Podcast Episode - Bear Management with Carl Ramm
Introduction
By David Ramm
About two months a year my brother, the wildlife artist Carl Ramm, manages bears—Alaska Peninsula brown bears, to be exact—at Brooks Camp in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. As part of a team of bear techs, he helps track the bears’ movement and, as much as possible, guides them away from the camp’s many visitors and toward a place that’s safer for bears and humans alike.
You can find the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Breaker, Anchor and more. As always… listen all the way to the end for some bonus content. (#outtakes)
Wildlife Artist Carl Ramm working in Bear Management at Brooks Camp in Alaska
Sometimes Carl can do this with his voice alone. Sometimes he makes noise with sticks, either striking them together or banging them against a bridge railing, building, or even boats. And occasionally, depending on the situation and the bears’ level of stress, he has to bring out his can of bear spray to stop them from charging. (Our family holds rather more critical views of this line of work than Carl does.)
I’ve never made it to Brooks Camp to see Carl in action, but I love hearing stories about the bears and how he responds to them, in part because they offer improbable lessons in the importance of context and the obdurate wonder of personality.
In this episode of News from the Peak, “Bear Management and Management,” Carl explains that a bear’s actions are fairly predictable if you know the individual bear and how that bear’s day has gone so far. It’s a problem managers face all the time: finding ways to get very different people to do equally good work and to recognize that each person’s individuality is the key to getting them to do their best.
A sample of the artwork of Carl Ramm -
It’s not easy to do that with people, let alone bears. If anything, bears seem too large to me, too elemental in a way, to be controlled by anything other than bearness. But as the active and enthusiastic community of Brooks Falls bear camviewers can attest, the bears Carl works with are basically the ursine equivalent of a Shakespearean history play, packed with gruff males clinging tenuously to status and big-hearted but battle-ready sows and subadults that just want to get a reaction, any reaction.
Given their outsized personalities, it seems fitting that the bears of Brooks Camp have become famous for their size through the annual Fat Bear Week competition. Our episode gives a look inside the work that tries to keep the human visitors to Brooks safe while also giving the bears the time and freedom they need to bulk up for the long winter’s sleep ahead.
Resources
By Carl Ramm
Bear Biographies
The key to unlocking the ongoing drama of the bears of Brooks River is getting to know the individual bears. Below is a link to the authoritative guidebook (by year) to the individual bears, plus some additional information about a few of the better known bears in order to give a hint of how much more can be learned about their personalities and life histories.
• The Bears of Brooks River. The essential background information for each of the bears on the river, for any given year
• Bear 435 (“Holly") Adopts a Cub (503). Both this article and this one give an overview of the situation we discuss toward the end of the podcast. This video is fairly long but gives an excellent sense of how rich the stories of bears can be. Ranger Barb Lutes is Brooks Camp’s resident scholar on the life of bear 503, the adopted cub
• Bear 775 (“Lefty”). Lefty was responsible for the most madcap, electrically-charged twenty minutes I have ever experienced at the falls. Somewhere there is a video featuring more of the incident, but this one does a good job of portraying Lefty and his personality, and makes reference to the evening in question. It also shows one of his infamous belly-flop leaps off the falls during that wild spectacle
• Bear 128 (“Grazer") Defends Her Cubs. Videos 1, 2, 3, and 4 give several examples of how momma bears earn their reputation for protectiveness. When she goes up against 747 (the largest bear on the river then and now), it shows just how much smaller she is in comparison
General Information on the Bears of Brooks River and Alaska
• Brooks Camp Bear School 101 (Video). The best way I know of to get a feeling for life at Brooks Camp in a short amount of time. The primary purpose of the video is to teach “bear etiquette” to new arrivals at Brooks Camp, but it has some very nice shots of the bears, as well as camp life and camp itself. The people in the video are all either rangers and bear techs from 2018 (in and out of uniform), lodge staff, or actual visitors
• The Brooks Falls Bear Cam. Beware, your life may change in unexpected ways…
• The Dominion of Bears. Easily the best book on the relationship between people and bears and in Alaska, and an excellent book for anyone interested in bears and our relationship to them. Highly recommended
• What Good Brooks Bear Management Looks Like on the Ground (Featuring Bear Tech Julie Hower). Example 1 and 2. I think Julie does an excellent job in both of these videos. While the second one made the rounds in the media, neither case was that atypical of what typical hazing sessions look like. In spite of the fact that when the bears are on the river Bear Management deals with them every day, multiple times per day, there are few videos of it on the web. I’m not entirely sure why this is the true, especially since visitors in camp have shown me dramatic videos of bear management in action. Part of it is due to us trying to get people indoors before we deal with bears whenever possible, but I don’t think that’s a complete explanation. Since many will no doubt wonder how Holly’s current cub—who features in the second video--is doing with the porcupine quills in her paw, I am happy to report that when last I heard she was much better, still very fat, and on the road to a complete recovery. Her recovery is natural. Injuries like this are not something that the park intervenes in
• Brenda D’s YouTube Channel. For anyone who can’t wait for the cams to start running in 2021, this channel is as a good place to start exploring the infinite rabbit-hole of Brooks River bear videos
Living with Bears and Bear Safety
• Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Presented for an Alaskan audience but most of it is relevant anywhere in North America that has bears, covering a wide range of concerns.
• National Park Service. Solid information mostly oriented toward outdoor travel
• Get Bear Smart Society. General information from a nonprofit dedicated to helping people live harmoniously with bears
• Bear Research. The International Association for Bear Research and Management