00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support of this podcast. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode, we're going to start piecing together and understanding where grizzly bears fit into the modern landscape and get into some subjects of controversy, like their current placement on the endangered Species list. But we're going to start all of this off by hearing a conversation with one of the most interesting human beings I have ever met. A hunting guide, a local legend, a man who has spent the majority of this life in the wilderness living around them, and a man who has one of the most harrowing bear charge stories I have ever heard. Do you remember the first time you encounter under a grizzly bear? 00:01:01 Speaker 2: I sure do. It wasn't a close range encounter, but I was bear hunting, and it was here in the valley floor, and it was not all that far from here, and it was on the edge of a wetland meadow system, and it was late in the day, early evening, and I was watching some bears they'll graze on forbes and grasses when they first come out of hibernation, and that's what was going on there. And the mosquitoes were just hatching, which I can tell you on average, the big hatches on the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth of May historically here earlier now, but I knew that from guiding, you know, hunters in the spring. You had it pretty good until about the twelfth of May. And then it was like they opened the hangars. 00:01:59 Speaker 3: And mosquito clouds and with all the wetlands in here that there was really unbelievable populations of mosquitoes. 00:02:14 Speaker 2: And I'll never forget I was in a cloud of mosquitoes and watching these black bears feeding. Was number of them actually in this meadow. Sism was quite big. And I saw something move in the timber across the neck of the metal where I was, and I looked and I was like, wow, there was It looked like the moon almost coming through the dark timber. And it was the face and the and the rough on this big silver tip and it was silver tip had to foot, but it's it really struck me how that face rough and head rough made that head so round appearing and and you know how the moon is kind of an off weight to silver, Yeah, that's exactly the color it was. And I got to watch that. I watched that bear until it was dark. It started to feed towards me, and I thought, you know, I'm just gonna, you know, head out. 00:03:27 Speaker 1: How far was he? 00:03:29 Speaker 2: You know that bear was under one hundred yards? 00:03:33 Speaker 1: Okay? 00:03:34 Speaker 2: Yeah? 00:03:35 Speaker 1: Yeah, so not like yeah, because at first I didn't know if you were talking about you know, three hundred three, four hundred yards away, but he's he's one hundred yards or less. Yeah, and that was the first one you ever encountered. Yep. Okay, Before we go any further, the state age has to be set. There's just some information that I think is essential for all of us to have before we hear more from this guy. Two years ago, my good friend Fred Finizi asked me to come up and do a day's worth of ONEX hunt seminars at the Youth Outdoor Education Rendezvous in Conden, Montana. It's a pretty sweet event that happens during the summer that teaches kids' real outdoor skills like backcountry first aid, fly casting, archery, firearm safety, and a whole lot more. Throughout the day. There after my class would end, I kept hearing this enthusiastic voice coming from the class over next to me. It was the wildlife conflict class, where kids were taught how to handle themselves in a potential bear charge situation, and the instructor was captivating, to say the least. I couldn't help a watch and listen as he would go over several different scenarios, all paired with examples from his real life experience, and the class always concluded with giving the kids the opportunity to try out their newly learned skills with a simulated bear charge and a train ainting can of bear spread. Kids loved that, as you could imagine. After watching this unfold a few times, I finally went to Fred and asked him who the instructor was and his response was, oh, man, that's Tom Parker, a legend in the Swan Valley. Now my curiosity was even more peaud. Tom had been a well known hunting guide that had been operating since the seventies and was known for his time spent in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and Mission Mountains. Known for his expertise in the backcountry known for his extensive amount of knowledge about all sorts of wildlife, particularly bears, which is why Fred asked him to teach that wildlife conflict class. He was a legitimate local legend. The more I asked around that day, the more my beliefs got confirmed, and I knew immediately that one day I needed to sit down with Tom and talk to him, but I didn't know exactly what about. As luck would have it, when the summer of twenty twenty five year Old Around and Backwoods University was now in existence and we had planned already to do some episodes on Grizzlies, I immediately thought of Tom Parker. This past July, when we were back in the Swan Valley, I set up a time to meet with