On the southern bank of the Lamar River in Yellowstone National Park, a female grizzly bear forages for tubers, snout to the ground. For a day and a half, she eats and dozes in the same spot, ignoring the huge herd of bison that graze nearby. Much like humans, grizzlies are clever scavengers, feasting on rodents, trout, roots, nuts, berries, insects, and dead animals. But they paid a price for their omnivory, at least at Yellowstone. During the course “Grizzlies: From Dumps to Recovery?” at the Yellowstone Association Institute last September, I spent a weekend tracking grizzlies and learning about their reversals of fortune in the park.
A dozen of us—including a student, an artist, a car salesman, a mining archaeologist, and some retirees—stayed in log cabins at the Buffalo Ranch in the Lamar Valley, an area often called North America’s Serengeti. Led by wildlife biologist Mark Haroldson—who once spent ...
