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The Bears Among Us
by John Seidensticker

We relate our experiences—our history and relationships, including our relationships with nature and the natural world—through stories. Bears have been part of our stories and myths from our beginnings.

Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders place the bear in a cultural context in The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth and Literature. Bear myths and rituals, they conclude, center on the theme of renewal, including the reincarnation of the soul, the symbolic replenishment of food, the passage of initiation, or the renewal of clan power. Bears are the symbolic image of brave deeds.

As a curator responsible for the stewardship of bears, I have some bear stories to tell about the relationships between these wonderful animals and ourselves. I fell in love with bears when I was working for John and Frank Craighead as a student assistant in the Yellowstone Grizzly Project 30 years ago. Each day we would go out and radiotrack bears and we spent long hours watching them. But there is nothing more up-front and personal than a close encounter. When bears are startled they may stand up and look around, as we all know. Encountering a grizzly in open country one day was a special experience. The great bear stood and scanned the surroundings. Bear and I made eye contact. There was a connection in that instant—bear to me, me to bear—with only a few tens of yards and sage brush between us. To me this was the essence, the lyric core of being alive and with nature. I recognized that under that coat and long muzzle there was a self, not so different from me.

It is best to back off from an encounter like this, and in my experience bears also seem to know this. After the adrenaline subsides, there is time to consider what Shepard and Sanders have so eloquently written: "The bear strikes a cord in us of fear and caution, curiosity and fascination…a kind of ideogram of humankind in the wilderness, a thorough telling of what we were and perhaps what we lost: wily, smart, strong, agile, and independent in ways that we humans left behind when we took up residence in the city." As a curator of bears, I reaffirm this connection with a bear nearly every morning when I make my rounds. So can you with a visit to see our bears at the National Zoo.

Another bear story. I remember watching a young grizzly sitting up with a three-gallon mayonnaise jar between its legs, slowly turning the lid off by feel with the flat of its paw while looking about to make sure a larger bear didn’t come up and take this food away. For a young grizzly, the most dangerous animal, aside from man, is a larger bear. This bear was quizzical, almost comical as it confidently solved the jar-lid problem while keeping a cautious eye to potential danger.

While radiotracking, I gained additional appreciation of bears’ problem-solving abilities. They have very good memories, memories that let them find food with great precision in time and space in large landscapes. Again, Shepard and Sanders: "The bear moves across the landscape and terrain like no other animal, a purposeful and mystical transit keyed to the plants and the season and tuned to the needs and possibilities of the seasons and celestial rhythms." For me, "bearness" is about solving problems over long time spans in vast areas, and I am envious of the bear’s ability to do this.

The conservation of North American bears—American black bears, brown bears (including grizzlies), and polar bears— is seen as a success story. But the future is not at all secure for the spectacled bear in South America or the sloth bear, sun bear, brown bear, Himalayan black bear, and giant panda in Asia. Our ultimate goal at the Zoo is to work to secure a future for these bears on their home grounds. We can begin by developing partnerships that allow our Zoo to participate in achieving this goal, as Devra Kleiman describes in this magazine about our efforts for wild giant pandas.

Drawing refined road maps for the future of bears is complex because, as the context for bear conservation changes, new threats emerge. The old conservation prescription was to give bears wild lands in the form of reserves or parks and to stop killing them; essentially the goal was to keep bears and people apart, each in their own place. But explosive population growth and massive changes in the social and political landscape in Asia and South America during the last 50 years make this impossible. Parks and reserves will never be large enough, so the task is much more complicated than pursuing a simple set-aside of land. There is a reasonable amount of bear habitat left out there; the challenge is to devise ways for people and bears to share it. We need to see protected areas and zoos not as islands, but as vital core areas in networks of local, regional, national, and international bear conservation efforts.

Conservation does not occur in a vacuum. Bears are at risk because of a conflict over values. To understand the root causes of declining bear populations, we must look at how different people, especially the people who live near them, value bears. Local human needs must be identified so the presence of bears contributes to fulfilling those needs. Political will for conservation is accrued by building local support through the provision of cultural and economic benefits. Support for bear conservation must also be universal; people everywhere must help champion the cause of these magnificent animals. Environmental education, letting people get to know and love bears, is essential.

I know a good place to start. Come to the Zoo and get to know our bears. They are ambassadors for wild bears everywhere.

--John Seidensticker Senior Curator at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park. He has worked with large carnivores, including bears and tigers, for more than 25 years.

ZooGoer 28(2) 1999.
Copyright 1999 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.

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