[Coyote howl, music, and the sound of a geyser erupting]
You're watching Yellowstone InDepth.
This is a love story. And as often happens in a love
story, it starts with a chance encounter.
In Yellowstone, it seems, everyone loves the bears.
Our love affair begins anew with each sighting.
But it's a story that has played out since the first visitors
came to Yellowstone. And it's a love that has only
grown stronger over time.
[music]
"I think my favorite encounter with a bear..."
"Well let's see, that would have had to have been..."
"One time on Dunraven Pass..."
"When we were over by Norris..."
"I was working the visitor center desk and
I happened to look out the window..."
"And all of a sudden people came running around the corner saying,
â??There's a bear in the backyard! There's a bear in the backyard!'"
"Suddenly there were three of them, all right next to the road."
"The bear was only a few feet from the car..."
"The Grizzly bear was laying down for awhile
but then it started heading up, our way."
"And then my Dad and I were faces against the
window, like â??Oh my gosh!'"
"She screamed because the bear was right outside of her door."
"It looked at the people, too, and it didn't care."
"And they were right above us and it was just such a beautiful sight."
"It was amazing to see them."
"It was just so amazing."
"It was really cool."
"It was just so cool."
Yellowstone National Park is home to about 500 black bears
and anywhere from 100 to 200 grizzly bears.
The bears' admirers, however, number in the millions.
The first visitors and inhabitants in Yellowstone viewed
bears as a potential threat, an aggressive animal to be
respected, and a creature of great intelligence.
That intelligence enabled bears to quickly adapt to the
presence of an increasing number of people. It wasn't long
before they learned to use us to their best advantage.
[music and the sound of a photographic flash bulb being fired]
By the late 1800s, bears had figured out that where there
were people there was food. For the next eighty years,
a hallmark of every Yellowstone visit was looking for bears
begging along the roadside or watching them fed on food scraps
at the hotel garbage dumps. We loved them. They loved our lunch.
Kerry Gunther: "Visitors to Yellowstone National Park
in the early years would come to the dumps to see bears
feed on the garbage at night. They would also see bears
lining the roadsides, panhandling for human food handouts,
all along the park roads. And many visitors would stop and
feed bears and try to lure bears into interesting photographic
positions with food. Get bears inside their cars, behind their cameras,
in different positions to get pictures. There were also bears
coming into the roadside campgrounds every night,
joining people for dinner. Getting up on picnic tables,
eating people's food. Some bears would come up to the
back doors of hotels every night about the same time,
when they knew the kitchen scraps would be thrown
out the back door. And so people treated the bears as pets and
even some of the park employees actually had bear cubs as pets.
So it was really pretty crazy."
Having been raised on Yogi Bear and Winnie the Pooh,
park visitors often thought of Yellowstone's bears as
cartoon bears or teddy bears. And the bears themselves
often seemed to play up that image.
For a while, even the National Park Service got into the business
of bear feeding. Bears visited dumps behind park hotels,
and people visited the dumps to watch the bears.
Bear watching at the dumps became so popular that the
park service eventually built grandstands and hosted
nightly ranger programs for up to 3000 spectators.
The constant supply of human food, both at the dumps
and on the roadsides, made many bears realize that people
weren't a threat. They lost their fear of humans,
a process called habituation. They also became conditioned
to human foods. It was a dangerous combination.
About fifty people every summer were getting scratched,
bitten, or mauled. It was simply out of hand.
By 1970, park managers decided it was time for a little
tough love. The National Park Service, in a sweeping and
controversial move, closed all of the dumps inside
Yellowstone National Park within a few years.
Rangers cracked down on roadside feeding of bears.
After almost a century of eating human food and passing
on their beggar ways to their cubs, bears had to again turn
to wild foods. Some began raiding campgrounds for human food.
The worst offenders, both black bears and grizzlies, were killed.
It became a public relations nightmare for the National Park Service,
but the agency stuck by its mandate to protect and restore
natural conditions in the park. Fortunately, Yellowstone's bears
proved remarkably adaptable and eventually returned to a natural diet.
There still are some instances of habituated bears in Yellowstone.
Bear 264, for instance... a female grizzy who often was seen
between Mammoth and Norris. She became so tolerant of people
that she was possibly the most photographed bear in America.
She was struck and killed by a car in 2003.
Other, younger bears sometimes enter campgrounds,
most likely out of simple curiosity.
Kerry Gunther: "In recent years we've had a few bears
that have learned to crush tents. And some of them, I think,
have gotten a food reward because they'll crush a tent and
then dig through it as if they are looking for something.
We had one other bird who appeared to do it just for fun,
or play. He would walk up, belly flop on a tent, and then
just walk away. We never did catch that bear or prove
which bear it was, and it's no longer happening.
We think he outgrew it"
Today, Yellowstone's bears may be seen less often
than their roadside counterparts of old, but they still
exist in healthy numbers. When they do venture to a roadside,
it's because that road passes through their natural habitat,
not because they're expecting a handout. And human injuries due
to bears are down from fifty each summer to about one per year.
For some, Yellowstone will always be a disappointment
without the roadside beggar bears â?? the romance has lost
some of its pizzazz. For others, the love affair with
Yellowstone's bears has taken on a new depth and significance.
By appreciating them from a distance, we can better see
them for the wild bears that they are.
In Yellowstone, our love affair with the bears goes on.
But that love, as often happens, has evolved over time,
as we learn more.Â So how will we write this new chapter
our love story? What would we say now?
Dear Yellowstone's bears;
You are the bears of our imaginations,
our dreams,
and our nightmares.
You are the inspiration for the teddy bears that we grew up with,
and of the cartoon bears that make us laugh.
But you are not those bears.
You are wild.
You are unpredictable.
You exist on your own terms.
And for that we respect you.
And we love you.
[music]