The Last Grizzly of Paradise Valley Natural World

This is my home - the Cascade Mountains in western Canada.

My name is Jeff Turner and I've spent the past 25 years

making wildlife documentaries about wild animals and wild places.

I spent my childhood roaming the forests, valleys and peaks of this range.

It's what led me to my career as a wildlife filmmaker.

I have photographed wildlife around the world but now I'm coming home

to spend the next year filming the wildlife in these mountains.

My home is not a national park or protected area.

There have been many changes since I was a boy.

But by seeking out the wildlife of my childhood -

black bears,

coyotes,

mule deer -

I hope to understand the state of the wild around my home today.

And there is one animal I want to find that, for me,

symbolizes Canada's wild lands more than any other.

The grizzly bear.

But I've never seen one in these mountains and I wonder

are there any left?

Though the nature here has to make its way alongside all the uses

humans make of the land,

my home is still one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.

These woods where I live are on the edge of the world between humans

and the wild. Beyond us, the forests stretch, uninhabited,

for 30 miles through the mountains.

When I was just a kid,

I first saw the animal that was going to change my life.

The only problem was that it was dead.

In the early 70s, a local rancher friend discovered a grizzly bear

was killing cows on their summer pasture up in the mountains.

Eventually, he caught up with the bear and shot it.

Years later, I discovered Aldo Leopold,

one of the first American ecologists

to write, more than 60 years ago, about protecting nature.

In his book, A Sand County Almanac, he wrote about the death

of the last grizzly bear in Arizona

and it really struck a nerve with me.

What I didn't know then was how much grizzly bears

were going to play a role in my life.

When I started out making wildlife documentaries,

I seemed to be drawn to making films about bears.

Over the past 25 years,

I have met and filmed hundreds of grizzly bears.

I now have such a close relationship with the grizzly,

that on my last film I was even able to swim with them

and film how they caught fish under water.

To me, the grizzly has always been an indication

of the state of nature in a place.

Grizzlies are at the top of the food chain and a real challenge

for man to get along with.

Their presence in a natural community is no better sign

that things are going well for the rest of the environment there.

For years, the grizzly bear has been declining in numbers

in the North Cascades.

There's lots of human pressure on this landscape.

But if I can still find one here

it would give me hope for the rest of the wildlife in these mountains.

It's mid-winter and bears are hibernating,

so I'll see what other animals I can find.

Temperatures can dip to minus 20 for a week or more.

January is generally a quiet time of the year for all wildlife.

But it's usually a different story around home.

These Bohemian Waxwings are drawn in

to feed on one of the crab apple trees.

We put out seeds and attract all sorts

of these wintering forest birds like the redpolls and chickadees.

It's great having this little bit of wild so close to home.

But because we feed them, it's not a very good indication of the true state of the natural community.

I need to get out and spend more time getting a feel

for these mountains again.

My work has taken me away so much I haven't spent the time

roaming these hills as I did when I was younger.

So I decide it's time for a camping trip.

Growing up here it was easy to take this place for granted.

It wasn't until I left that I truly began to appreciate it.

My 16-year-old son Logan is joining me.

Logan has been coming on filming trips since he was just a baby

but we haven't spent the time getting to know our own mountains

as I did with my father.

With his growing interest in photography,

I'm looking forward to his help on this project.

One of the things I enjoy about photography is the way

taking pictures can sometimes change how you look at a familiar place.

Time-lapse photography is a wonderful way to get a sense of the landscape

and the processes that happen beyond the usual level of our awareness.

It's easy to forget that the stars are not fixed

and that we live on a world that is constantly moving.

I'm surprised we could see the lights from the city of Vancouver,

100 miles away.

It's a reminder of how much the human influence

extends around here now.

100 years ago, there were still huge areas of wilderness

that animals had all to themselves. Not any more.

With our powerful machines, we can go anywhere.

It means that wildlife and people are bumping into one another

much more than ever before.

