Working as a wildlife advocate in Montana is not always as glamorous as it sounds, but every now and then I’m lucky enough to have a bit of adventure come my way. This past weekend I got a chance to spend two days tracking bears in Montana’s beautiful Centennial Mountains, with a great group of motivated volunteers -- not a bad day in the office, as we like to say.

The idea behind this outing was to look for signs of grizzly bears in the Centennials, an area at the edge of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem that forms a key habitat corridor to and from the vast wilderness of central Idaho. As I’ve discussed on my previous blog, grizzlies in Greater Yellowstone are facing rapid changes in the food sources they have traditionally depended on, particularly whitebark pine trees whose rich nuts once helped grizzlies fatten up for hibernation. As a climate-driven epidemic of mountain pine beetles decimates whitebark pine forests across the West, Yellowstone’s grizzlies are being forced to look elsewhere for food, spreading into new areas and roaming at lower elevations.

So we headed to the woods last weekend to see if we could find evidence of grizzly bears using new areas – places where grizzlies are occasionally starting to be seen now after decades of absence. The Centennials were our first target because of their importance for these newly roaming bears and the region’s role as a habitat corridor for bears and other carnivores. Because grizzly bears are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, finding conclusive evidence of grizzlies in this area could help inform land managers as they consider land planning and energy development proposals in this critical area.

To carry out this project, we partnered with Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation (ASC), a great new nonprofit that connects adventure athletes with scientists who need data collected in the far corners of the world. (Check out their website, here, to read about climbers collecting ice worms, kayakers sampling river diatoms, and other cool expeditions going on around the globe.) With ASC, we planned a series of three workshops to teach volunteers how to track and collect data on bears, the idea being that we would not only collect data together but also teach our volunteers everything they needed to know so they could collect data whenever they’re out in the woods in the future.

With a GPS, hiking boots and a little know-how, anyone can be a scientist.

NRDC has hosted a number of citizen science workshops over the years, focusing on monitoring whitebark pine and grizzly bears in Greater Yellowstone, all based on the idea that concerned citizens and outdoor enthusiasts are some of the best people to monitor what’s going on in our vast backyard.

And by the end of this weekend, I think it’s fair to say we all felt like scientists. The first morning, Gregg Treinish of ASC taught everybody how and where to look for bear signs – fuzzy hairs snagged on barbed-wire fences, paw prints along a riverbank, or scratches and hairs left on a “rub tree.” We learned how to tell bear hair from other types of animal hair, and we learned the fine art of distinguishing black bear hair from grizzly hair (grizzly hairs have “grizzled” silver tips, hence their name).

Together we learned and practiced, walking trails and fencelines through the woods, pausing to huddle close and examine each clump of hair we found. Eventually cresting a ridge where the woods gave way to an alpine meadow, we finally allowed ourselves to look up and take in the view – from the Madison Range to the Tetons, all bathed in late summer sun. (Compared to this, the view from the window of my real office is starting to look pretty lame.)

We spent the rest of the weekend putting our new skills to use, walking a set of transects where we were likely to find evidence of bears and other wildlife. It was wonderful to see our team of volunteers tackle this task with such enthusiasm. We had everybody from a self-described Canadian “city kid” to a Wyomingite who grew up guiding historical trips on the Oregon Trail, yet everybody seemed equally fascinated and excited to be tracking bears in this expanse of mountains and sagebrush hills.

The weekend would have been successful even if our goal had just been outreach and education, not to mention being a fun weekend in the woods. But we were also successful in collecting valuable data, including, excitingly, some bear hair samples that we hope to send to a lab for DNA analysis, to confirm that they are indeed grizzly bear hairs. We also collected data on the condition of the whitebark pine trees we saw, including one promising tree with a healthy cone crop. With a diverse team of volunteers we were able to cover a huge amount of ground, and our efforts may ultimately help protect bears and their habitat.

This is why we believe in citizen science. This is the power of citizens who care. And this was – not by coincidence – the best two days of work I’ve had all summer.

Sound like fun? We still have two more workshops taking place this fall, so come join us! More details and sign-up forms are available on ASC’s website: www.adventureandscience.org/grizzly. See you out there!

Photos by Whitney Angell Leonard