero in 1991.