Story by Theresa Curry

When Front Royal author Christine Andreae needed a plot device to begin her wildlife thriller, Grizzly, she introduced a corpse. Skinned, and minus its heads, hands and feet, the body kicked off a murder investigation, until the forensics lab reported the gruesome body was that of a male bear.

“This was a grizzly, not a Virginia black bear,” says Andreae, who lives near a mountain path frequented by bears, “but I’ve always been struck by how much the torso of both these bears resembles a human’s.” Andreae made use of another similarity in her Montana-based mystery. The rear footprints of bears look like they’ve been made with a human foot – shorter and wider, but with the foot landing firmly on the heel, and the marks of five distinct toes.

“There’s certainly a resemblance.” says Mike Vaughan, a wildlife professor at Virginia Tech. “They’re large mammals like us, and we have a lot of the same outward physical traits. Our internal organs are also very much alike.”

Dr. Vaughan, an internationally-recognized bear expert and a member of the advisory board of the bear journal Ursus, has studied Virginia’s black bears for the last 25 years, both in the Blue Ridge Mountains and in the troubled bear territory of the Great Dismal Swamp to the far Southeast.

“There are stories every year where someone finds what they think is a human leg bone or part of a foot in the dumpster, and it turns out to be from a bear,” Vaughan says.

Vaughan welcomes a few bears every year at his Blacksburg bear facility. “They’re usually problem bears who have disrupted their neighborhoods,” he says, “and every once in a while, we’ll get bears orphaned by hunters.” Typically, game wardens will bring the bears in the summer, then Vaughan and his students will observe them; fatten them up with dog chow, give them a cozy spot for a winter den, then release them back into the wild in the spring. Vaughan and his students and staff also monitor bears fitted with radio collars in the past for clues to their lives in the wild.

The initial study was designed so wildlife experts could learn more about the habits of Virginia bears, answering questions about the general range of males and females and tracking the bear harvest each year, generally monitoring the population for purposes of wildlife management. In recent years, though, Vaughan and his colleagues have found some ways in which the Blacksburg bears might hold some of the answers to questions about human behavior and health.

Bears in the den

The pregnant female bear who enters her den when the weather grows cold stays half asleep for most of the winter. During this time, she’s inactive, doesn’t eat, delivers two or three cubs and nurses them every 20 or 30 minutes. Bear mothers have very rich milk – their tiny cubs double their weight every few weeks – and they readily adopt and feed orphaned cubs.

Bears don’t defecate in their dens: Nature has provided them with an intestinal plug to prevent this. They have no need to urinate, either, Vaughan says. Everything they ate in the fall is recycled in their bodies. If the year is good, they’ll be fat and full, he says. “If you fly over Virginia’s cornfields, you’ll see ‘bear circles,’ ” he says “They sit down in the middle, pull the stalks down to them, and gobble the cobs.”

When bears emerge in May, they’ll be lean, but their bones will be as “strong as two-by-fours,” according to Michigan Technological University researcher Seth Donohue, who uses the Hokie bears to study possibilities for osteoporosis prevention. In comparison, snoozing and fasting all winter – even without pregnancy, childbirth and lactation – would turn our bones into the equivalent of toothpicks.

“Not only do they avoid losing bone strength, they actually continue to strengthen their bones during this whole process,” Vaughan says. Part of this he attributes to the lack of urination, which washes away calcium and other minerals in humans.

Donahue, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, is chasing the other part – the bone growth. In both people and bears, activity builds strong bones. This process is helped along by parathyroid hormone. When people are inactive, parathyroid hormone production doesn’t increase, but in hibernating bears, it does. It’s the human situation in reverse. The older the bear, the stronger the bones.

Donohue has identified the bear gene responsible and synthesized the hormone in his Michigan lab. His next step will be to sprinkle the synthesized hormone on human bones and test for bone growth. Meanwhile, public-health experts are watching closely for answers to the widespread problems caused by falls and fractures in the fast-growing elderly population.

Both female and male bears have good muscle tone in the spring as well as strong bones, something that we certainly couldn’t expect after three or four months on the couch. “It looks like they constantly contract their muscles by shivering,” Vaughan says. “It’s like us getting on an exercise bike for several hours a day.”

Bear bad behavior

When photographer Mike Nichols moved into his home in Sugar Hollow in Albemarle County, he realized he had a hidden neighbor.

“There was an old male bear in my woods,” he says. “He worked hard for his food. I’d go for walks and see every rock overturned and every piece of fruit picked from trees and bushes. He was old enough to know that going after the easy food around human dwellings was a sure path to disaster.” They’d see him sometimes, but only fleetingly. The neighbors kept a respectful distance, and everything was fine.

One day, Nichols’ wife saw the bear in the back of a hunter’s pickup truck, and the neighborhood started going downhill. “Without that old, wise bear to police the area, we started getting goofy, immature bears,” he says. “They were like teen-age hoodlums, breaking everything, crashing around, looking for fast food.”

Nichols knows a little bit about this subject. He’s a wildlife photographer for National Geographic and the organizer of the recent Charlottesville Festival of the Photograph. He’s followed tigers in India and elephants in the Congo, and he’s seen the same phenomenon literally all over the world.

“We need those elders,” he says. “Because of the hunting emphasis on large, trophy animals, we take out the best, the wisest, and those with the great genes.” He saw young elephants separated too early from their mothers become the oversized gangsters of the animal world.

Vaughan agrees with Nichols on the relative wisdom of older animals: “The worst bears are those 2-year-olds who come into a territory,” he says. “If there’s an older bear anywhere nearby, they don’t go there.” The smartest bear he came across was also the oldest, he says. “There was an older bear who managed to escape hunters year after year,” he says. “He’d figured out hunting season somehow and just went into his den a month early every year.”

The Hokie bear experts use “aversive conditioning” to educate their troublesome teen-agers, mimicking the hard lessons young bears might learn from an older male or a watchful mother. “We’ll pop them with a rubber bullet or do something to scare them when they get out of hand,” Vaughan says. “We always hope these lessons will stick when we release them in the spring. Their best chance of survival is always avoiding humans.”

In his 25 years of tracking bears, Vaughan has seen only two die a natural death, so he’s unsure how long they could live if nature took its course. “One death was due to a fall from a tree; and the other was a cub bitten by a snake,” he says. “In some places not so heavily hunted, bears live to be 30 years old, but the early twenties is the oldest we generally see in Virginia.”

Even bear fans like Nichols don’t advocate a ban on bear hunting. “I’m emotional on the subject of large predators, but I’m not going to make that argument in Virginia,” he says. “We can’t win it.” He points out that hunters in general are the allies of conservationists and are much less of a threat to wildlife of all kinds than encroaching development.

“I’d just like to see us stop hunting for those big trophies,” he says. “Otherwise the animal world will become more and more like the human world, reflecting the perspective and wisdom of the animal equivalent of the high-school sophomore.”

For further reading

Mike Nichols - www.michaelnicknichols.com

Ursus - www.ursusjournal.com

Filed under: 6-July 2007 Issue