The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Polar bears and penguins

Near the North Pole, examining a submarine.

When we were getting ready to go to Antarctica, people warned us about polar bears. Polar bears, they pointed out, are fast, big, smart, dangerous. They are more inclined than other bears to view humans as fabulous taste explosions.

No, we said. We're going to the Antarctic, not the Arctic. There are no polar bears in Antarctica.

Oh yeah. Well, polar bears eat people!

During our stay, groups from our station occasionally visited passing cruise ships. The station manager and lab manager gave talks about the U.S. Antarctic Program. Then, Q & A for all of us from the station.

They told you that was a bear costume?

The ship passengers knew they would not be seeing polar bears. But some asked why. Ice and snow everywhere – perfect polar bear country. Why no big white bears?

Here are my responses – after looking it up – to the Big Questions.

Are there polar bears in Antarctica?
You already know: no.

Here's a way you might guess this from personal experience. Have you ever seen a photograph of a polar bear eating a penguin? Probably not. But if polar bears and penguins lived in the same place, there'd be photos. So far, no one's told me they've seen such a photo. Although there are zoos in this world, so who knows.


Why aren't there polar bears in Antarctica?

History! Really ancient history. There's a nice video by Sally Gillies that tells just how ancient. Basically, the bear family evolved in the northern hemisphere. As bears developed exciting new spin-offs (panda! sun bear! sloth bear!), some bears moved south. To this day, there are more bear species in the northern hemisphere than the south. The closest bear to Antarctica is the spectacled bear, which rambled south along the Andes. It gets no further down than northwest Argentina.

(In the Bronx Zoo.) Look at the size of those feet.

What with continents drifting apart and all, Antarctica is too far for a bear to swim. Up north, polar bears, who recently spun off from grizzly bears, had a smooth transition across land from warmer climates to icy ones. From there they could stroll onto sea ice. Or swim feasible distances.


So even if people weren't making life very difficult for bears (ask the extinct Atlas bear of northern Africa), and they were free to explore new niches, it'd be a long time, if ever, before a bear got far enough south to be selected for Antarctic living. And when we talk about people making life difficult for polar bears, the biggest factor is climate change.



Should there be polar bears in Antarctica?

No. You've heard that things are getting bad for polar bears. Because of Arctic warming, they're losing sea ice to hunt from. Habitat is melting out from under those huge furry feet.

Plate tectonics? What does that have to do with me?

You know somebody somewhere is thinking maybe polar bears could be transplanted to Antarctica. Sure, climate chaos is happening there, too, but for now there's still sea ice. Assisted migration! What could be bad?

Ask any penguin what could be bad. They will say “Awwwk! I see no problem! Awwwk!” That is because penguins are stupid about land predators. When early explorers brought sled dogs to Antarctica, penguins would walk up to the tethered dogs. “Awwwk! What's your story, furball?” The dogs would tear them to pieces. More penguins would walk up. “Awwwk! Are you new kids?” The dogs would tear them to pieces. More penguins would walk up. “Awwwk! Can I touch your fur?” And so on.

In the Svalbard Archipelago, eating a walrus. Gulls stand by ready to help.

Polar bears could devastate penguin colonies. In fact, polar bears are already turning to northern bird colonies. They're trying to survive by eating prey so small they previously didn't bother with them. Lots and lots of eggs.


So yeah no. Polar bears are an unpredictable bunch. Antarctic wildlife is also subject to the grievous insults of climate change. They don't need rapacious northerners on top of that.

Carpetbaggers, stay away!

Bears? Sure, bring 'em on. There's plenty of room. What ARE bears, anyway?

 

Shared food, shared beds

Trying to get close to deer is one thing. There were some animals in that forest that it was wiser not to get close to, and others who thought it might be good to get close to us. Bears were in the first category – we were afraid of them – and luckily not in the second category.

 One camper went off by himself, and just about bumped into a bear. Terrified, he ran away. Terrified, the bear ran the other way. When the kid stopped running he was seriously lost. When the camp noticed he was gone, there was a huge search. There was even a helicopter. He was located and rescued the next day. (How this played out for the bear we never knew. But definitely no helicopter.)