Tom. This conversation takes place sitting in the living room of Tom's cabin. My wife Lacy and I rode over there one morning and we had coffee with Tom, along with his son and his daughter, and we talked for a bit as they shared with us some old photo albums from Tom's early guiding days. As I flipped through the pages looking at the different photographs, I saw pictures of the Montana skyline, mule teams going into the wilderness, successful hunt photos with moose, mountain goat, mountain lion, black bears, elk, mule deer, along with several photographs of live grizzlies. It was clear that this man had a story to tell, probably several stories. Tom was a houndsman at one point, and the story goes that for several years Tom ran his hounds without the use of GPS collars, and that he would rather just keep up with his dogs on foot and physically track them himself. This story is not grizzly related, but I still think it's worth sharing because you'll get an idea of the caliber person that we're dealing with before we get into the bear talk, which is fully worth sticking around for. Because I'm telling you this bear charge story that he has will make the hair on your next stand up. Here's Tom. 00:07:18 Speaker 2: I just couldn't see the utility for the way I hunted. You know, much of the hunting here. If you're guiding hunters, you're hunting on snow. Even before the tracking callers, what guys were using was a radio receiver. They had a collar that would put out a radio pulse, and I had never used ZoZ either, even though they were almost universally used by most of the guys. I knew that ran dogs. 00:07:49 Speaker 1: But how did you figure out that you could track your dogs like that? Did someone teach you how to do that when you were younger? Did you just figure it out? No? 00:07:57 Speaker 2: I just figured it out. I had some mentors that were houndsmen. But I guess what it was was I was in really good shape and I could largely keep up with my dogs, and if not, you know, it didn't take me long to close up whatever lead they had on me. 00:08:25 Speaker 1: And you're doing this mostly like in the wilderness. 00:08:27 Speaker 2: Yeah, in this country here, you know, all around the periphery of the Bob Marshall and Missions. 00:08:33 Speaker 1: Yeah. Wow, Yeah, I mean it's impressive. 00:08:37 Speaker 2: Yeah, you're going right up the side of a mountain. I mean it's I couldn't do it today in the same way. 00:08:44 Speaker 1: No way. 00:08:45 Speaker 2: I just don't have the same stamina that I had then, which was, you know, I could go day and night and largely not stop. 00:08:55 Speaker 1: If you're unfamiliar with the Bob Marshall Wilderness or the Mission Mountains, it's some sea, serious, rugged country. And if you've ever seen any modern houndsman work. Most of those folks can cover some serious ground. I mean really, they are typically some in shape dudes. The fact that Tom did this for years, keeping up with his dogs with nothing but his own tracking ability and bootsteps is wild to me. This guy is the real deal, and he's been at this for a long time. When did you start guiding around here? 00:09:26 Speaker 2: Nineteen seventy six. I went to work for a local outfitter and I was packing and guiding full time. At that time, you had to have worked three years full time in the outfitter classifications you wanted licensed in, which was I was hunting, fishing, and packing outfitter right, And I tested in nineteen seventy eight, and I've been licensed continuously as an outfitter ever since. I've been doing it my entire adult life. 00:10:03 Speaker 1: Did you guide any particular species more than others or were you doing a pretty good swath of stuff? 00:10:09 Speaker 2: You know? I guided all species that tags were available for, and it's changed substantially over the years. But back in those days, we had a really robust white tail population, of robust mule deer population, decent elk numbers, even though we're not as Montana elk habitats go. We're not, you know, the best black bear. We had really high black bear numbers in this country, and mountain lions high numbers. Moose tags were really tough to come by, and in fact there's none here now, and there's very few goat tags. They closed the grizzly hunting in nineteen seventy five. 00:11:04 Speaker 1: Yeah, and they've been they've been on the endangered species ever since then. Correct. 00:11:08 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:11:09 Speaker 1: Tom's guiding days began back in the nineteen seventies. And honestly, it's impossible for us to wrap our heads around the full extent of it, but I thought it was extremely important that we get some understanding of the vast amount of this man's experience spent in the mountains, hunting, guiding, tracking, and truly living out there before we get into the bear talk. But as you heard in the last few sentences, we're about to dive off into it. But before we start talking biology, ecology, endangered species delisting and all that stuff, I want you to hear the closest call with the grizzly that Tom has ever had. 00:11:45 Speaker 2: I had one grizzly that you know, it could have gone very wrong. If you know what to say. And I surprised one at really close range, and you know they can't help but believe that you came there purposely for them, and they're going to be defensive about that. 00:12:05 Speaker 1: See that you think that they're responding out to like self defense. 