TRACKING the DESERT BEAR

For the better part of the last five years, Doug Chadwick’s mornings began with the soft glow of the sun rising over the hard, tan earth of the Gobi desert. While his Mongolian colleagues slept, Chadwick would hike the hills and mountains alone before returning to camp for a breakfast of noodle soup with dried camel meat.

Then they began the day’s work of tracking the rare Gobi grizzly bear.

Chadwick, a naturalist, biologist, author and Whitefish native, recently published a new book, “Tracking Gobi Grizzlies,” recounting the long and arduous search for these bears that call the desert home. Chadwick will promote the book at its world premiere at Casey’s in Whitefish on Friday at 8 p.m.

The Gobi grizzly is what Montanans would call “a respectable black bear,” Chadwick says. The bears are smaller and leaner than the grizzlies that live in the woods of Chadwick’s home state. Their claws are short and blunt from walking on the rocky terrain, and their teeth are ground down from chewing gravel as they dig out plants like wild rhubarb. They also have a thicker coat of fur for when the desert temperatures drop to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter.

Altogether, the bear is a stranger in a strange land, and Chadwick wanted to know how and why the grizzly has made the desert its home.

“My fundamental question is how the hell does this bear make a living out there?” he says.

Until five years ago, Chadwick didn’t know the bears even existed. On assignment for National Geographic, he and his wife, Karen Reeves, were tracking snow leopards in the mountains of Mongolia when they noted how similar the high country was to Montana. Recalling that there were brown bears in nearby Russia, they were surprised to find no signs of bears around them.

When somebody told him they’d all moved to the desert, Chadwick thought they were pulling his leg. But once it was confirmed that the bears, an estimated 30 total, did in fact live in the desert, Chadwick knew he had to go.

National Geographic picked up the topic for an online feature, and when the project continued on, Patagonia Books offered their help in turning the research into a book. Patagonia also published Chadwick’s previous book, “The Wolverine Way.”

He and photographer Joe Riis, along with Mongolian researchers and park rangers, made up a camp of 10 people in the Great Gobi, a protected reserve at Mongolia’s southern border with China. Over the last five years they tracked and counted the bears while trying to discern how the bears stayed alive, looking for different food and water sources and examining how they interacted with other wildlife.

The first time he saw one of the bears he wished he didn’t know the much larger North American grizzly so well to compare it to.

“The bears here have no idea how good they’ve got it,” he says with a laugh.

Chadwick says there used to be a higher population of Gobi grizzlies until a Russian attempt at development brought livestock and wells to the area. The bears retreated to the mountains and desert as a result, and populations dropped to the dozens. Chadwick said the updated population estimate is now between three and four-dozen, but protection is needed if that number is to continue to stay healthy.

The problem is that the desert is likely rich in mineral resources, and any future development could wreak havoc on the grizzlies’ life in the Gobi.

“We can do this, because the bears show signs of a slight increase,” he says. “There’s always a push to go in and just overrun the whole area and put in new roads, and that’ll be the end.”

Maintaining a healthy balance between humans and wildlife is a top priority for Chadwick. Vital Ground, which he helped found 26 years ago, aims to secure and protect habitat for grizzlies and other animals in Montana and Idaho and other Northwest states, and as a board member for the Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg Foundation, he helps find projects that protect wildlife and their connections to humans.

Chadwick has studied mountain goats and grizzlies in the Rockies, elephants in Africa, and whales in the world’s oceans. On assignments from Siberia to the Congo River’s headwaters, he has produced several hundred popular articles and 11 books.

Chadwick says the connection between humans and other animals is being threatened as populations of species continue to die off in alarming numbers, and when we lose them we also lose a part of ourselves.

“For creatures like us, homo sapiens who arose among wild animals, if they’re not there anymore how do we know what it means to be human? How do we define ourselves?” he says. “I feel like we all have to be thinking pretty hard, when we say we’re saving nature what do we really mean? How serious are we?”

With “Tracking Gobi Grizzlies” out this week and a future book with photographer Joe Sartore “The Photo Ark,” set to release in the spring, Chadwick says the next item on his agenda is some lazy, relaxing time spent back in Montana.

“I promised myself a little bit of a break,” he says. “I’m going to be lazy for awhile. I want to go cross-country skiing and I want to hang out in Montana and not write for awhile.”

Whitefish Review will host Chadwick at Casey’s on Friday, Dec. 16 at 8 p.m. for the world premiere of his new book, “Tracking Gobi Grizzlies.”

Chadwick will share a slideshow and a reading about the bears of the Gobi desert. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the reading and slideshow will begin at 8 p.m. A $10 suggested donation is requested.