 I didn't see bears there myself, but sometimes we saw bear signs. Once when we went on an overnight hike, a bear dropped by, removed a locked cabinet from a tree where it had been hung, tore it open, and ate our cornflakes. I was astonished, since I had a low opinion of cornflakes. Why bother?

Other animals were more willing to get close to campers. A certain chipmunk commandeered a camper's sleeping bag, probably because the camper was storing quasi-illicit candy and snacks in there. The stuffing also pulled out well and quickly made up into a splendid chipmunk bed.

 When the camper got in her bag and discovered the chipmunk, the chipmunk did not flee. It was willing to share. But when the camper attempted to evict the chipmunk, the chipmunk was annoyed, and bit, and we all found out about the whole sordid story, and rabies shots were insisted on. 

Have I mentioned what a great camp this was? There were wild animals, and there was drama.

 

The Fox and the Bear

For many years my friend Mary Lynn Fischer lived with QuickView, an Arctic Fox (Alopex lagopus). Quickie's immediate family had been raised for the exotic pet trade; her ancestors just before that were bred for fur farms; and before that they had been wild.

Quickie herself was both tame and wild. When you came over to the house, Quickie was liable to give you a horrified look and vanish for the rest of your visit. But you might also be eating dinner and feel little forepaws on your back when Quickie hopped up on the back of furniture to peer over your shoulder and see what you were eating.

Mary built a cage with zoo-level security in order to get a Fish & Game permit to possess a wild animal, and she lived in fear that the government would one day decide that people shouldn't be able to keep wildlife in suburbia and confiscate Quickie. At any given moment Quickie might be in the cage, or she might be playing with the dog, curled up on the bed, or requesting admission to her favorite cranny, the freezer compartment of the refrigerator.

Mary has an intellectual as well as an emotional interest in animals (and a great deal of first-hand knowledge). Here's part of an email she recently sent me about her relationship with Quickie:

For years I had wondered about the well known propensity of Alopex to taming. People have  come up with all sorts of theories about it, but the truth is more interesting than one might think.

Arctic Foxes tend to find and attach themselves to Polar Bears, who tend to hate Arctic Foxes. The fox follows the bear and scavenges from the bear's kills. From the fox's perspective, I guess, it's a symbiosis. From the bear's, it's a nuisance.

I examined pictures of the lives of these two coexistent creatures doing whatever it is that they do, over the years, and then it struck me: The fox shadows the bear, wakes the bear up when it sleeps in. ("Wake up! Wake up y'ol' bear! It's time to rise and shine and fetch me breakfast!") The bears grit their teeth at these ministrations. They seem not to particularly dote on their foxes, but the foxes adore their bears. They understand perfectly how useful a large predator can be. There are even pictures of Arctic Foxes fighting over "custody" of a particular bear ("Hey! This is MY bear. Go get your own bear!") When they find an unattached bear they shadow him or her, just out of paw range—actually a rather large distance. They wait until the bear makes a kill. Then they stand about thinking how hungry they are until the bear has had a surfeit and goes to sleep, whereat they take their tithe.

The bear surely does not miss the amount that an Alopex extracts on a good year. It's the principle of the thing. Some bears are relatively tolerant and good humored. Still others look darkly at the fox hovering nearby, and attempt to sleep on top of the carcass, to prevent the fox from even thinking of taking a bit. This does not work. Every now and then, a bear---goaded beyond everything that is holy by the cheek of the little foxes, has been observed to try to take a swipe at them.

My entire life with Quickie was marked by occasional explosions when Whit forgot yet again, and put his slippers beside the bed.  And then there would be the sight of a very happy fox, rushing off importantly with slippers dangling from her mouth, with Whit in hot pursuit.  He never learned. After a while, he took to buying the particular cheap slippers he fancied by the case. It's amazing how quickly a small animal with jaws like a machine vise can get through a case of rubber huaraches. And of course, he had trained her. Because Quickie thought it was wonderful. She didn't quite understand why this was true, but all she had to do was to steal his slippers, and no matter how tired Whit was, he'd rise like Lazarus from the grave, uttering terrible threats ("you'd make up into a great pair of mittens!") and chase her. And chase games are the one thing that little foxes worldwide love. 

