Yellowstone's Great Thaw: "Winter" (BBC, PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, December 13) I watched an intriguing nature show on PBS called Yellowstone’s Great Thaw. This was actually a three-episode mini-series; the episodes were called “Winter,” “Spring” and “Summer.” The show was filmed in 2016 and released a year later, and from the title I had assumed it would be a dire warning about how human-caused climate change had screwed up the ecology of Yellowstone National Park and threatened the delicate cycle of life within it. Instead it was more of a documentary about the general environment of Yellowstone, in particular its dramatic alternations of warm and cold temperatures, and the ways the animals who call it home have adapted to its changes in climate – though the show’s opening deals with how climate change has screwed up the hibernation patterns of bears so they wake up a month or two early and suddenly have to find themselves food (and high-protein food at that) before the game animals they rely on – bison, moose, elk – are readily available. The show was hosted by a rather nerdy-looking scientist named Kirk Johnson, who took us on an extended tour of Yellowstone and introduced various others, including bear expert Casey Anderson, owl expert Jeff Hogan, crow expert Lucas Zulewicz, wolf expert Doug Smith and overall animal expert Brian Bedrozian. Jeff Hogan was in some ways the most interesting of them, especially since his job was to keep watch on a snowy owl roosting in a tree. He was a male owl and Hogan talked about how worried he was that the owl might not find a mate and make little baby owls. In fact the owl did find a mate – Hogan had his camera at the ready while a she-owl stuck up behind him and had owl sex then and there (I joked, “Wow! Owl-porn!”) – and at the end of the show Hogan got to photograph them actually building a nest for the she-owl to lay her eggs and hatch them.

Another curious scene showed some of the scientists literally digging a hole in the snow with shovels, then putting devices that looked like oven thermometers into the various layers of snow to take their temperatures. It turned out that the top layer of snow was at 0° Celsius, the middle layer was at -5°, and the bottom was back at 0°. The conclusion they reached was that this is the reason bears dig holes in the snow and cover themselves with it as they hibernate: the lowest levels of snow are actually warmer than the levels immediately above and so the bears can use snow as insulation. There were also some interesting sequences of wolf packs hunting elk, and Johnson made the point that elk are actually quite a big bigger than wolves and so wolves can hunt them down and kill them only if they can wear down the elk and/or injure it first. And they also showed even weirder scenes of wolves hunting down buffaloes (they used the term “bison” throughout) despite the even bigger disparity of size; in the show’s opening the bear who woke up from hibernation a month early was fortunate enough to find and eat from a bison carcass that had been buried in the snow. There was also a funny scene in which a bear broke into the garage of one of the humans and chewed up a snowmobile seat. Ultimately it was a show about the delicate balances that rule nature and how easily they can be upset, and though the show didn’t make a big deal about human-caused climate change, it touched on it enough that it seemed particularly timely on the day the latest international climate-action conference had ended in Rome with a pro forma agreement among the participating nations to end fossil fuel use by 2040 even though no one involved actually expects that to happen.