Learning to Talk Bear: So Bears Can Listen

There's a vast body of research indicating grizzly bears are trying to get along with their human neighbors. Indeed, as Dr. Charles Jonkel, dean of American bear researchers, says: "Bears have better senses than we do and they know their environment better than we do. If we only knew how many thousands of times each year they take care of us ... and we don't even know they're around." Yet every year, humans are slain by bears, and bears killed by humans. Why? Dr. Jonkel says there are two reasons: "1) We simply don't know bear etiquette and 2) Our rules are too inconsistent for bears to understand." Research utilizing radio telemetry seems to support Jonkels theory--that in some places, bears really are trying to get along in order to go along. And that many of their human neighbors are rallying to the animals' support. In some cases, study bears have been closely monitored for years, with hundreds of location fixes identified via radio transmitters attached to the beasts. Discoveries include mammoth grizazlies amid densely populated areas, without their human neighbors being the wiser. In other cases the bears appear to be indifferent to humans: sows and cubs feeding on lawn clover while subdivision home owners shoot video footage through their living room windows. This book, Learning to Talk Bear, documents all the above and more utilizing biological research, and mixing the experiences of veteran outdoorsman-journalist Roland Cheek. The author uses trademark with and humor to both entertain and teach about a mostly unknown side of the most powerful carnivores on earth, demonstrating an advanced understanding of bear etiquette and a clear willingness to travel and recreate within the great beasts' living room, following rules they, too, can understand.

There are, I suppose, febrile savants who reject any notion that a person can acquire the writing art outside those hallowed halls of academia. Yet storytellers captured audiences for millenniums before Oxford or Harvard were more than forest enclaves where wild turnips sprout. There's dissent, or course, holding the cloistered academic life to be poor training grounds for the kinds of riveting stories audiences wish to hear or read. My particular PhD came from God's own university of wild places and wilder things. My culture might best be described as the Campfire kind, backed up against the inky black of star-filled nights, regaling saucer-eyed guests with tales of wilderness adventure, while horses stomped at the picket lines and coyotes howled at the rising moon. My doctoral thesis came during three decades of narratives about those wild places and wilder things; wonders saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt; crafted for Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, and Sports Afield. My column was syndicated over two decades to 17 newspapers, and I hosted a coast-to-coast radio show with 210,000 listeners airing on 75 stations across America. Then I turned my attention to books: a baker's dozen novels and wildlife and adventure nonfiction titles, all self-published to great success, all flavored with real-life experiences. What's my point? That one can have adventure AND learn to write very well indeed (despite academic disdain for anyone outside their comfortable inner circle); well enough indeed to tell the conventional publishing world to go to hell--that I'll publish my own stuff. More successfully. And at a greater profit!