This is especially true in my old home town of Princeton,

about 12 miles downstream from where I live today.

It's pretty much the same as when I was growing up

but there have been some changes.

CAR TOOTS HORN

Mule deer have moved into these suburban neighbourhoods where I grew up.

These deer have access to lawns, flowers and ornamental shrubs

that are nurtured and pampered by the local residents.

And there aren't any wild predators here.

The town deer have also learned to exploit another source

of human-created food.

Although we don't like to see wild animals rummaging in our leftovers,

to the deer, there's nothing wrong with this.

But what I think is really interesting about having the deer in town now

is how they're allowing us to re-think our ideas of community.

Aldo Leopold wrote about the need to expand the human concept of community

to include the non-human things

like soil, water, plants and wildlife.

It's been 60 years since Leopold's proposition but in my old home town

I think we're beginning to grasp the concept.

In late March, the winter melt begins.

After the snow melts, the forests in the lower valley bloom with spring flowers.

Now is the time to find bear families out of their winter dens.

And not far from my home,

I'm thrilled to find a mother black bear and her cubs.

It looks like she has two, about three to four months old.

They're still so tiny.

But these cubs would have been only the size of a squirrel

when they were born in the den in February.

Mother bears can look a little ragged in the spring.

This one's walked through a patch of burdock plants.

She's covered in burrs.

By feeding around these plants,

bears help distribute their seeds throughout the forest.

A bear's limbs are jointed very much like a human.

Some of the things they do can look pretty funny.

This cub looks like he's had one drink too many.

It feels good to find a mother bear with her cubs.

It makes me optimistic that, as the season moves on, I'll be able find a grizzly up in the mountains.

May is when the balsam root -

we call it wild sunflower - blooms in the forest meadows

around my home.

For me it's a sign that the mother deer will soon have their fawns.

This is the time of the year when the forest grasses and flowers

are at their peak nutritional value.

For the wood's deer, it's a time to make up for the poor feed

they've endured over winter, especially the mothers who have been pregnant.

Even though it's June, there's still a lot of snow in the high country.

But the long days of sun really begin to turn up the heat,

and the rivers swell with meltwater.

Water is one of the key components of life.

Aldo Leopold often wrote about the importance of water

to the landscape, especially in the dry American southwest.

The east slopes of the Cascade Mountains

are also dry so this meltwater is critical

to the network of lakes and ponds

which are a big attraction for the people that live here -

as it is for some of the other members of this community.

Every year a family of osprey returns to the lake near our home to nest.

The increasing human presence on the lake so far doesn't seem to be bothering them much.

But then I notice that the male osprey is flying elsewhere to fish, where there aren't any speedboats.

The osprey is an ambush hunter.

Flying above the lake, they look for the ripples

of a fish's fin near the surface.

They have to have incredible eyesight and impeccable timing.

The osprey goes deep into the lake, even sinking below the tip of its upraised wings.

It's a lot of work for the male osprey to get

a fish back to his nest, and he has to do this several times a day.

He needs his feathers dry to get the best lift.

With power boats criss-crossing his nest site lake,

the osprey will have a harder time feeding his family this summer.

POWERBOAT ZOOMS PAST

We're not used to thinking about the needs of wild animals around us.

We can't just relegate wild nature to parks and nature preserves.

There's not enough of them.

We need to learn to share the land.

And for many species, their needs are on a scale that makes it easy to share.

Loons are one of the most ancient species of all modern birds.

They've been around for millions of years.

They're excellent swimmers...

..but their feet are so far back on their bodies,

they're awkward on land.

It means their nests need to be very close to the shore, so you tend

to only find loons on lakes that don't have powerboat activity.

Loon numbers aren't what they once were, but they still do make

a good living on these quiet lakes.

The great blue heron is another species that does well

around backwater ponds.

But they also have to have a good healthy forest nearby for nesting.

It can be a pretty tough life

being the smallest heron chick on the nest.

