Campers Terrorized | Grizzly Bear Gangs? | Fatal Bear Attacks

Shauna Lovell and Maggie Bassett were enjoying a friend's camp out in the Bighorn Mountains when a black bear began ripping into Maggie's tent. And even after firing several warning shots, the bear would not relent. It has been an incredibly eventful week for both grizzly bears and black bears, so bear with me as I try and go through all of this. As for Shauna and Maggie's experience, we are almost certainly talking about an habituated bear. So Shauna and Maggie were staying in a dispersed camping area in the Bighorn Mountains. We know this because you can clearly see their jeep in the background behind their shredded tents. Maggie and Shauna were eventually able to get away, though it's not entirely clear how that happened because the bear apparently was ripping into the tent while one of them was inside and was not discouraged by warning shots. I'm not exactly sure how they were able to get out. They got out, they got away, and they came back later and found their tents leveled and shredded. So I have got to tell you that dispersed campsites can be some of the worst. Last year, I literally came across a campsite that had been used for an orgy. I wish I was kidding, but I'm not. I'm talking used condoms, trash, alcohol, toiletries, food everywhere. I had to shower for days after cleaning the area up. It is truly remarkable to me how self-obsessed and parasitic some people can be. And when we're talking about dispersed camping, they don't have the resources or the personnel of more developed campgrounds to kind of keep an eye on things and make sure people are being responsible. And it's only getting worse, especially as the morons in government are defunding our public lands agencies. With all the additional stuff that's going on this year, with the drought conditions, the reduced foraging opportunities for bears and wildlife, this is something that you have to be aware of, that you have to be, I don't want to say worried about, but it has to be something that's on your mind. You can be a responsible camper by yourself. And Shana and Maggie say that they were keeping track of all their food. They were properly storing it and keeping it away from wildlife. And I don't doubt it. The problem is, is if they just stumbled onto a campground where previous campers had been entirely irresponsible, then all of their preventative measures aren't going to undo the selfishness of other people. If people are leaving their food and trash behind, bears are going to take advantage. And they're going to learn to associate human beings with a potential food reward. This is potentially a very serious situation. This is not anything to scoff at. In fact, just today, I was reading a report about a potentially fatal bear attack in Colorado. We're talking about a black bear. Now, currently, the investigation is still ongoing, but it's currently being reported that human remains, an individual, we don't know the cause of death for sure, but that a human being was scavenged by a black bear. And that was in a picnic area. Very likely, we're talking about an habituated animal there as well. And with reduced foraging opportunities, fewer resources on the landscape, there is a possibility that some of these bears, male black bears in particular, they may start viewing humans as a potential food source. Most of the time, that's going to take the form of trying to get food or trash. But in rare occasions, they can actually look at humans as a potential food item. So super glad that Shauna and Maggie got it out, got out okay. I haven't seen anything in the reports regarding whether or not they had bear spray. Somebody clearly had a gun because they fired shots, but the bear just shrugged them off. I don't know. I mean, I assume that they were warning shots and not shooting the actual bear, which makes sense to me because if you're sleeping in two tents and a bear starts coming into your tent, you don't want to just start blasting blindly because your friend is just a few feet away. You need to be very cautious about where you're pointing a firearm. This is one of the principal safety rules of firearms that you never point a gun at anything you're not willing to destroy. So I don't know if they shot into the air or whatever, but they report that the bear was not phased by warning shots. Of course, bear spray and tents have a bit of a complicated relationship. They can be deployed effectively in this kind of an engagement, but it's certainly not ideal. Anyway, so I'm glad that Shauna and Maggie got out okay. They're reporting that they are having serious second thoughts about ever sleeping in a tent again, which makes me kind of sad. Certainly, this is a traumatic experience, and there's a lot of anxiety that's going to be associated with it for a long time. It is very possible to camp safely in a tent, but I would highly suggest that they consider adding something like an electric bear fence to their toolkit. That's what I use whenever I'm going to a dispersed camping area because I cannot guarantee that previous occupants have been responsible. It's just another layer of defense. Even if I'm taking all of my food and trash precautions, it's nice to have that barrier that can basically keep watch all night long. Again, it's not perfect. It's not infallible. If you leave food and trash everywhere around your camp, then bears have been known to get through electric bear fences. They're underutilized and incredibly effective when it comes to interrupting this kind of behavior. This all comes after some really kind of