Tom, tell me about the research you're doing and what brings you to Kulik this week? I'm a research wildlife ecologist for the Federal Government here in Anchorage, Alaska and I have based the last eight summers of my research in Katmai National Park. I guess I'm the local guru on bears for the park because I've worked here at Kulik before - this is my fourth fall here and I've logged about 1,000 hours watching bears and people here.

Tom Smith and Jack Hanna

I also have worked widely in the park on vegetation mapping. As a wildlife biologist it's important to understand the basic mosaic of vegetation - even for carnivores, like bears. Where the vegetation is often predicts where other forage species are that bears rely on such as moose calves and ground squirrels. We're vegetation mapping all 4.3 million acres of the park. On the coastal areas, I've done bear research in terms of how eco-tourism and bear interactions occur.

Could you give us a brief description of the different kinds of bears we'll find in Alaska?

Out of the seven worldwide species of bears, we have three in the state of Alaska. We have the Ursus maritimus or the polar bear, which would be a marine mammal. They range up to 1,800 pounds and live exclusively north of Nome, on the latitude. They are always within 50 miles of the coast and they work the ice packs extensively. Some of our bears have been radio collared in ranges as far away as Greenland. I don't know how many thousand of miles that is but a long ways. We have a very healthy population of polar bears.

Inland then and tied intimately with the forest cover in the state would be the Ursus americanus, which would be the black bear. There are about 110,000 of those in the state. They are a very adaptable species that are unable to survive or thrive on tundra environments like what we have here.

Which would bring us to the brown bear, Ursus arctos horribilis, actually. We have about 43,000 of those in the state, the highest number of brown bears, continent wide. Actually, we have more brown bears in the state of Alaska than all the rest of North America combined. The large males range up towards almost 1,600 pounds. They are classified as the largest terrestrial carnivore in the world. The brown bear is found everywhere in the state except for a few offshore islands and south of False Pass on the Aleutian Chain. We've got them in every habitat.

What's the distinction between the brown bear and the grizzly bear?

The brown bear and the grizzly is really a kind of artificial designation imposed by biologists who wanted to note that some bears are very large and some are somewhat smaller. And the small bears would be the grizzly - an interior bear that generally does not have access to salmon.

When brown bears/grizzly have salmon resources, their size will be double that of the interior bear. So artificially we call any bear within a hundred miles of the coast a brown bear and all the rest are grizzlies.