It seems that the smaller the animal,

the easier it is to share our space with it.

These small ponds represent a massive breeding ground for insects.

They support a network of creatures like this spotted sandpiper,

and this dragonfly.

Dragonflies are fierce predators but, being so small,

they can slip between the cracks in our busy human world

and find all the room they need to survive.

We have lots of dragonflies that live in the small ponds

in our front garden.

This type of wildlife is easy to miss.

So it can be difficult to appreciate all the nature around us using just our human senses.

But with this camera I can take up to 2,000 pictures a second

and open up a window into the world of nature

that we couldn't see any other way.

It's beautiful how these dragonflies move.

Their two sets of wings work independently,

giving them incredible manoeuvrability and speed.

Watching the beauty and grace of these small creatures got me wondering

what else there is in nature around us that we can't really see.

Logan and I took the camera down to the river and I couldn't believe how

beautiful even something as simple as the flow of water over the rocks

could be when you slowed it down.

You can see how clear the water is -

a good indicator of the health of our mountain ecosystem.

The smaller creatures can usually find enough space around us

to meet their needs.

But in these mountains, a grizzly needs about 100 square miles

to find enough food to survive.

Their just isn't enough true wilderness left in our world

for them to live free from contact with humans.

In America, the grizzly ran out of wilderness 100 years ago.

Today, we're at that point in my home mountains.

It's no wonder the grizzlies are so hard to find.

However, I do have lots of experience finding grizzly bears.

In the past, in most places where I filmed bears, like here in

coastal Alaska, I've always had one really important thing going for me.

The bears were coming out into the open looking for something - salmon.

The salmon in the rivers are the bait that lures

these normally shy animals out into the open, where I can film them.

But finding the grizzly bear in my home mountains is going to be another story.

Here there are no salmon.

The rivers on this side of the Cascade Mountains drain east into waterways that have dams

which prevent the salmon from getting up into these mountains.

Most of the food for bears in this country is forest plants

but it's very hard to spot them feeding under the trees.

I know in other mountain ranges they go up into the high country in the summer to eat alpine plants.

But after searching the area I hadn't seen a single bear.

I thought I might be able to spot one or two and focus my search on the ground.

But there's too much high country and the bears

are too few and far between to make it practical to use the helicopter.

I'll have to think of something else.

After the helicopter trip, I wanted to go out and find the mother black bear and cubs again.

I really needed a bear fix.

I knew just where to find her.

She was in exactly the same spot as before.

Mother bears with young cubs will hang out in a very small area of forest if they feel safe.

Young cubs are vulnerable.

They can't run very far or fast.

But they're excellent climbers.

So as long as they're in the forest they're pretty safe.

But watching them hanging from the branches in the top of this dead tree 25 metres above the ground,

I wasn't sure how safe these little daredevils really were.

It was then I noticed there were three cubs.

I don't know where the third had been hiding when I saw them before.

I also noticed that the mother bear had managed to rub off

most of her burrs.

She looked to be in much better shape than I remembered.

She started calling the cubs to come down from the tree.

But she looked a little nervous and agitated.

Maybe my presence was starting to bother her.

Then I heard something moving through the bush to my right.

It was another mother bear with cubs.

There were two bear families in the same spot.

This mother bear that had just arrived was the one

that I'd filmed last time.

The one with the burrs and the two cubs.

This was a different family.

The mother of the three cubs was a bigger and older bear.

I could see that now.

I realised that the bear with the two cubs must be the daughter of the older looking mother

because the two families were so relaxed with one another.

In bear society, mothers will share their home territory with their female offspring.

I'm always amazed by how animals I think I know so well can still surprise me.

I wouldn't have thought that two mother bears with five cubs between them

could have shared this little patch of forest for as long as they did.

We could learn a lot from them.

The problems we face in sharing the land with wildlife like bears resides more with us than with them.

It's not that bears can't live near people,

it's that people won't let them.