00:12:08 Speaker 2: Oh, it's defensive. 00:12:09 Speaker 1: How long ago is this? 00:12:10 Speaker 2: This would have been late seventies early eightieses. 00:12:15 Speaker 1: Were you on a hunt when this happened? 00:12:17 Speaker 2: I was actually scouting. I had a hunter coming that day, and I thought, I'm going to go in and scout this area before he gets here, and just see what's there. I learned a valuable lesson. It was May, mid to late May, and we kind of we don't have a lot of thunderstorms, at least in those days we didn't. They're more common now. And but there was a little thunder cell wasn't a big one that come over the missions and was come in my way, and so there was a lot of swirling air. Well, I just you know, when the high density bear habitat was swirling air, I just don't do that to this day. To this day, it's just being cognizant of wind drift. I have my whole career basically make a mental map as I'm out which way my wind is drifting, so that I know what I'll call is fouled or I'm probably recognized by my scent stream or not. And that goes for deer hunting, elk hunting, you know, you name it. That is particularly important for bears, especially if you're going to be around grizzy, because their nose is so good. What happened was I was walking on a really fairly tight It was an old logging trail that was really grown in and in a really high quality habitat, and it had been logged you know, I'm going to say probably fifteen or twenty years before. So there's lots of spruce and fir that gets quite thick. And I'm walking largely into the wind and into where the thunderstorm is going. But the wind is doing this, it's going in circles. And I had walked by this thicket and the winds swirled my scent into that thicket, and I was, you know, wanting to go in and see if I could find much sign, but I was like, you know, I want to get out of here. And I had no more than told myself that this probably isn't smart, and there was an explosion out of this thicket that I had just walked by. It was a very terrifying roar of this big I mean, he just roared at like nothing I'd ever heard, And at first I wasn't even sure what it was because I'd never heard a bear quite sound like that. Like I say, the cover is thick enough that I was partially obscured by a spruce tree. When he came out of the brush. He roared, brush and timber broke as he come out of there, and his jaws are literally fighting at the air. Oh yeah, he is not happy. 00:15:02 Speaker 1: He's mad. 00:15:02 Speaker 2: He is really mad. And I'm not that far. I'm about to the back end of the woodshed. 00:15:08 Speaker 1: I mean that's sub ten yards yea point, that's I mean that's it's like eight feet, like ten to twelve feet. 00:15:14 Speaker 2: And I froze behind this tree. But what I realized he is reacting to my sense the scent stream and with this swirling and he's literally biting at the only thing he can get a hold of at that point, which is my scent. So I knew better than to move. And this is before bear spray, and I did have a pistol on me, and I know how to shoot it well. This bear turned and faced away from me. What took me a split second. And I was young, adule and strong. There was a big down, large tree that has blown down against a fir tree that had some limbs just up from where I was. And when I saw that bear go behind a little spruce tree from where I was standing behind my tree, I jumped up on there and jumped up into that as hard and fast as I could go, and I started to climb, and I broke a limb. But the thing I had going for me, everything was moving because of the wind. Everything was moving, so that was kind of covered me right there. So the bear first he backtracked me in little ways, and then he realized that he's on the back track, and then he starts to come my way. I'm like, man, I'm not high enough. He can probably pluck me right out of here, which I could tell he would have hippy could have got older, so and so every time his head went behind, I'd make another, you know, pull myself up a couple more feet. So he came my way, and I thought, oh boy, here he's going to just track me right here. And he was all bristled up, and he's still going home. He's really huffing and unhappy. So then he went behind the tree and he just stopped like he was just he's just gonna see what's going on here. And he didn't track me to where I jumped up there. You know, I'm still not sure that I'm quite high enough that I cracked a couple of branches, and he come around the corner of that tree, I mean, ready to charge something. So I'm like, I'm gonna be quiet and not do anything. So he wondered actually away from me, towards towards a big alder swamp there, and at that point anytime the wind would blow harder to give me some cover on the noise, I went from the top of this fir tree, which wasn't tall enough, into a bare trunk lodge hole, and I shinnied up that thing, and I made some noise while I was shinnying, and he come right back and stood kind of by that screw sh tree, and we looked all around, but he never could see me, and he didn't try. I couldn't believe he didn't track me down right to that tree, which he could have, but I think it was all because of the way that my scent had been dispersed all through that area. 00:18:18 Speaker 1: From the wind swirling around. 