William Randolph Hearst Art He Had but Looked for
Earlier newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst built a sprawling castle in San Simeon, before he was elected to Congress, before he amassed a famous drove of European fine art, he had eyes for something as bold but even more than reckless. He sent a newspaper reporter out to capture a grizzly bear – if they yet existed. It was 1889, after modern society had brought the species to the brink of extinction.
Later a six-month search,San Francisco Examinerreporter Allen Kelley and his team had their bear: A grouping of trappers, reportedly using honey and mutton, had lured a grizzly into a cage, and Kelley'south team then bought that 1,100-pound bear. He was named Monarch – for the Hearst newspaper tagline, "Monarch of the Dailies" – and transported by rail to San Francisco, where he spent the next 22 years in captivity, mostly at the San Francisco Zoo, on display for thousands. He became the model for the behave depicted on the California state flag.
The last known California grizzly was seen in 1924, but Monarch's likeness persists on the state flag.
It's in part that flag that'south guiding a group of researchers to revisit the grizzly bear's place in California – and consider whether it's a good thought to reintroduce the species.
Sometime Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger bought this brown acquit sculpture in Colorado and placed it in the hallway of the Capitol but outside the governor's office. Former Gov. Jerry Brown reportedly advised current Gov. Gavin Newsom not to bear on it, because kids on field trips put their hands all over information technology; Brown cautioned Newsom to avoid "bacteria bear."
"They are our symbol, our state flag," says Alexis Mychajliw, a postdoctoral research fellow in holocene paleoecology at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. "It'due south our identity as a state. To me, that is really sorry nosotros don't have the identity of our state anymore, considering of our own actions."
Mychajliw is one of more than than 40 members of the growing California Grizzly Research Network, an interdisciplinary group devoted to studying the genetics, ecology, history and geography of California grizzlies. Depending on what they find – and how their research informs public stance – it'south possible that grizzlies could be reintroduced to the country.
"Instead of making guesses, we can really look at the fossil record," Mychajliw says. "Instead of trying to projection from present day, nosotros tin can await and say, OK how did grizzly bears interact with blackness bears; where did they adopt to alive; were they shaped by forces like climate, or other bears?"
Mychajliw is studying the composition of grizzly bones to understand what they ate. She has fragments from a few dozen skeletons across the state – including pieces from the drove at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, where she speaks March 21 – and she'south had access to just one full skeleton, the but i that's known: Monarch's.
Today, Monarch'due south taxidermied skin remains in San Francisco at the California Academy of Sciences. His skeleton is in UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
Mychajliw reflects on that continuation of the cruelty that Monarch suffered in life: "He's split across the bay, fifty-fifty in death."
Before HUMANS OR BLACK BEARS OR GRIZZLY BEARS ROAMED NORTH AMERICA, many fiercer species did. During the Pleistocene era – which began some ii.6 million years agone then ended with the last water ice historic period about 11,700 years ago – mammoths, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves (larger than modern wolves) and short-faced bears, which reached 2,500 pounds – more than double the size of grizzlies – were all office of the ecosystem. Grizzly bears haven't been hither much longer than people, and for much of their coexistence, the species thrived, even when people did not.
The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History's drove includes seven fragments of Monterey County grizzly skeletons, including a skull donated past old Showtime Lady Lou Henry Hoover. A collection of that size, says Alexis Mychajliw, "is a pretty big contribution for an establishment."
It's unknown how many grizzlies lived aslope the estimated 350,000 indigenous California people before European colonization. As Europeans settled and Native American civilizations began to plummet, grizzlies likely feasted on nuts and other food resources left behind, and had the addition of European livestock as a food source.
During the gold rush, guesses put the grizzly population at 10,000 – about the same density as present-day Alaska, where 40,000 grizzly bears alive in a country mass 4 times the size.
"They were doing quite well," says Peter Alagona, an associate professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara and the founder/facilitator of the Grizzly Research Network. "It was Anglo-American colonization – shooting, poisoning, other forms of persecution – that collection the population from 10,000 to zippo within 75 years, one human lifetime."