remarkable grizzly bear news. I already covered the incident in Canada, in Alberta, where I think it's Karen Osborne was out walking her dog and had the most ridiculous grizzly bear encounter I think I've ever seen captured on video. Super precarious situation, and the whole time I was watching it, I was thinking about Doug Ingalls and Jenny Goosey trying to protect their dog from what was likely a predatory grizzly bear in Banff National Park. Karen is unbelievably lucky that the bear that she was dealing with was timid and not committed to that attack because she had no bear spray. She just had bear bells. That was probably a habituated bear as well, and it's probably more habituated now because I guess Karen, in kind of a desperate attempt to get the bear away from her before she started recording, I guess she had a coffee that morning, and she threw her coffee at the bear and into the bushes. And you know, when you're in a desperate situation, you will do desperate things, but that was not going to be very helpful. People who give bears access to their trash, their food, they may prevent a conflict in the here and now, but that bear is probably still just a time bomb ready to go off. And just a short time after that, we get this remarkable footage out of near Great Falls, Montana, where a couple who run a ranch, they actually captured footage of what looks to be a pack of grizzly bears moving across their land. And they report that after they called Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, when the predator response team got out there, they actually hazed 10 bears away from their property. And you know, it's been kind of humorous seeing the internet respond to this. There's a very chicken little feeling going on where people are like, grizzly bears are forming gangs, it's not good, this is terrible and all this stuff. And I understand it is rare that you will see that many bears moving together across the landscape. And it does, they seem to be acting like a pack of lions, which obviously is a point of concern. And unfortunately, most of the news anchors that have covered this story, they haven't done a very good job of doing their due diligence. I was actually talking to Tom Smith about this exact incident. My initial impulse when I saw that footage is that there was likely some kind of a food source that was potentially drawing all these bears in. But I wanted to talk to Tom, I wanted to get his thoughts. He reminded me that it's not unusual if there is a rich food source for bears to congregate in larger numbers. The classic example is up at Brook Falls in Katmai National Park. Dozens of bears can be seen feeding off of the salmon seasonally up in Katmai. But that's not the only place that this kind of stuff happens. There are some basins in Montana where seasonally bears will appear. And in large numbers, I think Tom said that the record that they've counted in one basin was like 29 bears all in close proximity feeding on, I think he said curroway root, which is very similar to kind of a celery. But more than that, in the hot summer months or the high summer, which is what we're in right now, grizzly bears will actually trek high into the mountains and the Rockies and they will just gorge themselves on moths that go up to the rocky kind of craggy slopes and kind of take refuge during the heat of the day. Grizzly bears will just show up there in huge numbers. I think Casey Anderson reports running into around 40 of them at one time. So it's not that these bears are not forming gangs, right? And it's kind of hilarious when I see influencers making that claim because it's kind of absurd. Whenever you see something like this, initially you should be thinking, okay, concentrated food source. That's what's bringing these bears together. But the fact that they're moving this closely together, it must have been something else going on as well. So I actually reached out to Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks and I talked to the team up there. They're not certain, but what they told me is that it wouldn't be out of the norm or it wouldn't be unheard of rather for kind of a maternal group of grizzly bears to meet up and take advantage of a food source. So if you look at the footage, at least one of these bears is significantly larger than the other bears. And there's also some other variations. So we could very well be looking at multiple mother grizzlies, either with triplets or twins that have just kind of met up together. And if you understand kind of bear behavior and their social structure, sows or female grizzly bears, they will often inherit the same home range as their mother, which often means that even though they're not living together, that a matriarch sow may actually meet up with one of her daughters when both of them have cubs for that season or from the previous season or something like that. So that's a pretty likely scenario to explain why there are so many bears concentrated in such a very small area. So I hate to disappoint those of you who thought grizzly bears were forming gangs or starting to form packs and move across the plains like lions on the Serengeti. That's nonsense and I know the internet loves nonsense. The truth is actually not all that surprising and definitely not as scintillating as bear gangs and stuff like that. Anyway, so according to Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks, these bears were feeding on a large spilled bin of grain, which as I understand it is a fairly common occurrence. I mean, you have these farms, these ranches that are raising either livestock