There was one animal I remember seeing a lot of when I was growing up,

but so far this year, I have yet to catch a glimpse of one.

Then a friend found a family of them living in the woods.

And this was something that I had never seen before.

A coyote den.

I've seen lots of coyotes over the years

but I've never seen pups at a den.

They're only a few weeks old and just starting to explore the world outside the den.

Coyote pups are the same size as wolf pups when they're born but they mature much faster.

In a couple of weeks these guys will be weaned and eating meat.

It looks like six pups, which is average.

But Coyotes can have up to 19.

It must make for a crowded den so it's no surprise they're coming out here to spread out and sleep.

But pup mortality is high.

Three out of four won't survive to adulthood.

Now that it's mid-July and most of the snow has melted from the high country,

I can get out to look for bears again.

This remote mountain pass is one place I know grizzlies have been seen in the past.

Aldo Leopold wrote that a place was only true wilderness

if you could ride a horse across it for two weeks without seeing any sign of man.

Those days are long gone here in these mountains but there's still

enough space for me to feel the wildness of this place.

I wonder if it feels that way to a grizzly, though.

We haven't found any bears yet but we are seeing some animals that like this high, open country.

A mountain goat's hooves have a soft inner pad which gives them excellent grip on these rocky slopes.

Further down the valley we find a herd of mothers and young.

Mountain goats don't like to stray too far from the rocky cliffs

as this is their main protection from predators.

But sometimes they're forced to come down off the cliff to find fresh green feed.

Mountain goats are actually not true goats at all.

They're more closely related to antelopes.

Not all of the country where I need to look for animals is wilderness.

Much of the valley where I live is ranch land.

Agriculture is an important part of the community around here.

Although agriculture seems a gentle use of the land, throughout history

it has probably been the single biggest source of conflict between humans and the natural world.

During Aldo Leopold's era, the sweeping changes to the landscape he witnessed in the American west

were largely the result of the cattle industry's war on predators.

I have filmed wolves hunting in packs, bringing down large prey.

Like the grizzly bear, they are formidable predators.

Ranchers found it so challenging to live with these animals

that they were systematically exterminated across their entire range in America.

The wolves are long gone from these mountains where I live.

Although there are signs that they're making a tentative comeback.

But there is one predator left around here the ranchers find easier to get along with -

the coyote, which doesn't hunt in large packs and whose prey is often much smaller.

Like grasshoppers.

Though this youngster still needs a bit of practice getting the technique right.

Sometimes you just have to slow down and focus.

As August draws to a close the shrinking day length

begins to turn the leaves on the aspen trees from green to gold.

River levels drop as all the snow in the mountains has melted by the end of summer.

Autumn is my favourite time of the year.

I love the clear days and crisp, cold nights.

And the colours are beautiful.

But the vast majority of the forest in our part of the world is evergreen.

These trees are adapted to the colder northern climates.

Their leaves have a thin needle shape which reduces their exposure to cold.

In recent years there's been a problem in the forest around our home.

Some evergreen trees are changing colour now, but it's not due to the season.

These trees are dying.

I wanted to see the creature that is causing all this destruction.

I was surprised at how many bugs we caught in just one night.

They seem to be so small to be causing such destruction.

These insects have always been a part of this forest ecosystem

but their numbers have been rising and no-one is quite sure why,

although global warming is probably having an effect.

These tiny bugs are mountain pine beetles.

They burrow under the bark and lay eggs which hatch into larvae

that chew their way around the tree girdling it,

cutting off the flow of nutrients and water between the roots and crown, eventually killing the tree.

The scale at which this is impacting the landscape is huge.

Thousands of acres of forest are dead or dying across the eastern slopes of the Cascade mountains.

With warmer winters and drier summers, the beetle has been gaining ground.

But what has been a bane for the forest has been a boon for the logging industry.

More forests are being cut now to keep up with the beetle kill then ever before.

And the speed with which we can cut down the trees is much faster than ever.