This symbiotic relationship with foxes is not limited to the high arctic. The foxes in the Israeli desert loved to shadow hyenas in troops, and the hyenas felt about them the same way that the Polar Bears felt about Alopex. Yet Macdonald relates that few hyenas could be seen without a retinue of foxes at their heels. Occasionally, one of them got much too cheeky, and ended up inside the hyena. But that was rare. I don't think anyone has witnessed a Polar Bear actually getting its fox, but it wasn't for want of trying.

Reflecting on this one day, and weighing all the scientific speculation about the ease with which Alopex can be tamed, I had a sudden realization. Quickie took to captivity the way a duck takes to water. She loved it. She used to look nervously over her shoulder at the spectre of freedom, it seemed to me. She loved standing in front of me in the kitchen, and describing by her glances and little cries, just what it was that she wanted from me. That was when I got it:

I was the fox's bear.

The Horror at Arlington

The friends I was visiting in Massachusetts had a groundhog in their yard. They saw it regularly, usually grazing the rich growth of plants next to the gate between the driveway and the back yard. Where I live in California, we have no groundhogs, although I have seen their cousins the marmots in the Sierras. The groundhog, Marmota monax, is the same animal as a woodchuck.

My friends said it was very fat, appropriate for an animal that hibernates in the winter. If you say to a groundhog, “Wow, you're a real tub of lard!” it's a compliment. (But don't get addicted to saying this.)

One afternoon, while we were studying sangria in the yard, my friend said “Look! Groundhog! Quick!” I couldn't turn around in time to see it dash across the yard and dive under the toolshed. I did hear it, because it was very noisy. Pounding feet, rattling against plants -- we practically heard change rattling in its pockets. A bear makes less noise.

We went to the other side of the shed, and the groundhog put its nose out and looked at us thoughtfully. It had a nice face. With its body safely underground, or undershed, it wasn't worried by our regard. It wasn't all that interested, either.

That weekend there was a barbecue to celebrate the graduation of a son of the house. As soon as we went out to the yard, my friend asked “What is that horrible smell? Like sewer gas?” While I stood around with condiments saying “Where?” two quick-thinking guys spotted a heap of dung, carried it away on shovels, and covered the spot where it had been with leaves.

It had been a really dreadful smell, apparently, a foul smell, a disgusting smell, an H. P. Lovecraft smell (i.e., too awful for human vocabulary to describe). And it had been an enormous ghastly heap of dung. They said it must have been the groundhog. They said the groundhog had to go.

I said it didn't sound like the work of a groundhog, but since I hadn't actually viewed it, and since there was little enthusiasm in the crowd for a detailed description of the monstrosity, my comments lacked impact. My friends said they hadn't minded the groundhog before, but literal partypooping was intolerable. They would ask the city to trap it and take it far away. “It might not have been the groundhog,” I squeaked. But the conversation swept relentlessly to daintier matters.

When I got home, I did an internet search for “groundhog” and “scat.” I hoped to clear the groundhog's name and save it from captivity and exile. Just as I had suspected, groundhog scat consists of dry pellets of plant matter. It is not as big as The Thing that appeared at the party. And since groundhogs are vegetarians, it's not very stinky.

Anxious to avert injustice, I hastened to present this testimony I hoped would exonerate the groundhog. My friend was amused. She was glad to hear that the creature was innocent, but my argument was beside the point. That morning her husband had gotten up early and seen the groundhog in the yard – playing with a baby groundhog.

She had a baby. The groundhog was safe now, even if that had been groundhog poop at the party. She was safe even if she pooped in the yard every day. She would be safe even if she went out in the front yard and flung poop at passing cars.

