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Yeah, right. You have not just one, but a bunch of them tracked down and could get a type specimen any time you wanted, you just love them too much... That's the weakest excuse there is.

Clear cuts do not provide much of any cover for about a decade. Presuming they are immediately replanted. Last time I flew I examined the clear cuts that used to be my research area. Some, not all have been replanted. Actual practice sort of flies on the face of the propaganda put out by state foresters. Some areas near my research area had been clear cut when I started research and have yet to be replanted. There very little cover anywhere nearby. Small trees widely separated. For a BF to hang out nearby to harvest grazing deer in these areas requires a lot of travel to and from cover. They might do that at night but I cannot see them doing it in the daytime. I am just guessing but I do not think BF likes the practice of clear cut. If natural forest is their habitat, anything that disturbs that has to be disruptive to their daily life. I recall reading about a a BF fight in one old report. The looser was disemboweled. That could have been territory or a fight over a mate. I am inclined to believe the later. Juveniles have been reported to play fight. Pretty much like young male humans. Total conjecture on my part but the parallels between them and us, seem to point to using us as a model for their behavior. If we don't know something about BF behavior, figure out what human motivations are or were in our distant past. That might work more often than not. Certainly that points to warfare between rival tribes of BF. Throw in stealing of human women from Native Americans and you certainly have a parallel to human tribes at the same time period.

This is a very important point. The "territory" model is based on species of essentially solitary animals. It might be interesting to reconsider the same question from the perspective of pack predators like wolves. There's a good body of anecdotal evidence regarding bigfoot hunting in teams, sometimes only pairs, sometimes larger. If they are doing this, then the percentage of predatory attempts that "miss" is probably lower than expected for solo efforts reducing the calorie expenditure balance of hunting. It also points to a less than territorial lifestyle ... or if territorial, it is tribal-territorial, not individual-territorial else the cooperation wouldn't happen. Again, follow the model for stone age or pre stone age humans, it appears much more applicable, based on the reports to date, than assumptions based on grizzly bear behavior. MIB

SWWASAS - LIkely it's a food issue. Forest fires open space for new growth which, a few years after the fire, has a lot more nutrients available to grazers ... deer, elk, etc. That, in turn, draws the predators. Clearcuts do indeed have the same result. I've had this discussion in other places in a different context: elk herd management. Until about 1900 or so, fires just burned. The Cascades contained a lot of open "parks" which were habitat for elk. In the early 1900s we began suppressing forest fires, however, roughly the same time we expanded logging which replaced the fire-opened acres with clearcut-opened acres. The difference is aesthetic, an elk's belly can't tell the difference what made the clearing it feeds in. In the 1980s we mostly stopped logging in the Cascades but we continue to stop wildfires. The amount of meadow acreage available to provide elk habitat is dropping drastically and along with it, elk populations. I believe this is a much more significant factor than the change in cougar hunting (no dogs or bait now) increasing their numbers so far as elk herd size. MIB

Guess that settles that then. Thread closed.