Kodiak Island

They're like, it's a brown bear hunting show for the History Channel.

If you know any guides or characters on the island that we should interview, you know, like to build out the story around like the brown bear hunting culture on Kodiak Island, let us know.

And so it had been three and a half months at this point, four months filming with Coast Guard Alaska.

I'm hanging out with the same camera crew, the same producer, the same people, same Coast Guard friends.

I would take two schools that have like absolutely no business in being that environment.

So it'd be like ASU Rutgers on Kodiak Island.

That would be a total fish out of water.

But like I've seen some of these Cardinals games in Mexico City.

Kodiak bears are among the largest brown bears in the world, and males can weigh over 1,400 pounds, rivaling polar bears in size.

The large size of Kodiak bears is attributed partly to the abundant salmon runs on Kodiak Island, which provide a rich food source.

Brown bears in Europe tend to be smaller than their North American counterparts, likely due to differences in habitat and food availability, though the exact reasons are debated.

European landscapes have been more heavily modified by human agriculture and settlement than much of North America, and the food resources available to European bears are generally less abundant.

There are no salmon runs comparable to those in Alaska, no vast wilderness berry patches ungrazed by livestock.

The result is bears that are still formidable by any reasonable standard, but that lack the sheer mass of their Alaskan relatives.

A large male brown bear in Scandinavia might weigh 600 pounds, while a large male on Kodiak Island might exceed twice that.

European brown bears were once found across nearly all of Europe.

They went with each other on hunts, camped together, went over the best practices and procedures.

And in 1992, when Bart scored a very highly coveted Kodiak Island bear tag, Paul supported him on that hunting trip.

And for those concerned that this seems like trophy hunting, it, it's really not.

You have to go to these places and make sure that you actually cull the herds.

So if you leave too many wild animals of any sort, whether it's deer with no natural predators or bear with too many deer, they will overeat, overpopulate, and go into a cycle where there's a crash because everybody starves.

So every year, a limited number of people are allowed to go and hunt bear and deer and other creatures and critters on Kodiak Island and in other places like this, where the balance of nature might be a little bit off.

Paul came along that trip, as did two friends, Brad and Jeff.

Brad and Jeff were planning to primarily be hunting deer, but also be backup just in case it was needed, whereas Paul would be B- Bart's real backup, the guy that was up next to him with a bow to take the shot in case Bart missed and got charged by a bear.

Yeah.

I'm excited because Lee told me, you know, he, with the Coast Guard, he was in Alaska, and we ran a lodge on Kodiak Island, and then he said, "Where, where in Michigan you live in?" I told him UP.

Mm-hmm.

He said he was stationed in the UP of Michigan at one point, too.

Yeah.

Yeah, we got a problem up there in, uh, the Kodiak Island area.

They got a thing called Kodiak Island Expeditions, and they take people out looking for bears.

But of course, while they're out there, they also see other people out looking for bears.

This one lady took a picture of a, a photographer who was squatting down on the edge of the river within a few yards of several brown bear cubs.

Mm.

Those are gonna be the big Kodiak Island.

Yeah.