The question of who the actual offender was could now be considered at leisure. What creature is big enough to create the heap described? No bears or moose currently roam the back yards of Arlington, as far as I know. So our current suspect is a raccoon. They're stinky omnivores. They're not large animals (except the one you saw that time), but they like to accumulate scat in one spot, a “latrine.” Perhaps it's a way of saying “This is my real estate!” Sort of like renting a porta-potty. Maybe they repel competitors with the sheer volume and stench of the thing.

This strategy is ineffective against people with shovels. If raccoons wish to be welcomed in Arlington, latrines won't work. The raccoons will need to invest in actual plumbing.

Downtime for Beasts

To attract wildlife, we've historically offered water, food, and salty snacks. Hunters and ecotourists can both be found hanging around waterholes. Some people put out bird feeders to watch birds. Others put out cheap corn to attract deer year-round so they'll be available in hunting season. Animals have always been drawn to salt licks. That draws people, which is why there were all those early settlements called French Lick, Boone's Lick, Blue Lick, etc. So some people put out salt blocks.

I propose a new way of attracting animals: spa weekends.

Okay, animals don't much observe the work week, so let's just say spa vacations. Spas. Places animals could visit for food, water, salty snacks – and a nice back-scratch, mudbath, massage, or pedicure.

Animals are always trying to get their backs scratched, rubbing against trees, fences, and one another in the attempt. They'd flock to a spot where toothed surfaces were mounted at convenient heights and angles. There'd be rubbing, and groaning, and clouds of fur, and great happiness.

It might take a little more ingenuity to get animals to make pedicure and massage appointments, but a nicely-scratched back ought to lower their sales resistance, to say nothing of a good hot soak.

Most animals love a nice bath, and while they are typically envisioned frolicking in a crystalline lake or a mountain stream, they gladly take hot water when they can get it. The famous Japanese snow monkeys (a species of macaque) appear to spend most of the winter in hot springs.

In the mid-90s, a cinnamon bear (a black bear with natural auburn coloring) was raiding garbage cans and fruit trees in Monrovia, California. While on the prowl he discovered the pleasures of jacuzzis. After he ate, he'd relax in a hot tub. Some people didn't like a scum of coarse black hair and bear grease in their tubs, but Connie and Gary Potter took advantage of the photo-op and videotaped the bear, called Samson, luxuriating in their tub.

One day the Potters saw Samson rolling in agony on their lawn. Concerned, they called Fish & Game to help. By the time the wardens came, Samson, who had incautiously eaten a plastic bag, felt better. Because he was a known “nuisance bear,” they trapped him. They found that he was an old bear, with worn-down teeth, who wouldn't be able to support himself in the wild.

Fish & Game has views on the unwisdom of people feeding formidable wild animals. (F&G would get the blame if Samson gummed a Chihuahua.) They have experience with relocating garbage-eating bears (who return to favored garbage dumps with lightning speed). They also know that zoos are full up with black bears. They announced that they would euthanize Samson. Horrified, the Potters took their videos of Samson bathing to the television news. The public was appalled, as anyone would be who can identify with an innocent woodland creature lolling in a hot tub after a satisfying meal of garbage. The governor issued a stay of execution.

The Orange County Zoo, with a sharper eye to public relations than F&G, announced that it would take Samson in. They built him a big enclosure with a waterfall and a pool. (But no hot tub, and I am betting no salty snacks.) He lived there for years, until he got so sick he really did have to be euthanized.

So if we already have wildlife trying to sign up for the spa treatment without encouragement, think of the business we could do if we were trying. Spas where they didn't have to dodge wardens, where the salty snacks were laid out on buffets, where dogs wouldn't bark at them.

We'd need to be clever. We'd need to be sure that a rabbit coming out of the massage room (blissfully relaxed), didn't encounter a coyote (invigorated by a back-scratching session), back into a bobcat exiting a meditation class, jump sideways and bump into a moose heading for the jacuzzi, and startle a bear into swallowing a loofah. Since none of these animals really want to meet humans either, we'd do it by monitoring video cameras and not opening gates that would let predator and prey or any kind of enemies into the same space.

