Anyone who has been following my posts has probably figured out by now that I am essentially a scaredy-Cat. I love being in the field, but when I’m there, I worry about anything and everything – from mountain lions all the way down to cows. Unsurprisingly, bears have always featured pretty high on my list of worries. Huge, powerful bodies, sharp teeth, and a distinct tendency to be irritable when surprised…what’s not to love?
My initial bear encounter took place during my very first field season, up the Queen’s University Biological Station – and, in fact, wasn’t an actual encounter at all. I was working at the station as a field assistant, and my duties included daily inspections of approximately 200 tree swallow nest boxes. One day, as I made my way through a grid of boxes, I suddenly realized that one was missing. At first, I wondered if I was losing it: how could a nest box just vanish? However, closer inspection revealed that the box was actually still there…in pieces on the ground. The nest was torn apart, the nestlings were gone, and a pile of bear scat sat on the ground close to the wreckage.
Until that point, I had thought of QUBS as an entirely safe place to do fieldwork. Finding the ruins of that box was a rude awakening. I froze in place and stared frantically around the field, looking for other indications that a bear had been there – or, more problematically, was still there.
In the end, of course, I found nothing; the bear that had destroyed the box was long gone. In fact, over the course of my two summers at QUBS, I never actually saw a bear, just heard occasional second- or third-hand stories of sightings. I eventually accepted that I was highly unlikely to actually meet a bear at QUBS, and I relaxed.
All that changed when I started my PhD. I was thrilled to be doing my fieldwork in the beautiful Okanagan Valley of British Columbia…but at the same time, my mind heard the word “mountains” and interpreted it as “bear country”. And while no one would claim the Okanagan is overrun by bears, my research informed me that black bears are reasonably common there, and even grizzlies aren’t unheard of. Too make matters worse, a lot of my work took place in vineyards, where bears can be a big problem in late summer, when they come down out of the hills to gorge themselves on the grapes.
In preparation for this ‘highly dangerous’ fieldwork, I purchased a plethora of bear bells (to warn bears people were coming) and a few cans of bear spray (to deal with bears that didn’t heed the warning). Armed with these tools (and accompanied by a ceaseless jingling), I felt pretty secure wandering around my field sites. That is, until one day, when a local asked me, “How do you tell the difference between black bear scat and grizzly bear scat?”
“I don’t know,” I said innocently. “How do you tell the difference?”
“Well, black bear scat is full of berries. And grizzly bear scat…well, it smells like pepper spray and jingles a bit when you kick it.”
With a wicked smile, he went on his way. I stared foolishly after him, clutching my pepper spray while my backpack jingled faintly.
This conversation somewhat eroded my faith in my bear spray and bells. On top of that, it turns out that ceaseless jingling is phenomenally annoying after a few days. Add to that the fact that I kept accidentally leaving my bear spray behind in various locations (forcing me to spend additional time wandering around in bear country attempting to retrieve it) and it’s not hard to understand why I decided to abandon that approach.
But I was still not enthusiastic about encountering a surprised, irritable bear. So I devised a new strategy: I would just talk to myself as I wandered the hills, providing fair warning to any bear in earshot.
However, I quickly found out that it’s hard to talk constantly when you don’t have anything in particular to say. In desperation, I found myself thinking back to high school, trying to recall any lines of the poetry or prose we’d recited in English class. As it turns out, the only thing I remembered was the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. So day after day, I would stumble around the Okanagan back country, repeating “Two households both alike in dignity / In fair Verona where we lay our scene…” as loudly as possible. It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t encounter too many people on my wanderings. At least the bears of the Okanagan are now well educated.
I guess the star crossed lovers did the trick, because I didn’t actually see any bears for most of my first field season. But one day in early August, as I was making my way back to the car in one of my most isolated field sites, I rounded a corner and found myself about a hundred feet from a black bear.
Given that I’d worried about this exact scenario all summer, I was surprisingly taken aback. I turned on my heel and started walking away briskly, trying not to look back over my shoulder. Finally, though, I just had to know. I whipped around to survey where the bear had been…only to realize it had vanished. Now I had a new problem: there was definitely a bear in my immediate vicinity, but I no longer had any idea where it was, and it was a very long walk back to the car.
Can you spot the bear in this picture?… Nope, I can’t either.
Clearly the thing to do was keep talking to avoid surprising it; unfortunately, though, Romeo and Juliet deserted me in my panic. So I decided that the logical thing to do was call home and talk to my parents.
When I dialed my home number, my sister picked up. I told her about the bear and explained that I just needed to stay on the phone to keep talking. “That’s too bad,” she said impatiently. “But I need to call my friend now. Call Mum on her cell instead.”
Right.
I hung up with her, and did as she suggested, still striding in the direction of the car while swiveling my head vigilantly in all directions. This time, I managed to get a hold of my mum…and that’s when I learned that you never, ever, ever call your mother and tell her that you’re in the middle of nowhere, with an unseen but very real bear lurking around. She was quite willing to stay on the phone with me, but had no problem letting me know that she was not thrilled with the situation overall.
Much to our mutual relief, I made it to the car with no problems, and I didn’t see another bear for the rest of the field season. In fact, it was over a year before my next bear encounter. This second run-in happened at a less isolated site, but played out in much the same way as the first. I froze briefly, then did an about face and walked away. And once again, after a few seconds, I couldn’t help glancing over my shoulder. This time, the bear was still visible. In fact, it looked an awful lot like he had also done an about face and was hurrying in the opposite direction as fast as his furry paws could take him.
Apparently some bears are aware that humans also have a distinct tendency to be irritable when surprised.
Dispatches from the Field 