00:18:20 Speaker 2: Yep. So I got up in the lodge pole and I hadn't seen him for about, I don't know, thirty minutes. I'm just hugging the tree, you know. And he got tiring, and the thunderstorm had kind of gone through, and I had started sliding down that bark out he comes out of the alders and he ran up there and he just and he just kept watching because at that point, I'm not even drawing a breath, if you know what I'm saying, I'm not gonna wrinkle any bark anymore. So well, I just hung on. I'm gonna say double that time again. And he had wandered back, and I thought, you know, he's got a bed sight or something down in those alders, and he's just waiting to see if I'm gonna show up again. Because what this bears thinking. He came for me once, he'll come for me again, and I'm gonna be ready for him. 00:19:14 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:19:14 Speaker 2: So when I finally got too tired, I just super quietly as quietly as I could. I got myself into the fir tree which was a lot quieter on the bark and stuff, and I had limbs and got down and I made a big bee line out of there, made a big like multi mile hike to get out of there without going backtracking to where which is largely where he was on my uh what had been my forward track going in there. 00:19:46 Speaker 1: Once you got down the ground, did you ever see him again and you just make it out of there? 00:19:50 Speaker 2: Nope? I made it out of there. 00:19:52 Speaker 1: That's a pretty harrowing one. 00:19:53 Speaker 2: It was pretty harrowing. If I would have done anything wrong, made a sound, not had the cover of that wind. 00:20:02 Speaker 1: It was. 00:20:03 Speaker 2: It was largely luck of a lot of circumstances and knowing enough not to move, you know, when he was when he was actively looking for me, right, and only move when he was behind another tree. 00:20:17 Speaker 1: Not to take off running. Yeah, it wouldn't have gone well. 00:20:21 Speaker 2: Moden have gone well, not at all. And I have inadvertently bumped bears off of kills, you know, grizzlies where they had every good reason to be defensive and field threatened where there was no ravens to indicate and no track sign until I just there. I am I'm right on it. I didn't linger, if you know, as soon as I saw what was going on. We've got a bear. You know, this is a grizzly barried carcass, and that noise we heard was him basically moving off the other side of this thing. And I've jumped other grizzlies out of beds literally from you're to the table in alder thickets. That the bear just broke as soon as they saw and so as soon as we saw them, they just broke and run. And you know, knock on wood. I've been fortunate to have the right bears on the right days. 00:21:15 Speaker 1: The right bear on the right day. I told y'all wasn't exaggerating about that bear charge story. It's something, but it's also a testament to how staying calm and thinking through a situation can work out in your benefit. As well as shining a light on Tom's unique perspective on bears. 00:21:33 Speaker 2: Most outdoor people I know find tremendous. I'll call it enjoyment, satisfaction, personal reward in seeing and interacting with nature of all kinds. And I don't see if you have a healthy understanding of the relative danger of that animal, which you go to Yellowstone, I think most people would say they enjoy seeing those bison and would enjoy seeing a grizzly bear if they saw one, and it's no different anywhere else in the habitat they exist. I would, you know, see that as an enjoyable experience for most people rather than an unpleasant one, if you know what I'm saying. It's that if our understanding of interacting with these animals is based on knowledge and what I'm gonna call a reality based understanding of their behavior, which really changes the the person if you will. For for the I think the average person about the relative danger versus ability to enjoy the experience. One of the things that we tell folks in the instruction, every encounter is different when you have a surprise encounter, even with a grizzly bear. You know, if Fred Pinisi had asked me when we were on a pack trip, you know, what do you do in that situation a surprise encounter? I said, you know, largely enjoy the opportunity to get to see that animal, because you don't get to see many of them. You and that animal just happened to cross paths on the on the landscape and they're not typically unless you do something really wrong a dangerous situation. But I can you know, stay from my own experience that if if you stay calm and you back up, give them space, that they will realize that you're not a threat. Bears charge, and most charges are false charges. I've never had a bear touch me, but I've been charged by