Smiling Bears - A Zookeeper Explores the Behavior and Emotional Life of Bears
My parents remember the first bear I ever saw. It was 1958 and I was three. We were on our annual August trek across America from Baltimore to the west coast and back again in the family station wagon. On the outgoing trip we stopped on the road by a river in Yellowstone National Park for a break. My parents used a fallen tree trunk as the picnic table and my older brother and I ran around blowing off steam after having been confined to the car much of the morning. It was quiet and secluded. The only other human was a fisherman who stood very still fishing downstream, waiting patiently for a bite. As we ate, a black bear came out of the woods, crossed the road and ambled down to the river’s edge. Hanging her head, peering intently into the lake she stood motionless. Suddenly, she slammed her upper torso into the lake and came up, water streaming off her fur with a large trout flopping in her mouth. Again she crossed the road and disappeared back into the trees with her catch. The fisherman continued to stand very still fishing downstream, waiting patiently for a bite and we finished our picnic.
My entire life has been dotted with bears coming and going - always leaving an impression - always unlocking another little secret to who they are.
My brother and I went hiking in Glacier National Park, this time as adults in September of 1998. We parked at the Logan Pass Visitor Information Center to walk the Hidden Lake Overlook Trail. Waiting on my brother still inside the Center I joined a small group of people on the south side of the building. They were watching an enormous chestnut colored male grizzly bear in the alpine meadow across the valley. He was busy grubbing for any number of foods such as tubers or ground squirrels. He dug as he walked in a spiral adding rings of tilled land to the circumference of the circle. I was mesmerized watching him methodically work. Olaf arrived and wanted to speed walk to Hidden Lake. I reluctantly joined him not really wanting to leave the grizzly bear. For a few minutes I jogged behind my speed walking brother who was several hundred yards ahead of me on the trail. Decidedly my heart wasn’t in this. I pulled a U turn and ran back to watch the bear. There were other groups on the trail to Hidden Lake so I wasn’t really concerned about my brother hiking alone. The grizzly was still digging. He was built like a furry tank, massive, block-like, seemingly unstoppable and yet, when he found something of interest he gently sieved the soil from the plant with his claws and ate it. I was part of small group of admirers all standing very still, quietly awestruck. In two hours time my brother returned, the bear’s crop circle was about thirty meters in diameter.
I am a zookeeper with 25 years of experience specializing in bear behavior. In that time I have raised bears, comforted bears, taught bears, learned from bears, have been bitten by bears, had bears communicate their needs to me, and have nursed bears back to health. To do my job - to help each bear - I have asked two questions "Who are you?" and "What can I do for you?" Finding the answers to these two questions has unravelled many mysteries of bear behavior and emotion. And so I wrote a book to share the wonderful portraits of the bears that I have come to know in all their richness and complexity.
Smiling Bears is due to be released from Greystone Publishing in March 2009 and is currently preselling on Amazon.com and others.
http://www.dmpibooks.com/book/9781553653875
http://www.amazon.ca/Smiling-Bears-Zookeeper-Behaviour-Emotional/dp/1553653874/ref=sr_11_1/183-2420810-9902332?ie=UTF8&qid=1227365283&sr=11-1 
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