Bryce Andrews Down From The Mountain

What this episode covers

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of the Avid Reader. Today our guest is Bryce Andrews author of Down From The Mountain: The Life And Death Of A Grizzly Bear, published tomorrow April 16th by Houghton Mifflin. Bryce is the author of the memoir Badluck Way: A Year On The Ragged Edge Of The West. He has appeared on PBS and his essays and short work have been published in High Country News, Big Sky Journal and Backpacker. Bryce lives in Montana where he manages a conservation-oriented cattle ranch. Down From The Mountain tells the story of Millie, a really nice grizzly bear, who even has a woods named after her, a loving mother to two beautiful cubs. But Millie, like a lot of other bears in the area near her woods, is lured into the arena now usually reserved for humans and their encroachment into the wild. A very nice man Greg Shock who farms acres of corn to feed his dairy cows, is losing more and more of his acreage year to year to the foraging bears, who crave corn, kind of like us, buying 80 percent of our groceries containing high fructose corn syrup. Corn for the bears is a learned behavior, just as it is for us. Millie and her offspring encounter a situation that is heartrending and the story continues on in an attempt to solve a mystery and to figure out a way that the bears can be kept “safe” from the corn and Farmer Shock can keep his corn and save 8-10 thousand a year. Bryce adopts and adapts a method of fencing that is novel and economic in order to keep the bears out and it works. He is still using it today. The idea of the book is to allow People and Carnivores to live and thrive together in harmony, or if not harmony, then detente.

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