many, but they always stopped and I never shot one of them. 00:24:25 Speaker 1: Let's face it, today there's a lot of opinions around grizzlies. They're an animal that just tends to pull out all kinds of emotions across the board. I was particularly interested in hearing Tom's, however, because his thoughts on them were built off of countless years of first hand experience. And like I said, this episode is just kicking off this subject, and now that we have a grasp on Tom's knowledge around the subject, I want to point the conversation towards what is going on with them currently, such as their current status on the endangered species list. 00:24:56 Speaker 2: This valley here, you know, back in the day when I I first started guiding here, the density of black bears was hard to believe. And on average, you know, people would ask me, you know how many grizzlies. Would you see to black bears? And I would generally on a hunt, I could show somebody and this is all hiking about twenty bears on an average hunt, and one about twenty to one, we'd see a grizzly. 00:25:41 Speaker 1: You know. 00:25:41 Speaker 2: One of the things that's very different is the habitat use and selection by these bears. When I first started guiding, one of the things you couldn't help but understand and realize in this backcountry was the importance of high elevation white bark pine to not only grizzly bears and black bears, but many other species, but you know, bird species, mammal species, and these pines produce you know, the cone produces a large number of really high fat contents seeds. I learned early on in the seventies because it was some of the last great big pine nut years that were super abundant production. Is that's where the all the bears in the country were they go. And these trees occur from sixty two hundred feet on up towards treeline and they grow in in fairly you know, big stands where you're in really good habitat for them, and they are fire resistant. They're very long lived on the landscape. Some of them are a thousand years old. These trees. 00:27:03 Speaker 1: Wow. 00:27:04 Speaker 2: Early in my guiding career, I had been in some what were extensive stands of white bark pines in these high elevation basins and seen you know, up the seven Grizzlies and a number of black bears exploiting these caches, and you know, flocks of Clark's nutcrackers, you know, coming and they're extracting the seeds, flying them to their you know, individual food caches and returning and they're they're they're making quite the ruckus. It was one of the most amazing ecological relationships that I have ever observed. To this day, it just teeming with life. These pine stands are gone. This is the biggest ecological change in this part of the world in my experience here. 00:28:04 Speaker 1: Do you know what happened to him? 00:28:06 Speaker 2: Yes, it is a combination of an exotic fungus which was brought here from Europe, pine in pine five needle pine seedlings, and fire suppression at the landscape level. You know, we effectively put out fires for a century, and that fire suppression worked against the pines in other words, created more competition and crowding for those trees, and they became stressed from that, which is kind of the story of the larger forest here. And it's at one level. And then the other issue is with climate change, the amplification of the bark beetle insects that are specific two various tree species, and that would be mountain pine beetle and western pine beetle for the ones that take out the white bark pine. 00:29:10 Speaker 1: Some multiple things working against it. Then all right, we got a lot of information there, so let's quickly break it down before we go any further forward. Grizzly bears were listed on the Endangered Species list in nineteen seventy five to prevent their extinction. If you remember from earlier, Tom started guiding in nineteen seventy six, so he started right after their listing, and he saw from his perspective a key ecological shift in the large scale loss of high elevation white bark pine habitat. And from this fact, once again we've found our recurring theme without really looking for it. How do humans influence grizzly bears today? You may ask, Well, one way is the loss of those white bark pines through a fungal disease called blister rust that resulted from an exotic fungus being brought in from Europe unintentionally, but we still brought it here. But I'm curious how that affects grizzly bears today, as well as Tom's thoughts on grizzly still being listed as endangered. Where do you think the overall health. 00:30:13 Speaker 2: Of grizzly bear populations are right now? You know today, there's a lot of discussion to delist them, and I would support that on the basis of numbers and proven you know, population growth, which is low but there if you will sure, and the evidence is you know that they're growing. I think it's three percent a year, and mortality is up because of that. The fact that these bears are utilizing low elevation and what I'm gonna call habitats that have lots of human activities and residents and roads in them. That was the first thing, you know, with the big pine die off here that was most amplified in the mid and late nineties mainly from pine beeedle, but also blister us, was that the bear habitat use you know, shifted from those places and high elevation habitats to low elevation and the periphery of these wildernesses and mountain complexes a lot more time spent down here trying to make up those laws calories. 