We ended up with lots of sleepless nights and just basically taking catnaps. One day a bear biologist visited and I started to talk to him about the work he was doing in Northern New Hampshire. You definitely feel like you’re the outsider when you’re there. From icy polar bear country at 81° North to tropical Andean bear forests on the equator, Chris…
I’ve spent a lot of time in the wild in very isolated places, but in our first location, the Alaska Peninsula, the density of bears is like almost nowhere else on Earth. There aren’t many places in the world that feel that way. Never put food in your tent. Anchorage is on the front line of what we call the wildlife-human interface. You have to take every possible precaution. I work on that population and I work with members of the public in these rural towns in grizzly bear country to help them understand what grizzly bears are, what we need to do to have more of them here, how we can live with bears. February 24, 2016; Pretty WILD! For the past 20 years, British Ecologist Chris Morgan has worked as a wildlife researcher and educator on every continent where bears exist. When we were filming bears in the northwestern part of Alaska, we were in an area were the western Arctic caribou herd is. It’s great, because we can use places like Anchorage as a model for co-existence with humans. Grizzly bears – up to 2.5 metres tall with top weights of 550 kilos, equipped with sharp claws and predators’ jaws to match. We put in a heck of a lot of time looking for these half-million animals, so we could then find the bears.
They took it in like little sponges, like baby humans do. We ended up with lots of sleepless nights and just basically taking catnaps.
We were camping with electric fences around our tents – bear fences that zap 5,000 volts on a bear’s nose when it tries to come near your tent. I live in Washington State; we’ve got about 20 grizzly bears here. I was out there on and off for a year. Chris knows that conservation depends on people and if people do not see the connection between their own well-being and wildlife, then nothing will change. Hopefully it doesn’t in the first place because the other thing you do is keep your kitchen and your food storage area a hundred yards away from where you’re camping. The window will always be open. You will often hear Chris say, “What’s good for bears is good for people.” Chris has an acute sense of the power of media to bring hearts, minds, and resources towards conservation. Chris Morgan: Bears conjure up a sense of wild. They can’t persist over the long term without wild, connected habitat, and Alaska has plenty of that to offer. A lot of this Alaska pride comes through, like “Yes, we live in the wildest state in the Union.” It’s really refreshing. From icy polar bear country at 81° North to tropical Andean bear forests on the equator, Chris has sought adventure among the focus animals of his life – the bears of the world. Hopefully it doesn’t in the first place because the other thing you do is keep your kitchen and your food storage area a hundred yards away from where you’re camping.