A Lesson from a Bear

Wildlife teachings on 'sustainable development'

Asked to speak to young students attending the 2025 India Birding Fair, on the festival theme of wildlife and human conflict, I remembered a story from Santa Fe.

Home was at 8,000 feet, not mountainous but where the Rockies come to land. We had built a new home and several outbuildings on eleven acres. It was 3am, I was writing, and heard a crash.

A black bear had climbed out from the pinon forest and was raiding our trash can.

I marched toward it, shouting and clapping my hands. The bear backed into the trees and watched me as I locked the trashcan away in the back of the truck.

A war had begun – my own wildlife / human conflict.

We had hummingbird feeders hung on cast iron poles. The next morning the poles were all bent in half, the bottles of nectar smashed. I took hold of a pole to straighten it, though I am impossibly weaker than a bear, and it swung around in my loose grasp and whacked me on the head.

We were collecting compost inside a special rubber bin. The bin had been lifted and thrown aside, the contents kicked around the ground. I spaded them back. The next morning the bear had chucked the whole aside once again.

We had a ten-gallon drum of sunflower seeds to feed the birds. Another morning, and it was in the middle of the land, its top clawed off, the contents emptied. Bear turds composed of sunflower seeds were dropped inside a ring of ponderosa pines that we called the sacred grove.

We had a friend who was a shaman. I told her of my ongoing battle with the bear. She was aghast. Not long before, she had conducted a ceremony to put me I touch with my spirit animals: a crane, a shark, and a bear.

‘In battling with the bear,’ she told me, ‘you are fighting with yourself.’

She recommended I leave an offering.

We had a small table on which we used to leave scraps for passing ravens. I carried out an apple for the bear, and left it there.

The next morning the apple was gone.

And the bear never returned.

I told this story twice at the Bird Fair, the kids looking up at me and blinking, with four more such talks to give.

‘Why not tell us about your meetings with the Bishnoi instead,’ the MC suggested.

I was happy to switch – especially because in repeating the tale I had filtered its lesson to a good yet simple one.

After the next session, on which I duly spoke about the Bishnoi, a boy stood and asked me a question about sustainable development. How was it possible?

There are now professionals in that area, I told him. You can take courses in, say, sustainable architecture. But I did have another point to make. And told him in brief my lesson from the bear.

A hundred years before the land that now held our house had been worked by a charcoal burner, and sometimes we would find ancient arrow heads. But des[ite such human moments this land had been bear territory for millennia.

Now we humans had come along, paid big money and acquired deeds. We had built a home on the land and worked to do so ‘sustainably’.

‘This is MY land,’ I could say. We had bought the property rights. I could shout it to the bear, loud and clear. ‘This is MY land.’

But of course the bear had a response to that. He threw around my garbage, shat in my sacred places, ruined my birdfeeders. Who has the run of this land, human?

When I switched tack and no longer defended my patch, but instead left the bear an apple, I moved the situation out of conflict. For it was me who had created the conflict in the first place.

The action involved a change of pronoun. I was no longer shouting ‘This is my land!’. I was saying ‘This is OUR land.’

The bear’s and mine – wildlife and human. Ours.

And of course that’s so. In London a fox curls to sleep on the lawn we have grown into a wildflower meadow. We plant for insect life. It’s a way of recognizing that this isn’t my land – it’s our land, a part of the planet I can care for and share.

Change the notion of who owns the land in this way, I suggested to the boy, swap ‘MY’ for ‘OUR’ and see how that helps.

And he smiled and thanked me afterward. ‘It’s a new thought for me,’ he said. ‘Not my but our.’

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The Birding Fair is a joyous occasion – on the banks of the Man Sagar lake where it started back in 1997, with the dual purpose of restoring the lake to cleanliness so migrating birds would drop back in [witness the pelicans in the photo], and bringing children to the magic of birdwatching. Watch a small video clip here, including an interview with myself (under a new name!): Jaipur Bird Fair 2025: Birds, Conservation & Martin Good Maunk’s Vision | जयपुर बर्ड फेयर 2025

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It was a mammoth journey back from Jaipur, including an eleven-hour layover in Hong Kong then a flight across the Pacific to Los Angeles that took me through sixteen time zones, so that I landed a couple of hours before I took off. From my first trip to Jaipur I brought back Covid. This time it was just a bad cold. The things we do to nudge a book into the world…

It was worth it though, to have delivered the book to Rajasthan and the Bishnois. The hall for the launch of MY HEAD FORT A TREE at the Jaipur Literary Festival was packed, so we couldn’t fit in the whole world – and that’s who needs to know about the book.

But our luck is in! A recording of the event has just gone LIVE! Please check it out, and share it with friends and others: The First Eco-Warriors: The Extraordinary Stories of the Bishnoi | Jaipur Literature Festival

It reached a dizzying Number 1 on Amazon in India for a while – in the Nature and Environment category. It’s out now in the UK, and comes out in North America in April. It comes replete with beautiful photographs by Franck Vogel - and can be yours!

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Meanwhile I’ve returned to my long loved but much neglected website. There’s a host of material on the Bishnois that I like a lot, but didn’t sneak into the book. Little by little I’ll post pieces online. Here’s an article about the Bishnoi temple at Jangloo.