A tiny grizzly cub is born on a silent night inside a hallowed earthen lair while, outside, a violent winter storm rages across the landscape. That’s the image at the heart of a still-in-progress Nature series film titled “Christmas in Yellowstone.”
In truth, that particular birth will happen in Pullman, inside a den constructed of two by fours, concrete and rock. While winter storms in Yellowstone aren’t hard to find and film, pregnant grizzly bears hibernating in their den are. So while the PBS one-hour documentary will be created from more than 100 hours of footage inside Yellowstone National Park, the inside of the bear’s lair was shot right here at WSU in late December.
“It’s our nativity scene,” said Janet Hess, series editor for Nature and co-producer and writer for “Christmas in Yellowstone.”
Hess said she knew she wanted a grizzly birth as part of the production, but didn’t think that would be possible until she heard about WSU’s Bear Research, Education and Conservation Program. Last fall Hess contacted WSU zoology professor
Charles Robbins, founder and director of the 20-year-old bear research program, and learned that it was likely one of two bears was pregnant. To minimize disruptions to the bears’ hibernation as much as possible, Robbins and his colleagues decided to test for pregnancy, move one of the bears into a specially constructed wilderness-like lair and then film the hibernating mother bear all on the same day.
June, a 20-year-old sow, tested pregnant and so will have a starring, if limited, role in the PBS production. The actual birth is somewhat anticlimactic, Robbins said, given that June weighs about 400 pounds and a newborn cub is about 1.5 pounds. After a typically low-stress birth, both cubs and mother curl up and sleep for another six weeks, again not particularly dramatic. But, he said, the film crew plans to return in late March when the cub, or cubs, begin to stir.
The grizzly bear birth will tie together several layers of meaning, said Hess, who was also the writer of the award-winning documentary “Pale Male” about a red-tailed hawk in New York City. The birth represents new life emerging in the wilderness, she said, but the film also explores how grizzly bears pull inward and rest during extremely harsh winter conditions — even while protecting one or more newborn cubs — and gather strength in anticipation of spring.
“It’s really just kind of this metabolic miracle of hibernation that we want to go into,” Hess said.
Struggle for survival
The film won’t be religious, but there will be a spiritual dimension to it, Hess said, particularly the struggle for survival through the darkest time of year.
“We’re trying to show Yellowstone at its harshest,” said cameraman and coproducer Shane Moore, who was delighted to note that temperatures at the park dipped to -42 degrees in mid-December. Moore, a native of Jackson Hole, Wyo., was an assistant on Wolfgang Bayer’s classic 1989 film “Yellowstone in Winter.” But, he said, the story this time is different.
For one thing, “Christmas in Yellowstone” will be about wilderness, but also about the human relationship to wilderness and how that relationship changes as places of wilderness diminish. For another, Moore said, the park has changed.
“To me, Yellowstone is a much more interesting place now,” he said, “For one, all the top predators are back. Then, we saw one grizzly bear and it was an event.”
In fact, grizzly bears are back at Yellowstone to the degree that the federal government has recommended delisting the grizzly from the Endangered Species list, a status it has held since 1975 when scientists estimated there were fewer than 1,000 grizzlies in the United States and only about 200 to 300 in Yellowstone. Scientists now estimate there are between 500 to 600 grizzlies in Yellowstone. While it has taken about 30 years to build the grizzly population to what some scientists believe is a sustainable number, the wolf population, which had virtually disappeared in Yellowstone, was reintroduced only 10 years ago and is thriving today.
Jennifer Fortin, a WSU graduate student, said grizzlies are not out of the woods yet, so to speak, because three sources of nutrients are in decline: cutthroat trout, army cutworm moths and whitebark pine nuts. But still, the recovery has been heartening.
Moore, who will be filming all winter, said “fascinating things are happening” in Yellowstone and he intends to capture as much of it as he can on high definition film in 5.1 Surround Sound. “We really want to make this an experience,” he said.
Hess, who works out of WNET-TV in New York City, said the film should be ready for release during the next Christmas season.