00:32:00 Speaker 1: So you have basically a potential for more interactions with humans and conflicts because they don't have that higher elevation habitat anymore. Interesting. 00:32:11 Speaker 2: Yep, and they're you know, I still get up there quite a bit. And it isn't that there are not food resources there. I mean there are glacier lilies that they dig and eat, and all kinds of other plants and forbes and berries on good berry years, but the white bark pine component was a really big impact. I Mean, these bears were, you know, places I'd never seen them before. Yeah, you know, both grizzlies and black bears. And we had really high bear mortality in you know, in both of those food failure years, mainly from you know, bears just death coming into people's places and getting into trouble, hit on the highway, hit on other roads. And the bear population has never really recovered since then. It's never really come back. It's starting to show signs that it will, but the grizzly use also at that time changed dramatically, and you know, you saw bears all the way around the proofery of the Bob Marshall Complex that were out in the habitats where they previously they were just rarely seen, and now that's become quite common there For quite a while. It wasn't so much a population growth expansion as it was an expansion of the landscape and habitats in which they were willing to move to exploit and make up those lost food resources. 00:34:05 Speaker 1: Because they had to. 00:34:06 Speaker 2: They had to. 00:34:08 Speaker 1: Quick ecology lesson here. Remember this because it applies to virtually all elements of wildlife and wildlife management. You can never just do one thing, meaning every single action within an ecosystem has multiple, interconnected and sometimes unpredictable consequences. The Storytime just shared with us is a perfect example. We know that the wilderness in the mountains where he spent most of his time lost the majority of its high elevation white bark pine habitat. But what does that mean? What means we lost those trees, of course, but it also led to a lost food source for black bears and grizzly bears, which resulted in them having to venture out to areas and places where they had often not been before, if they had even been there at all, places at lower elevations, places where they crossed paths with humans, more more highways, more home sites, and so on. Actions have consequences, and that's important to note. 00:35:06 Speaker 2: It really is an amazing story of how small, unintended actions by humans that had you know, good and different intentions. 00:35:21 Speaker 1: So does that mean is there any you know, white pine left? Do you find it scattered in them ores? It just pretty much gone. 00:35:28 Speaker 2: I've been up in some of these burns in the white bark stands, and there's actually an encouraging amount of white bark pine regeneration that is bird planted that you know, they're finding some rush resistant trees on the landscape and they're planting those. 00:35:50 Speaker 1: So there's a chance that some of that habitat could return. 00:35:54 Speaker 2: Yep, it's going to be a long time because they they're usually at least fifty years old before they produce a comany. Oh, you know, you got to take the long view on this. But I'm i am more encouraged and hopeful than I was after the big pine beetle attack on these remnant trees. I'm based on the regeneration hunt that I'm seeing. 00:36:23 Speaker 1: Encouraged and hopeful to future for the bear populations going forward. 00:36:29 Speaker 2: Yeah, in terms of it's it's going to be a few generations out if you know what I'm saying, generations of people. But you know, my children will live to see hopefully some cone production on these trees regenerating in some of these high elevation stands. 00:36:52 Speaker 1: I think all of us would be better off in life if we learned a thing or two from Tom Parker. And I don't just mean learn how to behave if he ever encounter Baron, although that would be some good stuff to know, but rather his big picture view on wildlife and the places that they call home, and his hopefulness that we could see a return of better black bear and grizzly bear populations, as well as a delisting of them from the endangered species list. And speaking of the endangered species list, and what do y'all think should grizzlies be delisted or not? In fact, that's your homework for the time being, because next time we're diving further into the grizzly topic and how they fit into today's world. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease in This Country Life. If you like this episode, share it with a friend this week that you think would get a real good kick out of that bear charge story, and stick around because there's a whole lot more on the way.