Why Track at Bear?

Why track a bear or any other apex predators, across huge territories, dissecting scat? Well, from what I have been learning from Will Smith on the documentary series "Pole to Pole" and from grizzly bear advocate Doug Peacock on the Rewilding Earth Podcast - apex predators are an incredible indicator of the health of the entire ecosystem. Super helpful for conservation work. If the biggest predators are healthy, have enough food to eat, a large enough area to hunt and mate, and uncontaminated land and water, then you can almost guarantee that everyone else in the food web is surviving. 

Ecosystems thrive on diversity and interdependence, so everyone along that food chain has to have their needs met to support the apex predators, like a grizzly bear in Montana, an anaconda in the Amazon river, or a whale in the Southern Seas.

Here in September in Virginia, it is also approaching hunting season, the first week of October, and already "kill permit" season for culling the deer population. So as bow hunters are tracking deer, I have considered how I would not have the first clue of tracking a deer, other than waiting for it to appear. But strangely enough, hunters tracking deer is not unrelated to conservationists tracking their top-of-the-food-chain animals. Both are in the service of ecological balance and capacity. Our woodlands cannot carry the burden of uncontrolled deer herds, after we hunted to non-existence their natural predators, the wolves. So we have no apex predator to count and care for, we move onto population management, being the predator to keep the deer from starvation but also their destructive overeating of saplings and native plants, and their detrimental effects of sowing invasive species seed in their scat and spreading vector-carrying ticks.

Knowing that the top-dogs and king-of-the-jungle lions are not just awesome in their size and strength, but are markers of ecological success, brings a whole new appreciation for their existence. One based in reverence, not fear. And that feels like a big win.