Remnants of one grizzly trap remain at Palo Corona Regional Park, in a grove of redwood trees side by side to a creek. Almost likely trappers would've transported the bears to town for infamous bull vs. bear battles.
At that place was a time, non that long ago, that Alagona viewed the history of the California grizzly every bit nil more than a cautionary tale, illustrating how humans tin can and so readily disrupt ecological balance. Then, in 2014, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity submitted a petition to the U.S. Section of Fish and Wildlife calling upon the agency to brand a program to help the species recover across its native range. (The grizzly was been listed equally a threatened species in most of North America since 1975.)
"The Service has failed to develop recovery strategies for ecosystems that still comprise substantial and sufficient suitable habitat, which is not but an abdication of the Service'south responsibilities under the Endangered Species Human action as a legal affair, but leaves grizzly bears endangered across significant portions of their range as a biological fact," the petition stated.
That petition was a non-starter, but Alagona tuned in. There was a viable question about how to all-time protect a threatened species, which does still exist in Due north America in a few pockets, including in Idaho, Montana, the Northern Cascades of Washington, and in Yellowstone National Park.
"It's something I entered into with some trepidation," Alagona says. "It'south fascinating, but potentially controversial, and fifty-fifty a little scary for some folks. The petition was really just a reflection of how some people were starting to think differently nearly a possible future for coexistence of wildlife."
That was the genesis of the California Grizzly Inquiry Network, which now counts nearly four dozen researchers at half a dozen institutions amid its ranks. Grant funding is enabling Alagona to focus increasingly on the grizzly project, while others in different disciplines dive securely into answering questions about grizzlies: What was their range? What did they consume? How would they do if reintroduced to California today?
Their findings will eventually atomic number 82 to a different question that's just partly scientific:Should nosotros reintroduce the grizzly comport?
"The goal of our group is to provide data," Alagona says, "in guild to have an intelligent, civil, evidence-based discussion. There'south no equation that can spit out the right answer. It's got to be function of a democratic process.
"The reason nosotros don't have these animals hither at present is because a small number of people, mainly white men, took it into their own easily to eliminate these animals. There was no ceremonious discussion, there was no democratic process. At that place was none of that. We can do those things that were kind of taken away from us. We tin can written report the issue, we can talk nigh it in a civil manner."
Before DAWN 1 MORNING Terminal SEPTEMBER,Mychajliw and a staff geologist from the La Brea Tar Pits left Los Angeles in a van wrapped in images of prehistoric creatures, like saber-toothed cats and mammoths. After a end in Santa Barbara for bagels and in San Luis Obispo to return a borrowed grizzly bear skull to Cal Poly, they arrived at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History by early afternoon.
Alexis Mychajliw traveled in July 2018 to the Caribbean area isle of Trinidad to search for Ice Age fossils in asphaltic deposits. She works primarily at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.
Mychajliw was guided to the basement, where the jaws and fragments of skulls of several grizzly bears are stored. Her piece of work there was fast: She chooses a spot with no museum label or glue and where she'due south least likely to damage the os, then uses a dremel to excerpt a fingernail-sized slice of bone. The whole process takes just nigh 10 minutes.
Because grizzlies were well-nigh extinct as museums began collecting specimens similar this, very few remain, maybe 100. Mychajliw has been all over the state, visiting museums and universities and private collections of hunters in pursuit of os samples. (And in some cases beyond – samples from Yale and Harvard might be Monterey Canton bears.)
Back in a lab at UC Irvine, Mychajliw demineralizes the os, a process that results in spongy collagen. Next, it's freeze-dried "into what looks similar cotton wool processed – whipped and white." She can excerpt pieces using tweezers to examine the ratio of carbon to nitrogen to go a picture of what a particular bear ate.
But the bone sample still needs to be dated, which requires an additional step: super-heating the cotton candy-like substance until it becomes a gas ("you have a glass vial that is filled with only gas and it's terrifying – yous could inhale your sample," Mychajliw says). It's get-go sealed with a flame torch in a quartz tube, so heated, then baked overnight and transformed into graphite.