or crops of some kind and it's a higher concentration of a potential food source. Obviously, a spilled grain bin is just going to be easy pickings for a bear and they're gonna congregate. It's exactly like trash heaps of yesteryear where bears would just congregate in really high densities and take advantage of these bear dumps. So it's effectively the same thing, except for instead of trash, it's a large spilled bin of grain. And according to Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks, they've vacuumed up the grain to try and remove the attractants. They've set up cameras and they've hazed the bears away and they haven't seen them for a week. So this is not outside regular bear behavior. It's hard to make a living on the landscape and so if a bear finds a food source, especially an easy one like a mound of grain, they're just gonna go gorge themselves for as long as they can on that resource. They do the same thing with bison carcasses and all this kind of stuff. Bears will congregate in higher numbers in greater densities when there is a rich food source nearby. So anyways, you now have your answers. I wish the news reports had been more responsible. I also wish that influencers would be more responsible, but that's a pipe dream. Influencers rarely are going to be responsible when they are reporting on some of this stuff. Anyways, like I said, a really, really busy week for bears and that's after a really busy month or two of attacks, conflicts, all sorts of stuff. And I've tried to warn you guys, I really think that this is going to be a very, very busy, I think it's gonna be a hard year for conflicts or attacks and we're already seeing that. Potentially, we have already got three fatalities from bear attacks this year. One grizzly, two black bears and we are barely halfway through the year. We've got a lot of busy recreation season coming up. There are more bears on the landscape. There are more people on the landscape. People are not picking up their trash. A lot of people don't understand how to stay safe in bear country, how to be responsible and not leave landmines behind that two ladies that are out on a camp out are gonna have to deal with. It's complicated and it's really not complicated because of the bears. It's mostly complicated because of people and the fact that grizzly bears, they're now moving back onto the plains and this is really freaking people out because they always picture grizzly bears as belonging in the mountains and the high peaks in the forest. The truth is that grizzly bears are a plains animal they always have been. I think we've forgotten the true character of the continent that we occupy. The Midwest and the Great Plains, they used to be teeming with wildlife like we just couldn't even imagine in today's world. I'm talking tens of millions of bison, tens of millions of elk, antelope, deer and every other animal that's native to this continent all moving across the landscape including the predators that preyed on these other species and because we've wiped out most of that environment we forget the true nature of the continent that we live on here and now and people see this and they see a bunch of grizzly bears moving together and they don't understand why grizzly bears would do that. Grizzly bears are supposed to be solitary. Why do we have footage of them seemingly moving as a pack? And unfortunately people too often reach for hysteria before they reach for understanding and that's absolutely what's happening now and that only makes the situation worse. There are legitimate concerns about human safety, about the safety of their livestock and their property which is why I am grateful and I hope that you guys are all grateful too to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks or in Wyoming Game and Fish or the National Park Service, the Forest Service all of these organizations which help manage and care for both the natural resources but also are looking out for the welfare of people. I hope that you guys are grateful for their efforts in either picking up grain or getting rid of dead livestock so that there isn't some kind of an attractant that's going to bring people and bears into close proximity where conflicts and injuries are likely to result. So I see this as a plus. I see this as a system that's working. Individuals recognizing there is a high concentration of bears just outside their door contacting wildlife management teams who then address it, move the bears off, get rid of attractants. I think this is an example of how the cooperation between civilians and public lands managers and wildlife managers, I think this is how it's supposed to work. I think that is a huge success. I will say that I think Deanna Collins and I don't remember her husband's name right now but I think they did say that they personally tried to kind of startle the bears off but had no success. That the bears were quote, not afraid of them at all and that's kind of a trigger word for a lot of people on the internet. They think, oh, bears are not afraid. We need to start hunting them to make them fear people. The fact of the matter is that these bears had really awesome access to a really rich food source and your average bear, if it doesn't have an important food source nearby, yeah, you can scare them off a lot easier most of the time but if they have a rich food source nearby, they're not gonna be all that interested in just running off and abandoning it. They're gonna stick around and that's exactly what happened here but now that the food source has been removed, the bears have also been removed. Everybody's