Animal Pictures For Kids Biography
For Harry Reynolds, a wildlife biologist and an authority on Gobi bears, Latin labels aren’t what count. “No matter how they end up being classified, Gobi bears are unique,” he says. “They’re the only bear of any kind that dwells exclusively in desert habitat. By adaptation and learning, they’ve found a way to live in one of the most extreme environments on the planet.”Reynolds has been a student and admirer of bears since his teens, when he apprenticed with brothers John and Frank Craighead, the godfathers of grizzly studies. He went on to spend 33 years working for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, capturing close to 1,800 grizzlies for research and management.
In recent years Reynolds and Frank Craighead’s son, Derek, director of the science and education nonprofit Craighead Beringia South, have been teaming up with Mongolian researchers to answer some basic but urgent questions about Gobi bears: How many are left? What areas are critical to their survival? Are their numbers so depleted that they should be rounded up and bred in captivity?
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A female named Borte, after Genghis Khan’s queen, investigates an automatic camera. When first captured in 2006, Borte weighed a healthy 165 pounds. Now she has dropped to 125, probably because of the rigors of raising cubs. Photo Credit: National Geographic
A misguided effort to expand livestock herding in southern Mongolia during the middle of the 20th century, when the country was a satellite state of the Soviet Union, brought more people to the Gobi, and with them more guns. Hunting and overgrazing of the desert’s marginal vegetation took a heavy toll on wildlife, and by 1980 Gobi bears had lost much of their former range and population.
One positive legacy of the Soviet era is the Great Gobi Strictly Protected Area(GGSPA), a sprawling nature preserve established in 1976 and declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1990. Today the reserve is the Gobi bear’s sole refuge. Access is allowed only by permission.
Invited to lead a study here in 2005, Reynolds and a team of GGSPA rangers, along with field biologists from the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, began capturing Gobi bears and fitting them with GPS radio collars. Over the next five years the team managed to collar and track ten different animals, some of them more than once. (The collars are designed to fall off after about a year.)
One unit of the GGSPA, an area labeled Gobi A, spans some 17,000 square miles. But Reynolds confirmed that most of the bears’ movements were closely bound to three minor ranges of the Altay Mountains, which make up just a quarter of Gobi A. The reason was obvious: Each of those highland areas, though separated by 40 to 60 miles of desolate desert floor, harbors several natural oases. Some of the watering holes resemble a desert wanderer’s dream—emerald havens of papyrus and poplar shading clear, spring-fed pools and streams. Others are little more than algae-clotted seeps. But even these offer enough water for a thirsty bear to drink its fill.
Spring days were gradually warming, but nights were still cold enough to freeze my water bottle when I joined Reynolds on my first expedition to Gobi A. Mornings began with hot tea followed by the roar of motorcycles as rangers left for the oases, where steel box traps had been set in hopes of capturing bears. Day after day the scouts returned with a shrug: No luck.
Although the elusive bears remained invisible, we frequently came across signs of their presence—and clues to the secret of their survival. Fresh holes revealed where bears had dug up thick, starchy roots of wild rhubarb, a staple of their diet. Still-moist dung piles contained sprouts of wild onion and bunchgrass, along with a few early wildflower blossoms. Bear droppings occasionally included bits of bone and fur from unlucky gerbils and hamsters. More commonly the dung held remnants of beetles and plump wingless grasshoppers. A picture began to form of how a grizzly might carve out a niche here at the outer edge of life’s possibilities.
Amgalan Luvsandambaa, at the time assistant director of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, showed me nitre bushes, currant bushes, and other shrubs that would bear berries by summer—“if,” he said, “storms bring enough rain.”
“If” is the operative word when it comes to rain in the Gobi. A long, withering drought gripped the desert from 1993 to 2007, and during those years Mongolian authorities put out livestock grain at oases to supplement the bears’ dwindling food supply. The drought finally relented, but rangers continue providing the extra nourishment, though grain has sometimes been in short supply due to lack of funds.
Though at first it seemed impossible to me that any animal larger than a hamster could survive in the Gobi’s parched and pitiless landscape, I soon realized just how wrong I was. Following bear tracks, I often crossed those of foxes and wolves. Automatic cameras set up at the oases to identify bears also captured images of lynx and even snow leopards, one of the planet’s rarest cats. We met goitered gazelles on the flats most every day. Argali sheep roamed the hills, and ibex traversed canyon cliffs.
Often described as a wasteland, the Gobi actually serves as a stronghold for wild species pushed to the margins by people.
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A young male charges an automatic camera set to record his departure from a tagging site. Photo Credit: National Geographic
The majority of Mongolia’s khulan, or wild asses, inhabit nature reserves in the desert. The same is true for virtually all of Asia’s last wild, double-humped Bactrian camels.
Protecting land to save Gobi bears—or any type of bear, Reynolds says—has a multiplier effect. “Bears are a kind of umbrella species. You save them, you save big chunks of habitat that benefit the rest of the wild community.”
At last came news that a bear had been caught in one of the box traps. Drivers fired up their Russian-made vans, and everyone, including the camp cook, piled in to jolt through canyons and over passes to the oasis. The team drugged the bear and carried it into the open. It was a male weighing 220 pounds, small as grizzlies go, but respectable for a mazaalai.
Short, dark hairs ringed the bear’s eyes. The rest of his outer coat was shaggy and of a hue that earned him the name Altan, Mongolian for “golden.” Altan’s fine underfur was brilliant white and remarkably thick.
“Winters are long here, and temperatures sink far below zero,” explained Mike Proctor, a Canadian bear expert assisting with the project. “Without deep soil to tunnel into for a den, these bears have little choice but to find a shallow cave and go to sleep partly exposed.” Lean compared with bears in more generous settings, Gobi bears likely rely on the extra underfur for insulation in lieu of body fat.
Instead of the sharp, three-inch claws depicted in many a grizzy tale, Altan’s claws had been worn short and blunt by his rocky habitat. An ordinary bear with teeth as worn as his would be judged 20 years old, but Gobi bears can’t avoid grinding sand and gravel along with their meals. Other tooth characteristics revealed Altan to be only five to seven years old. Though his was clearly a hardscrabble life, he was still a healthy young animal. We silently cheered as he woke and powered away into the hills, wearing a collar linked to a spacecraft.
That moment of celebration was followed by a long, disheartening stretch of days checking empty traps. Finally we caught another bear, a female called Borte, named after Genghis Khan’s queen. When first captured in 2006, Borte tipped the scale at 165 pounds. Now she was down to 125. Her teats held milk, which meant that she’d been transferring some of her weight to a nursing cub or possibly twins. But where was her offspring?
Borte’s drug dose wore off faster than expected and suddenly she was standing on all fours, growling, whirling, and swiping
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