She then runs tests on the bone-turned-graphite to determine the age of the bone, and the bear it came from.
Because she hasn't yet published her current research on the os samples, including those from the P.G. museum, Mychajliw won't say definitively what she's finding, but she offers a crude preview: As omnivores, California grizzly bears consumed a mix of plants and small mammals, as well equally meat scavenged from larger animals.
In Alaska, they've been observed feeding on whale carcasses – something that might've also happened in coastal Monterey County, Mychajliw says.
"They are of import components of ecosystems," she says. "They get eat fish, then get out part of the carcass. Through that behavior, they human activity every bit link betwixt aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and fertilize the forest.
"They could be helping to shape the forest and we just don't know it. In that location are lots of reasons big mammals shape the overall health of an ecosystem."
BEFORE THE CALIFORNIA GRIZZLY WENT EXTINCT, it was one of 15 subspecies of Ursus arctos, or brown bears. Now the California grizzly, along with ii other brownish bears, is considered extinct. But another 12 subspecies – like the Ussuri brown comport in Japan, Eurasian brown carry in Europe and Syrian brown carry in the Middle East – all the same exist.
The omnivorous and opportunistic species lives all over the planet, from high mountains to coast to desert, with a diet adapted to each environment. Alagona is peculiarly interested in how chocolate-brown bears have continued to exercise well in Europe, even more than densely populated than the U.S., as an example of how humans and brown bears tin coexist.
"Nosotros don't demand to be afraid of animals every bit long as we respect them," he says.
He blames Hollywood for portraying grizzlies as attackers, when there are but two circumstances in which attacks on humans are likely: when bears are emboldened by access to human food, or when a person encounters a protective mom and cub. They're less likely than wolves to become for cattle, Alagona says, though they might take sheep.
If bears did come back to California, role of the decision-making procedure on where to put them would be based on habitat availability. Information technology would too be based on where people would be willing to accept them.
At that place are iv potential areas: the Sierra Nevada; northeastern California, on the Modoc Plateau – where grey wolves began reappearing starting in 2011; the northwest, in the Klamath-Trinity surface area; and the Los Padres National Forest, which stretches from Southern California all the way to Monterey County.
Alagona is talking to a colleague in St. Petersburg, Russia, about how humans have been able to ranch and alive alongside grizzlies in remote areas. "We can live with these animals, we really can," he says. "Nosotros do it in Europe and Alaska. Educating people is a huge part of management. Nosotros simply have to want to, and commit to doing it."
Even if grizzlies are reintroduced and they practice well, well-nigh Californians will never see one. The overwhelming majority of the state'southward population is urban. Just those millions of people who might never come across a grizzly are stakeholders likewise, Alagona says: "What I'm really later here is to aggrandize the constituency of people who care almost this, so it'southward not a agglomeration of old white dudes in a conference room, but society as a whole."
He sees an opportunity not to punt to over-extended bureaucrats in the Fish and Wildlife Service, merely to invite scientists – and the public – to do the work of conservation planning. Whether or not this exercise leads to reintroducing grizzly bears, it'southward a hazard to reframe the public procedure as it relates to conservation decisions.
And that procedure is in large part about public perception. And depending on how that unfolds, at that place is a reasonable run a risk, Alagona says, that grizzlies could be reintroduced to California in his lifetime.
"If y'all would've asked me ii years ago, I would've said no manner, this is an academic exercise," he says. "Now, here's what I remember: The main impediment is not ecological, it'south not genetic. Information technology's about imagination. It's about whether people are willing to append their disbelief and imagine an alternative possible future. People in Europe don't accept to do that, because the bears accept been there the whole fourth dimension.
"When I started this project, I was very skeptical," Alagona says. "At present that I've been working on this for three years, I've come to believe it's not most as crazy as information technology originally sounded."
Source: https://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/cover/the-california-grizzly-has-been-extinct-for-a-generation-now-researchers-are-considering-whether-to/article_3e229a40-4b4d-11e9-bbe1-87d7b51bf82d.html
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