McCain and the Grizzlies

The Grizzly Lady! It's Kate Kendall, intrepidly snowshoeing in Glacier. I was trying to keep up with her but my snowshoes kept sinking into the snow, which damaged my self-esteem.

Her study area is 80 percent the size of Switzerland. That's the Front Range in the background. The bears are sleeping in their dens. I wanted to find a bear den but she pointed out that the bears don't really sleep, and will snap their jaws [fangs?] at you if you mess with them. So instead we went to lunch at an old railroad hotel in the mountains.

Before you read my story on the grizzly study that McCain is always harping about, you really need to check out the footage obtained with motion-sensitive cameras in the Montana backcountry. This is from USGS and there's more where it came from.

Here's the story:

WEST GLACIER, Mont. -- If you've heard Sen. John McCain's stump speech, you've surely heard him talk about grizzly bears. The federal government, he declares with horror and astonishment, has spent $3 million to study grizzly bear DNA. "I don't know if it was a paternity issue or criminal," he jokes, "but it was a waste of money."

A McCain campaign commercial also tweaks the bear research: "Three million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Unbelievable."

Actually, it was a scientific and logistical triumph, argues Katherine Kendall, 56, mastermind of the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project.

Kendall is one tough field biologist: She's rafted wild rivers, forded swollen streams and hiked through remote backcountry for weeks at a time. She goes to places inhabited by all manner of large creatures with sharp teeth. She was once charged by an enraged grizzly. She stared the bear down.

So she can handle a growling politician -- even one now poised to become the Republican nominee for president.

"It's pretty cool that we pulled it off," Kendall said of her project while giving a tour of the rugged terrain near Glacier National Park. "Nobody got seriously hurt. We collected a ton of bear hair. We stayed on budget."

McCain, who has railed against government pork for two decades, cites three beneficiaries of what he calls wasteful spending in his TV ad "Outrageous." One is the infamous "bridge to nowhere," a project in Alaska, pushed by the Republican congressional delegation, that would link a sparsely populated island with the mainland. Another is a museum at the site of the 1969 Woodstock music festival, which would be supported with a million-dollar earmark co-sponsored by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

And the third is the grizzly project. McCain has been jabbing rhetorically at Kendall's study since it began in 2003, including from the floor of the Senate:

"Approach a bear: 'That bear cub over there claims you are his father, and we need to take your DNA.' Approach another bear: 'Two hikers had their food stolen by a bear, and we think it is you. We have to get the DNA.' The DNA doesn't fit, you got to acquit, if I might."

Kendall, on orders from her superiors, will not directly respond to McCain ("I really can't wade into that"), but she clearly doesn't find his jibes amusing, much less accurate. The truth is, her project is focused not on the DNA of grizzly bears, but on counting them.

As a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, she set out to get the first head count of grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem. She and her co-workers at the USGS have used DNA primarily as a bear-identifying tool. Her project also employed barbed wire and homemade bear bait brewed up from rotten fish and cattle blood.

"There's never been any information about the status of this population. We didn't know what was going on -- until this study," Kendall said.

[Click here to keep reading.]

Every time I see this picture I shudder with terror even though the rational part of my brain tells me that bar bears never attack. It's the wolverine-looking critter [foreground] that needs to be worried.

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