On a field trip to Yosemite, a sixth-grade Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant huddled with her classmates around the window of the campsite’s mess hall.
“All the kids said, ‘get in here, get in, there’s a bear!’ We’re all looking out the windows seeing if we could see the bear and I just thought that was really cool,” said Dr. Rae, co-host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild.
Even though Dr. Rae never got a glimpse of a black bear then, she would grow up to be quite familiar with the species.
Discover how Dr. Rae became a wildlife ecologist who specializes in black bears.
Becoming a black bear expert
Before bears, lions were Dr. Rae’s specialty. Her master’s degree program was spent studying lions in Tanzania.
“It was so great, it was exactly what I wanted,” Dr. Rae said.
When she started her doctorate at Columbia University, she’d wished to continue her research on lions, but ran into a problem. Her project was more about conservation than ecology. Similar fields, but not quite what Columbia was looking for.
“Conservation is action, making change in an environment to benefit a species, whereas ecology research is studying what happens when you don’t do anything” Dr. Rae said. “With the lions I was studying, they needed help. They needed conservation.”
Dr. Rae pivoted to a true ecology project, keeping with the theme of large carnivores. Her one request was to continue working in the field with an animal, so her professors connected her with a research group in Nevada studying black bears.
“Little did I know that studying black bears would be something that was so life-changing in the best way — fun and interesting and challenging,” Dr. Rae said. “And I really resisted for a while, but ultimately, I was like, ‘do I drop out of my program? Or do I just study these bears?’ I took on the project and learned so much.”
Dr. Rae studies black bears in Nevada
Twenty years after her first near encounter with a black bear, Dr. Rae went back west with a mission — to find a wild bear. Dr. Rae and her team went out to find a black bear who needed a change of batteries in its GPS collar (researchers use GPS collars to study the bear’s movements).
“We walked up, and there she was,” Dr. Rae said. “She’s just sleeping. I’ll never forget, I was just like, ‘oh my gosh, a bear.’”
The black bear was light brown in color and slept as the team changed her batteries. Above in a tree, her cubs watched the team as they worked.
“I thought, ‘this is cool. This is really cool. I’m interested in this,’” Dr. Rae said.
Read more about Dr. Rae’s first time seeing a black bear in this excerpt from her book, “Wild Life.”
One of her favorite parts of studying black bears has been visiting bear dens. Ecologists need to visit the dens to count the number of cubs when they’re born and then again once they emerge. The data collected tells them about the survivorship rates of black bears in an ecosystem.
“Hibernating bears have captivated humans for thousands of years,” Dr. Rae said. “Hibernation is something we still don’t completely understand, so being able to be up close and personal, being one of the few people on this planet who’s spent time with the hibernating bear in the den has always just been magical.”
Black bears on Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild
Dr. Rae continues to visit black bear dens today as co-host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild. In the Season 2 episode, “Into the Bear’s Den,” she visited black bears in New Hampshire.
“I’d studied bears in the west, but because I’d never studied Eastern black bears, there’s always something to learn” Dr. Rae said. “Wild Kingdom gives me that opportunity to continue learning about wildlife ecology.”
Watch the Season 1 episode, “Bear Cub Rescue,” to see Dr. Rae’s first black bear encounter with Protecting the Wild. Then, go behind the scenes to learn how the episode turned Dr. Rae into a full-time co-host of the show!
Looking for more black bear stories? Here are the “bear” necessities:
Do All Bears Hibernate in Winter?
