Artwork by Joelle Marier

Join us in welcoming the bears out of hibernation at the 14th Annual International Multicultural Bear Honoring, May 3-5, 2013, in Missoula, Montana, the Mission Mountains, and Glacier National Park.

Nearly every culture that shares habitat with bears around the world has held ceremonies to celebrate the bear’s emergence from the den each spring. In observance of that tradition, the Great Bear Foundation holds a weekend long Bear Honoring festival the first weekend of May each year. This year, in recognition of the first documented case of a grizzly bear visiting the Missoula area in decades, our theme is welcoming the grizzly back to its historic habitat. While grizzlies still face tremendous threats in terms of habitat loss and conflict with humans, decades of conservation efforts are successfully allowing Ursus arctos to return to some of its historic range, including Missoula’s fringe, and the prairies east of the Rocky Mountain Front.

Schedule of Events:

Friday, May 3rd, 5:00 PM: Bear Foods Buffet at Greenough Park Picnic Shelter, Missoula, MT. Eat like a bear–glacier lilies, spring beauty, fiddleheads, nettles, and game meat will be part of the menu. Dr. Charles Jonkel will lead a bear walk on Rattlesnake Creek, looking for bear foods, den sites, and bear sign. You might be surprised at the high quality bear habitat found within Missoula city limits! Remember that next time you’re jogging up the Rattlesnake….

Saturday, May 4th: Visit Salish Kootenai College’s Art Department, the Powwow at Kicking Horse Job Corps, where we’ll sponsor a Bear Dance, and finish up the day looking for bears and bear sign in the Mission Mountains. Learn about Millie’s Woods, and why the Mission Valley is such productive grizzly habitat. Meet at our office at 802 East Front St., Missoula at 9:00 AM, or contact us to meet up elsewhere along the way.

Sunday, May 5th: Day Trip to Glacier National Park. Take a walk with us up Going to the Sun Road for storytelling, wildlife watching, and bear ecology. Meet at the GBF Office at 802 East Front St., Missoula at 9:00 AM to ride with us ($20), or meet at Avalanche Gate in Glacier at 12:45 PM. If the road is not plowed, we’ll meet in the parking lot of Lake MacDonald Lodge. Don’t forget plastic bags to help pick up litter along the way!

Please RSVP for Saturday and Sunday’s events so we can plan accordingly.

GBF President, Chuck Jonkel, surveying Hudson Bay.
Photo by Ilene Zwerin

The Great Bear Foundation and Salish Kootenai College Media have been hard at work on a film project documenting the life and work of GBF President and pioneer of bear biology, Chuck Jonkel.

Walking Bear Comes Home combines archival film footage of Jonkel’s historic polar bear research in the Canadian Arctic with interviews with Jonkel, his colleagues, friends, and family, to tell the story of one of the most interesting characters in wildlife conservation. Jonkel developed the first capture-and-handling procedures for polar bears and black bears, developed the first database on Canada’s polar bears and their habitat requirements, co-drafted and signed the International Agreement on Conservation of Polar Bears, directed the first comprehensive study on the habitat requirements of the grizzly bear in the Lower 48 States, co-founded the Great Bear Foundation and the International Wildlife Film Festival, along with many, many more achievements that have helped to protect wildlife and habitat in North America and beyond.

A preview of the film had its first public screening on February 2, 2013 at the FLIC Cinemafest in Polson, Montana.

Preview of Walking Bear Comes Home

This project is sponsored by the Great Bear Foundation, Salish Kootenai College Media, The Cinnabar Foundation, Humanities Montana, and numerous private donations. To learn more about the film, or to donate to the project, click here.

Coastal Brown Bear on an Alaskan Salmon Stream

Considering a bear-viewing adventure in 2013? Check out what the Great Bear Foundation has to offer.

Our bear ecology field courses give you the opportunity to observe bears and other wildlife, with minimal impact on the animals and their habitat. Meanwhile, you’ll learn about the big-picture context for the animals you observe–their ecological roles, cultural significance, threats and conservation issues, and how to safely observe them without threatening their well-being or their habitat.

This year, we’ll be offering two field courses at Churchill, on Hudson Bay in Canada. In addition to our annual Polar Bear Ecology Field Course in November, you’ll also have the rare opportunity to travel with us to Hudson Bay in August, for Berries, Belugas, and Bears, our summer arctic ecology trip. This trip is timed for the best opportunities to see beluga whales, in addition to expeditions to pick berries, explore the tundra, look for fossils on the beach, and explore areas that are not accessible to us in the snowy fall and winter months. There may be opportunities to view and photograph the aurora, and, with some patience, we’ll likely find a few polar bears. However, if you really want to see polar bears, your best bet is to travel with us in November, when they congregate at Cape Churchill, waiting for first ice.

In May, we will be expanding our operations to Alaska! Stay tuned for opportunities to view bears in Southeast Alaska! We’ll also be available for educational programming and custom wildlife-viewing expeditions in and around Haines, Alaska, southern Yukon, and northern British Columbia. Contact us for more information to book a wildlife expedition or educational program.

Solar Bear II: Polar Bear on Thin Ice by Douglas E Taylor

The Holiday Season is upon us already, and we’d like to thank all our members for your generous support throughout the year. Your support has helped to fund our operating expenses and our on-the-ground bear conservation projects, such as the educational programs we deliver, free of charge, to schools and the public, our Bears & Apples program addressing local bear attractant problems. Your generosity helps support our efforts to rein in exploitative forms of wildlife tourism, and to promote ethical, low-impact wildlife travel that supports local economies and keeps the well-being of wild animals and their habitats first and foremost. Thank you for your help.

As a small, grassroots organization, we work hard to keep our overhead costs low, relying heavily on volunteer work and our resourcefulness so that the majority of membership contributions goes directly into our projects. This also means that we struggle to keep our doors open, and even the smallest contribution goes a long way to help our programs. We rely heavily on our loyal members to keep our programs running.

As we enter the holiday season, there are several easy ways that you can help to support the Great Bear Foundation:

Purchase a gift membership through our website.

You can support GBF while you do your holiday shopping. Here are a few ways:

Holiday Shopping–You can support GBF while shopping at Amazon, Patagonia, Moosejaw, or REI. If you shop through our website, those merchants will donate a portion of the proceeds to GBF.

GBF merchandise makes great gifts! Visit our Cafepress store for t-shirts, bags, water bottles, and more!

Purchase a limited edition Giclée print of Solar Bears II (pictured above), a polar bear image created exclusively for GBF by local artist, Douglas E Taylor. Douglas generously supports GBF by donating half of the sale to GBF.

Earn money for GBF with internet searches and shopping online. Register at http://www.goodsearch.com/ and choose GBF as your charity. Internet searches conducted there result in donations to GBF, and you can also register to shop through them, so that online merchants will give us a portion of their profits from your purchases.

Spread the word. Please help to support our projects by telling your friends about us and our field courses. You can follow the Great Bear Foundation on Facebook. and check out the Facebook Page dedicated specifically to our Churchill trips too!.

Thank you, sincerely, for your ongoing support, and for helping us to ensure that bears and their habitats will persist for generations to come.

Happy Holidays from the Great Bear Foundation.

We’ve arrived in Churchill, at last!

Saw northern lights from the train last night, and a few people were able to spot our first polar bear, driving from the train station to the Northern Studies Centre.

Ice is forming in the Bay, and it’s blowing snow. Good to be back on the tundra!

Weather cleared up for gorgeous light this afternoon. Saw a few bears, lots of red fox, and a gyrfalcon.

It’s cold out there!