We started off our day at 7 am.  We first headed out to Lamar Valley and ended up getting very lucky with seeing 9 out of the 11 wolves from the Junction Butte pack.  This was all with in our first 1.5 hours with being out and exploring.  The wolves weren’t doing much, mainly just sitting around on some flat grassland that was at the base of the mountains.  We then went and talked to Travis Wyman who is one of the bear biologists of Yellowstone.  He is a guy who loves the animals he works with.  We mainly talked about the grizzly bears and how they got habituated to eating human food and hanging out with humans in the early 1930s and prior.  This was leading to a lot of human injuries and property damages.  Two brothers who were biologists, stated that to stop this, the park needed to quit feeding the bears human garbage and tourists needed to quit feeding the bears human food.  They said that the bears needed to gradually get weened off of the human food, but the park didn’t want to do that, and closed off all of the garbage areas within four years.  The bears became hungry and started ransacking camp sights for human food.  The park began managing the way humans acted in the park which lead to the bears returning to their natural hunting and gathering habits and has lead to there only being about 1 human injury per year.  After the talk we went on a hike to the Otter Creek garbage area to see where people used to go to witness the bears eating the human garbage.  This was all somewhat a new aspect of the park that I did not know about and it was interesting to actually see where this happened.

Morgan Gentzkow