(It wouldn't be right to use spas to attract animals for hunting purposes. What if the custom spread? What if manicurists and masseurs went Sweeney Todd on their clientele? Think about it.)

Why on earth would we do this? It's not like animals can pay. We would do it because it would be cool, because we like animals, because it would be interesting to see what happened, and mostly, as the story of Samson shows, because we would get Such. Cool. Video.

A Worrisome Precedent

A black bear is being sought by New Jersey police on suspicion of stealing a minivan. Officer Dave Dehard came across the stolen minivan abandoned by the side of the road with dented door panels and a broken passenger window. Looking for clues..., Dehard found the front seat covered with drool, candy wrappers, and coarse black hair... Police theorize that the bear smelled candy..., smashed the window, then “accidentally released the emergency brake” while foraging inside, causing the vehicle to roll down a hill. ---The Week

“Mom, Dad, I theorize that a black bear smelled brownies, entered our home through the dog door, was attracted to your purse by the smell of gum, inadvertently swallowed a twenty dollar bill, lurched against the computer, accidentally linking to that porn site, which automatically linked to a couple other porn sites, and then exited through the mud room, probably picking up a six-pack of the Moosehead as he went. I knew you'd be upset about the mess, and I was trying to clean up, but I only got as far as vacuuming up a whole bunch of coarse black hair.”

                   


“Sweetheart, I just came home a minute ago and found the place like this. I theorize that a black bear smelled that shaving cream you got on the rug the other day, entered our home via the chimney, found itself in our bedroom, spritzed itself with your aftershave, and then exuberantly rolled on the bed, dislodging that pair of somebody's boxer shorts which must have somehow gotten accidentally included with our dry cleaning. What a mess! I got what must be bear drool on my clothes when I came in, so I took them off right away. Ugh! Bear drool! So gross! Hold me!”

                                        

 “Captain, my theory: looks like the perp was a black bear. Bear smells something in the evidence room, sneaks into the station house. Maybe hid in the back of a squad car, lay low in the garage until the day shift went home. Then made unsuccessful attempt to break and enter the evidence room. Grabbed and consumed snacks from the detective bureau desks. Then detected candy scent in that piñata of the commissioner the detectives have. While attempting to access the candy the suspect climbed onto a computer that was logged on, through the use of a back paw got into the discretionary fund, accidentally clicked with its claw to bet it all on European stock indexes, then, hearing a noise, exited out the side. Doesn't it seem to you like there's more coarse black hair than usual lying around? Too bad about the money. You wouldn't really expect good investments from a bear. Though of course if the indexes had gone the other way, he'd be a total hero.”

                                                            

                                                                                                      
Editors—I hypothesize that a bear, attracted by the lure of publication, which the animal took for the scent of fame and for the deep primordial call of self-expression, made its way into a small office in the downtown area of a Western city, where it raked its long curved claws across a keyboard with a grace surprising in such a large creature--one typically thought of as ungainly, and one which does not invariably feed only upon the canonical “roots and berries,” but on rare occasions reveals itself as a formidable predator--creating a short work of apparently lighthearted prose. Accidentally releasing its own innate sense of literary restraint, the bear, or if not a bear, a person strongly identifying with bears, composed a brief fantasia addressing the human penchant for relentlessly deterministic explanations of animal behavior, and the equally marked human penchant to employ these explanations in self-justification. The innocent animal—and I knowingly use the term “innocent” for its several meanings such as “not cognizant of current normal literary channels,” and “free of the imputation of original sin,” and “hasn't killed anyone yet, or even hurt anyone, and knocking over dumpsters is hardly a felony”--then flicked a claw rapidly across the metallic device which it simultaneously found disquietingly natural and so familiar as to be almost invisible, sending the odd missive on its electronic way, exhaled a bitter gust that seemed to speak of the high mountain ranges, spun once in the office chair, and lumbered away, leaving the workspace littered with drool, candy wrappers, and coarse black hair.