About bighorns and big bears
G. GEORGE OSTROM / For the Hungry Horse News
Grizzlies are making news again lately. In 65 years of exploring wilderness, I've only once witnessed grizzlies seriously trying to kill a bighorn ram. It happened May 3, 1992 and showed how cunning the big bear can be. Don't recall doing a column on that but did put photo with cut lines in my book, "Wondrous Wildlife."
Biologists say grizzly bears in Glacier Park have a diet of over 80 percent plants. They eat bugs and carrion and have some luck in bringing down wild animals, mostly young of the year and old or crippled adults. The catching of moose calves in lakes was unhappily witnessed by tourists at Many Glacier twice in the last few years, and visitors saw griz nail a whitetail fawn near the Inside Road.
Grizzlies dig out marmots and ground squirrels and once in a while catch a mountain goat. Huckleberries are favorite fair, but when the chips are down they seem to eat anything available. Silvertips get an adult sheep often enough to keep hope alive.
Grizzlies don't seem to 'stalk" so much as "mosey" in a casual yet purposeful fashion. They can 'sort of" creep a la cougar but seldom do so. Watched a young male sneaking up on spawning cutthroat in Yellowstone. They seem to favor a fast charge, and will lie in ambush if moseying puts them in a good spot for a surprise attack.
It is a rare adventure to watch a lethal game between majestic prey and big predators. That one in May of '92 was played out with a disarming "business as usual" atmosphere among all involved. It was an intense hour but regular activity went on. That's life for bighorn sheep where few days pass without threats from some kind of predator.
My adventure began after our Thursday hiking gang saw a large herd of rams while climbing Mt. Altyn, so I got my son-in-law, Scott Duncan, to go with son Shannon, his friend Mike Schlegel, and me, for photos on Sunday. The rams had divided into two groups with about 30 below the Iceberg Trail on Mt. Henkel. We photographed them working out of brush and onto a hillside above the trail. Then we climbed a nearby cliff to watch.
Suddenly a big female grizzly and her sub adult cub entered a clearing below the sheep. The bears were south of the sheep with the wind from the west, but a lookout ram spotted them and gave alarm. This caused a slight stir among the resting and feeding rams, but nothing close to panic. The grizzlies knew the sheep had seen them so circled up until they were at the same elevation and downwind 200 yards to the east. The bears studied the sheep that were studying them. Aware she was visible to her prey, the female seemed to send over a message that she just wasn't interested in any mutton today, turned her back to the herd and nonchalantly walked directly away over a knoll and disappeared.
Told the guys, "Well that's that. The bears are gone. Let's climb higher and try for some goat shots." We'd gotten up on the next band of cliffs and somebody said, "Look the griz are coming back." Sure enough! They'd gone over the knoll and found a concealing ravine which ran completely around the north side of the knoll, looping back beneath the rams. The bears had wind in their favor while the sheep had to rely on sight. The mother bear knew from scent when she was closest to the unseeing herd, and out of the ravine she came at full tilt.
The bear's luck was bad, because the nearest ram was a mite too far for her to have any chance. She slammed on the brakes. The cub seemed upset by its mother's decision. The bears left again, staying above the ravine in full sight of the rams and went a quarter mile east to cool off in a snow patch. After rolling around, they pressed deep into the snow and watched photographers up on the cliffs.
Did the rams know the grizzlies were up to something when they seemed to leave the first time? Did the female griz know about that ravine?
There is a lot of stuff we don't understand … about the wild ones.
G. George Ostrom is a Kalispell resident and a national award-winning Hungry Horse News columnist.