By Kayla Heinze, Communications and Outreach Coordinator
John Hechtel remembers a time in Alaska before crowds of people gathered to watch brown bears catch fish at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park and Preserve. The increasingly famous and impressively large bears now draw not only visitors from across the world, but thousands more watching virtually from home.
Since its simple beginnings in 2014, Katmai and the website Explore.org’s Fat Bear Week has grown in popularity nearly as much as the animals it celebrates. Online votes that tallied 55,000 in 2018 have easily topped 1 million in recent years. At any given hour, several thousand of these bear fans tune in devoutly to the website’s livestream of the falls. With an active live chat identifying bears and discussing their behaviors, it’s usually a cheery space, but this year the celebration took a somber turn. The on-camera killing of a popular female bear by an older male prompted both anguish and reflection among fans of Fat Bear Week and the larger bear conservation community.
A longtime biologist in the state, Hechtel has worked for both nonprofits and government agencies on bear management, research, and conflict prevention. Also a longtime board member of Vital Ground, John currently serves as President of the International Association for Bear Research and Management (IBA). He knows a lot about the world’s eight bear species, but maintains a steadfast humility in his relationship with bears, one that adds complexity to his understanding of the Fat Bear Week phenomenon, and the corresponding rise in bear-viewing tourism and celebrity status of individual bears.
“I obviously like people to be excited and to care about bears and to be interested in them,” Hechtel said when we talked recently in the wake of Fat Bear Week. “But I think we all, myself included, tend to underestimate bears and what they’re really like.”
And what they’re really like, according to John and others who adore these remarkable creatures, is a true wonder of wildness that cannot be fully comprehended, even after an entire lifetime of learning about them. This endless curiosity is necessary if we are going to continue sharing landscapes with bears. It allows us to appreciate their conservation needs and avoid stereotyping them in ways that can lead to conflicts between their species and ours.
Grizzly realities
In an age where content producers compete for slivers of our already-overburdened attention, sensational stories do well online. For bears, this usually means being slotted into one of two extreme portrayals: vicious, cold-blooded killers as seen lately in “Cocaine Bear” and “The Revenant” or cuddly-cute teddy bears as harmless as Paddington and Pooh.
There are dangers to both of these mischaracterizations, but Hechtel believes the downsides of the latter are sometimes overlooked. The urge to view bears as cute or docile can lead to people side-stepping crucial safety practices, letting bears learn to associate people with food rewards like bird feeders or garbage. It can tempt people into fixating on the creature’s photogenic features or unrealistic imagined personalities over less amusing realities like the threats of human disturbance and habitat fragmentation.
“Part of the problem to me is we’ve got people going to two extremes,” John said, “Bearanoia is a problem, but on the other side they kind of ignore the impacts and potential danger, get complacent and don’t think about the risks to bears and humans.”
The truth of survival for wild bears defies stereotypes, as was on display more than usual during this year’s Fat Bear Week. Hailed as the “darkest” iteration of the competition yet by Backpacker Magazine, two longtime fan favorites failed to return to the falls and viewers witnessed the well-known older male bear kill and begin to eat a popular female on the livestream. While difficult to watch, Hechtel thinks this was an important glimpse of what really goes on in the sometimes-harsh lives of wild bears. Especially if the exceptionally healthy salmon runs at Brooks Falls start to decline like some other big Alaskan runs have, a scarcity of food could make both bear-to-bear and human-bear conflicts more likely.
“We’re losing sight of [Brooks Falls] being an important place for the bears to come and put on the pounds before winter,” John said, voicing concern about the potential for human activity to disturb this seasonal pattern. “When there’s few [salmon], it’s going to be a different scene than bear cam viewers are used to.”
The reality, far from the catchy-headlines of Fat Bear Week, is that survival can be challenging for bears. While Katmai itself is home to one of the densest brown bear populations in the world, with around 2,200 individuals, their relatives here in the Northern Rockies face threats like habitat fragmentation and rapid development in addition to the normal difficulties of life in the woods. Hechtel wishes that all the people who tuned in to the livestreams and online voting also channeled that energy not just into Katmai but also into broader efforts to conserve the animals they love by supporting conservation work like Vital Ground’s.
“Those of us who feel having bears is important have to do what we can to make sure they continue to live,” John said. “What you really need is bears being able to move across the landscape.”
Thoughtful tourism: a bear necessity
One way to learn about the reality of bears is to view them in the wild. The Katmai livestreams offer a chance to do this, as do in-person bear viewing trips. But the monetization and rapid growth of the bear-viewing industry also concerns Hechtel. While he told me he thinks it’s valuable to embrace the individuality of bears and connect with them on a more intimate level, he worries that the impacts of visitors at Katmai and elsewhere are understudied, overlooked and contributing to the possibility of “loving something to death.”
When John first visited Brooks in 1986 while helping with a National Geographic special, the viewing season ended in mid-September, giving bears less comfortable with humans’ presence ample chance to fish the falls before winter. With more people and longer viewing seasons, Hechtel thinks some bears are likely avoiding the area altogether. Anglers have also long been allowed to fish the Brooks River, but this year fishing was closed to everyone except subsistence users after four incidents of bears being fed by anglers. John says there are frequently photographers and tourists allowed into the river, too, where their behavior could have direct impacts on bears.
The excitement to see bears up-close is understandable, and for people who visit Alaska or places like Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in the Northern Rockies, it is often a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a wild grizzly. Hechtel shares their enthusiasm but told me he wants to see more discussions of how to have a positive impact and be responsible wildlife viewers. This includes giving wildlife plenty of space, following regulations and park ranger instructions, and in some places setting caps on the number of visitors.
Sharing his view is Michael Fitz, a former National Park Service ranger and the creator of Fat Bear Week, who writes of Brooks Falls, “Humans may be the river’s biggest ecological wildcard… and people alter the behavior of the bears that make the scene so special. The infrastructure needed to support thousands of visitors and their recreational activities invite conflict with bears.”
Responsible guides can help people be thoughtful in their tourism. When John led polar bear viewing trips to Churchill, Manitoba, he told me he always emphasized the importance of giving back to conservation so future generations could have equally awe-inspiring experiences in nature. He said he wishes this same conservation message was more central during guided bear viewing trips, events like Fat Bear Week and the social media buzz around other celebrity bears like Grand Teton’s Grizzly 399.
“I spend as much time as I possibly can trying to watch bears,” John said. “If you’re excited about the bears of Fat Bear Week, what I would like to see is people realizing that here’s a door to a fascinating world of complexity and interesting information about these amazing creatures. You can spend the rest of your life reading about and learning about bears and barely scratch the surface.”
For many of us at Vital Ground, a fascination with bears inspires our conservation work on their behalf. Our dual-pronged mission of protecting habitat for grizzlies and working with local communities and landowners to prevent conflicts is an investment in the long-term wellbeing of these wild creatures. Only if they have the space to thrive can we continue to learn about bears, experiencing the true wonder and true wildness they have to offer.