This trip is the first time truly I think in my probably 30 plus years of really enjoying
nature that I have been more focused, taken it slower, just seen more intricate details.
This is more than grizzlies, the grizzlies are kind of the big interest, but hiking is
going to be a whole different thing for me now.
I'm not going to be be aligning it to a lake.
I'm going to be stopping and really looking at signs of life.
To the west of us is this giant area called the Frank Church River of No Returned Wilderness.
It's an area that's capable of supporting as many bears as in the greater Yellowstone
ecosystem right now.
They think that six to eight hundred bears could be supported there, grizzly bears.
Right now, guess how many are over there, zero.
This here is right on the fringe of where we know that grizzly bears have been.
If grizzly bears successfully move into here, there's a great open space to the west of
us where they could start to filter into that Frank Church.
And the reason we want them to move is really for genetic diversity.
They don't have the freedom to move and the freedom to go to these other habitats, then
they're not able to encounter new mates.
They're not able to encounter new opportunities for genetic diversity.
I've got some hair here.
So what we're looking at on here are the grizzled tips on the end of this.
This is where a grizzly bear gets its name.
This is the jackpot guys.
This is full of DNA on the end of it.
If you pull one hair out, take a look at just one hair and you'll see this has silver tips
and you can see a follicle on the other end if you look really closely.
Some of you older folks may need your glasses.
I just want to go over bear safety real quick.
We carry bear spray and we make noise when we're in the woods.
We take care of our food at night and I also have with me a little air horn so even if
the bear is further away, we'll give one of those.
You look like you're falling asleep over there.
You're never going to look straight on to a tree.
You're always going to come on the side and put some sky or whatever you can between us
in the tree.
Okay, zero, four, two, seven, six, nine, zero, five, six, seven, eight, nine, nine, nine,
nine, nine, nine, nine.
This is a lot more detail oriented examinations than I'm used to.
I'm just really a beginner at this.
But I still know the difference between the elk and the deer and bear scat.
We thought we saw some feline either mountain lion or bobcat scat and the diversity of this
terrain is very interesting because there's new growth and fire for only a couple hours
from Bozeman and yet there's so much wildlife here.
I could always just be outside.
I'm ready for lunch, I don't know what time it is, but I'm ready for lunch.
So guys, I think that we may have something here.
Yeah, this is looking really good to me.
You see the silver tipping right here and it goes back to black there.
A deer and elk will do that, but a deer and elk here is hollow and it's really easy to
spin around.
This is much finer than deer and elk here.
But it's pretty clearly a silver tip.
Today we went tracking looking for bear signs.
We looked for claw marks on the side of the tree, rub marks where there were hair fragments
left on the tree, a scat in the middle of trails.
We tried to smell for bears, we tried to see if there was any bear sign present in a route
that we had picked out.
So this is an important bear fruit, so another bear sign is to see ant hills that look like
this.
You know, you're like, oh, bear got in there, scooped it out, went to the larva.
Maybe lemony.
These ones are slight lemony.
The bigger ones, the formic, the genus, the genus formica is much more lemony.
They're the black with the red head.
They're my own lemony.
They are.
They're my own lemony.
Wow.
Wow.
That's sour.
Yeah.
That's formic acid.
And berries.
It's one of these.
It smells like chamomile.
Um, Ben Williams, originally from Lone Jack, Missouri, Marine Corps really preaches attention
to detail.
It's an easy correlation from looking for rust on your rifle barrel to looking for grizzly
hair on a tree.
You know, it's just something different, something else to look for and pay attention
to.
Use these heightened senses that you've gained during your time overseas and put it to some
of their use.
The grizzly tips was definitely something new and interesting to me, knowing that they
use rubbed trees pretty consistently, knowing that dug furs are good to look for.
I thought it was really cool that we're actually just out hiking on a trail and doing what
you could typically do on your average outing and still do something pretty substantial and
something really neat.
I think the opportunity to do this is special.
To participate in something like this that is as important as it is, this is the data
collection and this is going to go into the big study.
That's what really appealed to me.
This is not just a nature hike with, you know, some free lessons thrown in.
It's actually a good data collection.
The evidence that I saw mostly was the scat.
I mean, I was looking down a lot, so I saw a lot of that evidence.
Let's see.
It looks like you have some ant parts right there.
Do you see that?
There's bones, little seed shucks over here.
Let's see if we can find any more.
The sheer size of it is what I'm looking at.
Also the hair content.
These look like different scats.
These are much less hair.
They're much smaller.
I think that these are likely coyote, but these bigger ones have a much bigger cord
diameter, and so I believe that these are wool.
Probably the most fascinating to me was seeing how high on the tree those claw marks went
on some of those bear scratches.
We've got what's likely a black bear claw mark on this tree.
You can see that he climbs up, and one of the indications that it's a black bear instead
of a grizzly is that he's climbing rather than along the bottom.
That height, this one here, could be a grizzly, but because it keeps climbing up, pretty confident.
Not a grizzly.
We've identified the most likely places that these bears are, and that's how we've chosen
the drainages that you guys walked in today.
Look how huge this area is we're in, and we're trying to find one little hair on one little
tree in this ecosystem.
It's an amazing effort.
This would be the first ever DNA evidence of grizzly bears in here since the 1930s, so
just an outrageous opportunity.
As you guys now go outside in the woods and show your friends how to do this, you're going
to come up on a tree and you're going to say, oh my gosh, that looks like a rub tree, and
you're going to look at it, and you're going to pull off a grizzly hair, and you're going
to think to yourself, where am I right now?
Maybe Greg needs to know about this, maybe the Forest Service needs to know about this,
and so you'll collect it just like you've been taught to, you'll send it our way, and
we'll get some DNA evidence off of it, and continue to build our record of where these
bears are, how family groups are moving.
I hope you really get the picture that your efforts out here are really making a difference,
and it's really something we couldn't do without all of you guys out here.
So thanks for being here.
I'll see you guys in the next video.
