Death in Yellowstone: How a Killer Grizzly was Captured
Read Time:7 Minute, 46 Second
A grizzly was ambling along the Yellowstone River on a clear day in late September 2011, when she lifted her nose up and smelled something familiar in the air. She couldn’t tell quite what it was, but it smelled like food. Maybe the shredded remains of a bison taken down by a wolf pack, its innards sloughing out of its stomach and onto the riverbank.
The sow may have spent the day digging up pocket gophers, but a feast like this would really help her to pack on weight. Within eight weeks she’d be taking her two young cubs into a den in the side of a slope for the long Western winter. They needed fat, and soon.
After months of a diet consisting mostly of grass and nuts and roots, the scent of dead meat was impossible to resist. The mother grizzly walked in the direction of the carrion with her cubs scrambling along behind her. The bigger one, with the blond face, was probably closer on his mother’s heels, with his brother, the color of burnt sienna, lagging behind. The sow had to keep a close eye on her offspring. There was always the threat of male bears trying to kill her family. They knew she wouldn’t go into heat again as long as her cubs were with her.
Finally they located the source of the delicious smell—a wheeled, 10-foot-long aluminum tunnel, open on one end, that had been deposited near the river just south of a campground. The mother bear stuck her snout in the tunnel and then climbed in toward the meat. It was roadkill, probably elk or bison. When she touched the bait, a trapdoor dropped behind her.
She spent a long, desperate evening in that trap. Her two cubs stayed close by, but she could only watch them and smell their scent through the ventilation holes at the front and back ends of the tube. At first she might have been agitated, clawing against the smooth metal insides of the trap. But as the hours slipped by, she may have settled into her prison, resigned to her fate.
After daybreak, she heard a whap-whap-whap sound, like the heavy beating of wings, and then different strange noises from outside the tunnel. As she saw people approaching, she began to get angry. Her cubs backed off at the first sight of the humans, but they returned just minutes later when they smelled more dead meat: Both were soon coerced into another barrel-shaped piece of metal. Once all three animals had been captured, the tubes were wheeled onto a helicopter and flown several miles away, to another part of Yellowstone National Park. That’s where everything went black.
While the mother bear was sedated, government biologists pulled hairs from her body, and took a vial of blood from her wrist. Then they trucked her to a large area at Yellowstone Headquarters known as the “bear room,” and kept her there in the tube for three days, fed and cared for by Yellowstone staff. Her cubs were being held in the bear room, too, but she couldn’t touch them, couldn’t cuff them affectionately with the back of her paw if they were misbehaving.
On the morning of Oct. 2, 2011—the sow’s fourth day in captivity—the bear management team at Yellowstone did something they absolutely hate to do. Kerry Gunther, the head bear manager at Yellowstone, stopped by the headquarters with his wife. It was his 53rd birthday, and he wanted the company for the grim task he faced.
His wife was keeping notes when Gunther and his technician injected the bear with a dose of Telazol, a larger helping of the same sedative they had used earlier to take the blood sample. Then one of them shot a captive deadbolt—the kind used in industrial slaughterhouses—directly into the animal’s brain.
It took a couple of minutes for the mother grizzly to stop breathing, and for her heart to stop beating. For her cubs, this marked the end of their life of freedom. Eventually, they would be shipped off to the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center, a tourist attraction in West Yellowstone, Mont., where they will spend the rest of their lives.
The euthanization of the bear known as “the Wapiti sow” was the culmination of a series of horrifying events that had gripped Yellowstone for months, and alarmed rangers, visitors, and the conservation biologists tasked with keeping grizzly bears safe. In separate incidents in July and August, grizzlies had killed hikers in Yellowstone, prompting a months-long investigation replete with crime scene reconstructions and DNA analysis, and a furious race to capture the prime suspect. The execution of the Wapiti sow opens a window on a special criminal justice system designed to protect endangered bears and the humans who share their land. It also demonstrates the difficulty of judging animals for crimes against us. The government bear biologists who enforce grizzly law and order grapple with the impossibility of the task every day. In the most painful cases, the people who protect these sublime, endangered animals must also put them to death.
Whenever a grizzly bear commits a crime in the continental United States, Chris Servheen gets a call at his office at the University of Montana in Missoula. Servheen has been the Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for three decades, and his phone usually rings with news of mundane grizzly malfeasance: a bear breaking into garbage cans in the tiny town of Cooke City, Mont., or a grizzly being spotted getting too close to a rancher’s cows somewhere in Wyoming. But a call he got late last summer was much more sinister. On Aug. 25, for the second time in two months, a grizzly bear killed a human being in Yellowstone.
It is hard to overstate how unusual this is. Servheen’s bushy handlebar mustache barely twitches as he runs through Yellowstone’s many hazards and explains how rare grizzly attacks are in comparison. Park visitors are more likely to die by drowning in one of Yellowstone’s rushing rivers, or falling off a cliff during a hike, than they are to be slain by a grizzly. Other dangers abound: Several-hundred-degree hot springs can boil off your skin in huge sheets right before you die; bison can gore you with their blocky horns.
Though he says he was surprised and disturbed by the call on Aug. 26, Servheen’s flat Western tone betrays little of that emotion. As the government’s head bear manager, he must walk a fine line when he’s discussing the dark side of grizzly behavior. He knows that whenever he and the other managers decide that a grizzly must die, there will be lots of opinions from both sides. Everyone wants a say, from local ranchers whose livestock gets picked off by roaming bears, to environmentalists who don’t always agree with the government’s conservation policies. It’s to Servheen’s benefit to sound as neutral as possible when talking about violent attacks.
Servheen got into grizzly management because he wanted to study bear behavior—what types of dens they use, what kinds of foods they eat, what their traveling patterns look like. But mostly he joined FWS because he wanted to repopulate the grizzly bear in the Western wilderness—a line of work he’d wanted to get into since he watched a National Geographic special as a teenager, about a pair of identical-twin bear biologists named Frank and John Craighead. In the late 1960s, after he’d moved out to Missoula from Pennsylvania for his undergraduate degree in zoology and wildlife biology, Servheen earned a Ph.D. with John Craighead as his mentor. “I ended up with a dream job,” he says from behind a desk decorated with a massive grizzly skull and a glass statue of a bear. But the last few months had been more like a nightmare.
In July, Servheen had been alerted about a bear attack on a couple, Brian and Marylyn Matayoshi hiking on the Wapiti trail in Central Yellowstone. Brian had been killed. Now, Kerry Gunther was telling him about another fatality, this time on the Mary Mountain Trail, about 8 miles from the site of the first killing. Once again, it looked like a grizzly was the culprit. Servheen couldn’t believe the news. Until the summer of 2011 there hadn’t been a grizzly-related death in Yellowstone in 25 years.
Before Servheen, Gunther, and their bear management colleagues could decide what to do, they’d need a lot more information. Was a grizzly bear in fact responsible for this second death? If so, which bear did the mauling? And what were the circumstances that led up to attack—was it provoked or had some hiker just been caught unaware? The answers to those questions would determine whether a precious animal would need to die.
More of this story at Slate.com.
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Nice writing. Good piece about a very sad thing.
They didn’t have to kill that poor bear. Bastards.