Our powerful machines can rip through the forest at an alarming rate.

What used to take a team of men a week can now be done in a day or less.

All of these dead trees end up at the local sawmill, which keeps the economy of the town rolling.

Our machines are so powerful we can go anywhere and do anything we want to the land.

We are chewing up the forest and spitting it out.

The scale at which we are changing the landscape now is unprecedented.

It's never been more critical to show respect to the land and its inhabitants.

Although the actual logging can be destructive, it is in some ways the least damaging of the impacts.

The forest can grow back.

Wildlife can and does live in these areas as the trees re-grow.

The bigger impact I think is the access that the logging creates.

Roads into previously pristine valleys.

There is virtually no place left in this entire mountain range that can't be reached by road.

And everywhere there are roads, there are people.

Today our human world overlays the natural habitat of wildlife

so completely that they cannot escape our presence.

They have nowhere left to hide.

But seeing this little black bear feeding on these rosehips beside the road

is the sign I've been waiting for.

The fall berry season is going to give me my best chance to find a grizzly.

It's September and time for me to get back into the mountains.

Still, finding any grizzly in this massive landscape is going to be huge challenge.

Especially since there are so few of them left.

As well, our window is short.

Snow will start to bury this high country next month.

The North Cascade Mountains are a steep, rugged range.

It's a lot of work getting around.

But the bears' main source of food to fatten them up for winter is here.

These are blueberries and huckleberries and they only grow up high in the mountains.

They are full of sugar and excellent eating.

Logan is the fourth generation of the family coming up

into these mountains to pick berries in the fall.

The strategy is to scan these open berry slopes looking for bears.

I remember years ago when I could sit in a spot like this

and count up to a dozen or more black bears at one time.

After looking for hours, Logan and I only see one.

It's a little black bear.

This little bear seemed a bit nervous of us

so standing up and rubbing on this tree is his way of showing off a bit,

making sure we understand how big he is.

I really enjoy it when wild animals treat me like a natural part of their world.

Fall is a critical time for bears.

These tiny berries are all these mountain bears have available to them to fatten up for winter.

This guy seems to be doing well.

His coat is rich and black.

Despite everything I've seen this year, I'm still optimistic.

Spending time with Logan,

I realise each generation seems to be more aware of conservation.

When I was growing up we never thought we'd run out of the wild.

But Logan's generation is developing a strong ethic,

a personal responsibility to the natural world.

Time is running out for me and my search for the grizzly bear in my home mountains.

Fall is coming to an end and I still haven't found any sign of them.

From that first dead bear I saw as a boy,

through my long career filming bears,

the grizzly has been a major part of my life.

In the relationship I have with bears, it seems though,

that I'm the one that is benefiting the most.

What are the bears getting from me?

What can I give them?

We get so much from nature and we give so little back.

Aldo Leopold wrote more than 60 years ago that the way

to saving the natural ecosystems of this planet,

and ultimately ourselves,

was by developing a personal relationship to the land and its myriad inhabitants.

It was only by walking this path

that we would ever be able to learn to love the wild

enough to want to save it.

For me the doorway to that path has been through the grizzly bear.

It was October, and the first snows were beginning to dust the peaks.

I knew this was my last chance to find a grizzly in my home mountains.

On this late autumn day

I finally found my grizzly.

Even though it was a long way away,

as soon as I spotted it I knew right away what it was.

The size and shape of its head and body,

the colour of its back and hump.

Even though I couldn't get any closer, it didn't really matter.

Just knowing that they're here is all the proof I need.

We need to learn to love the wild,

and I think there is no better place to start than with the grizzly.

100 years ago Aldo Leopold saw the last grizzly in Arizona.

The fact that today, I can still find a grizzly bear in my home mountains,

despite the impact of our use on the land,

gives me hope for the future.

One of my inspirations for making this film was a short story

written by Aldo Leopold, from his famous book, A Sand County Almanac.

It's a story of a grizzly in the mountains of Arizona.

