Speaking of Bears The Bear Crisis and a Tale of Rewilding from Yosemite, Sequoia, and Other National Parks

About this book

As majestic as they are dangerous, and as timeless as they are current, bears continue to captivate readers. Speaking of Bears is not your average collection of stories. Rather it is the history, compiled from interviews with over 100 individuals, of how Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks, all in California's Sierra Nevada, created a human-bear problem so bad that there were eventually over 2,000 incidents in a single year. It then describes the pivotal moments during which park employees used trial-and-error, conducted research, invented devices, collaborated with other parks, and found funding to get the crisis back under control.

Speaking of Bears is for bear lovers, national park buffs, historians, wildlife managers, biologists, policy and grant-makers, and anyone who wants to know the who, what, where, when, and why of what once was a serious human-bear problem, and the path these parks took to correct it. Although these Sierran parks had some of the worst black bear problems in the country, hosted much of the research, and invented the bulk of the technological solutions, they were not the only ones. For that reason, intertwining stories from several other parks including Yellowstone, the Great Smoky Mountains, and Banff-Canada are included. For anyone seeking solutions to human-wildlife conflicts throughout the world, the lessons-learned are invaluable and widely applicable.

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Biography

Rachel Mazur ran the bear program in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks for nine years. She earned her Ph.D. from U.C. Davis studying black bear ecology, and also holds an M.S. in Forest Biology from the S.U.N.Y. College of Forestry and an M.P.A in Public Administration from Syracuse University. Besides publishing several scientific and popular articles on bears, she is the author of a children's book called, If You Were a Bear, from which all proceeds go to environmental education. To date, over 20 000 copies have sold, and in 2010, it won a 1st place Media Award from the National Association of Interpretation. Rachel currently works for the U.S. Forest Service and lives in Reno, Nevada with her husband, John, and her two cubs, Max and Wren.