happy, everybody wins. I mean everything and I do mean everything that has to deal with grizzly bears. Every news story that you're ever going to see is always going to increase the calls by some people to delist grizzly bears and I decided a long time ago that I'm not gonna tell you guys whether or not you should support or not support delisting grizzly bears. That's not my place. That is a conversation that all of us need to have together. We need to decide like how many grizzly bears, what's our comfort level in sharing space with these animals? The truth is that responsible and informed and educated people, they can share space with a lot of grizzly bears. It can be done but people who are not so well informed, who are not educated, people who are not taking precautions, you really can't. It's very difficult to share space with bears because poor human behavior leads to poor bear behavior and conflicts are inevitable if we can't make responsible decisions about how to keep bears and people separate. Because that's a decision that all of us need to make together and the people who live in these areas, we should absolutely let them share their experiences. We should be aware of what they're going through. I decided a long time ago that I'm not going to tell you guys one way or another delist, not delist. My main focus is just to make sure that we have reliable information so that we can make an intelligent decision and that's the thing that I get concerned about the most. The fact of the matter is that some bears are going to be a threat. They're going to engage in behavior which is dangerous to people and we should not tolerate that but at the same time because some bears engage in that behavior does not mean that every bear engages in that behavior and just because you see bears moving across the landscape, I think we need to tone things down a little bit. We got to be a little bit more reasonable. We got to make sure we have the data. We have the information necessary to accurately appraise the situation and that is exactly why I began At Home in Wild Spaces in the first place. That's what I'm here for to at least make sure that we have reliable information when we're making our decisions either about our personal safety or about just how many bears we want to share the landscape with. For my own part, I would like to see a consequential restoration of a lot of what we've lost on this continent and that doesn't mean that I am in favor of a full restoration where every inch that used to be wild lands is going to be returned to wild lands because that's just not practical but I would like to see consequential, meaningful improvements in an attempt to restore kind of the natural heritage of the continent and that's why I get really excited by projects like American Prairie and some of these organizations that are trying to bring back some of what we've lost in the natural landscape. But I understand, you know, grizzly bears are starting to move out onto the plains where they haven't been seen in a very long time. Mountains around Greater Yellowstone and Glacier, they're getting kind of saturated with bears and they only have a certain carrying capacity and so a lot of these animals are having to move out and disperse and find other places to roam and other places to live and that's kind of forcing human beings to come into contact with these animals and consider just how far we're willing to let them move back into the landscape. I think that people are beginning to engage with this conversation a little bit better and while there's a lot of misinformation out there, I am doing my best to make sure that you guys have quality information and really I'm just hoping to facilitate an informed conversation because quality decisions, they require quality information, they require quality data. Anyways, thanks for watching, thank you for engaging. I literally just finished recording at least the monologue for my upcoming video on how hunters are being systematically sabotaged and lied to in grizzly bear country. I've shot all the footage, now it's just a matter of editing it all together which I hope to have ready to go next week. I'm also retesting the famous or sometimes infamous Desert Eagle and trying to decide whether or not that is a reasonable choice for backcountry defense as well as putting together my expert guide to defensive bear guns. There's a lot of crap out there specifically from individuals who really should know better but that's the world that we live in. Misinformation has just taken over. Anyways, thanks for watching, thanks for engaging. A special thanks to my Wild Spaces team members. You guys and girls are the absolute best. Producing reliable information is getting more and more difficult so I am extremely grateful to those of you who have decided that you want to join this crusade to defeat misinformation and make sure that people have access to the facts and the fundamentals so that we can make intelligent decisions about our safety, about bear management, about all of these things. Anyways, so thank you. If you want to join the Wild Spaces team then all you have to do is click join below this video or head over to Patreon and if a monthly membership isn't a good fit for you right now you can also click thanks below this video and make a one-time contribution. I'm grateful to those of you who are watching or engaging and helping in the crusade to get people the information they need to make good decisions. Anyways, that's the video for today. Take care of yourselves, stay safe and I'll catch you on the next one.