And although it happened 100 years ago, Leopold's insights still ring true today.

In 1909, Aldo Leopold came to work in eastern Arizona

at a time when the American Wild West was coming to an end.

Leopold was a man who enjoyed nature and the outdoors.

He revelled in the raw wildness of this new country.

His love for this wilderness was captured in his story called Escudilla,

which was about a mountain and the grizzly bear that lived upon it.

The mountain was the symbol of the foundation of wild nature

that was present and visible in all aspects of his life in Arizona.

After graduating from the Yale School of Forestry,

Leopold got a job in the Apache National Forest measuring the areas of virgin timber,

to determine the extent of the lumber that could be removed.

He wrote about his mixed feelings in converting these beautiful trees

into remote notebook figures, representing hypothetical lumber piles.

But he could always emerge from a long and tiring day in the woods

to be refreshed by the sight of the great mountain hanging on the horizon.

As he wrote it, "But on the next ridge a cold wind

"roaring across a sea of pines blew his doubts away..."

MAN: On the far shore hung Escudilla.

MAN: There was in fact only one place from which

you did not see Escudilla on the skyline.

That was the top of Escudilla itself.

Up there, you could not see the mountain but you could feel it.

The reason was the big bear.

Old Big Foot was a robber bear, and Escudilla was his castle.

No-one ever saw the old bear,

but in the muddy springs around the base of the cliffs

you saw his incredible tracks.

Seeing them made the most hard-bitten cowboys aware of bear.

Wherever they rode they saw the mountain,

and when they saw the mountain they thought of bear.

Campfire conversation ran to beef, bails and bear.

Big Foot claimed for his own only a cow a year,

and a few square miles of useless rock.

But his personality pervaded the county.

Leopold lived in the American west at a time when it was undergoing massive change.

Progress was coming to cattle country.

And progress had various emissaries.

One was the first transcontinental automobilist.

Automobiles were just beginning to replace the horse as the main means of transport.

Another was a member of the women's suffrage movement

that travelled the land promoting the new and radical idea

that women should have the same rights to vote as men.

Another change saw the stringing of the first telephone lines through the wilderness.

Now even the far flung corners of the land were being connected

by wires that could transmit instantaneous messages.

And Leopold also wrote about another emissary of progress,

but one with a much darker mission.

LEOPOLD: A government trapper, a sort of St George in overalls...

..seeking dragons to slay at government expense.

"Were there", he asked, "any destructive animals in need of slaying?"

Yes, there was the big bear.

The trapper packed his mule and headed for Escudilla.

In a month he was back...

..his mule staggering under a heavy hide.

There was only one barn in town big enough to dry it on.

He had tried traps, poison and all his usual wiles to no avail.

He had erected a set-gun in a defile,

through which only the bear could pass, and waited.

The last grizzly walked into the string

and shot himself.

GUNSHOT

It was June.

The pelt was foul.

Patchy and worthless.

It seemed to us rather an insult to deny the last grizzly

the chance to leave a good pelt as a memorial to his race.

It was only after we pondered on these things that

we began to wonder who wrote the rules for progress.

Since the beginning, time had gnawed at the basaltic hulk of Escudilla,

wasting, waiting and building.

Time built three things on the old mountain.

A venerable aspect, a community of minor animals and plants,

and a grizzly.

The government trapper who took the grizzly

knew he had made Escudilla safe for cows.

He did not know he had toppled the spire off an edifice,

a building since the morning stars sang together.

We forest officers who acquiesced in the extinguishment of the bear

knew a local rancher who had ploughed up a dagger

engraved with the name of one of Coronado's captains.

We spoke harshly of the Spaniards who, in their zeal for gold and converts,

had needlessly extinguished the native Indians.

It did not occur to us that we, too, were the captains of an invasion

too sure of its own righteousness.

Escudilla still hangs on the horizon.

But when you see it, you no longer think of bear.

It's only a mountain now.

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