Susan J. Tweit is a scientist who evolved into an award-winning writer and radio commentator. She is the author of five books for adults, including Barren, Wild, & Worthless: Living in the Chihuahuan Desert, personal stories about the history and natural history of Southern New Mexico, The Great Southwest Nature Factbook, a browser's guide to nature in the Southwest, from A to Z, and Seasons in the Desert: A Naturalist's Notebook, from Chronicle books. She has also written two children's books, Meet the Wild Southwest: Land of Hoodoos & Gila Monsters (Alaska Northwest Books) and City Foxes, a picture book which was named one of the Outstanding Science Books for Children for 1998.
Her "Wild Lives" radio commentaries are heard three times weekly on KRWG-FM, Southern New Mexico public radio, and her columns run in the Las Cruces Sun News. Susan's essays and stories have appeared in Harrowsmith Country Life, New Mexico, Sierra, Cricket, Bloomsbury Review, and other magazines. She is the co-founder of Las Cruces' wildly popular - and fun - Border Book Festival. She is currently living in Colorado with her husband, Richard Cabe, and dog, Perdida Imelda.
Susan is a popular public speaker and leader of workshops. Her stories of our natural and human history have captivated a wide variety of audiences, including school classes, workshops, banquets, and professional meetings. As Bloomsbury Review put it, she brings the precision of a scientist and the passion of a poet, and is able to refocus readers' vision and ignite their imaginations.
Susan has a new web site! She invites you to come visit. Her books are available there, at local bookstores, or on-line through http://BarnesandNoble.com and http://Amazon.com (search by author for Susan Tweit).
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I don't think of grizzlies living in Southern New Mexico, but they did. Until earlier this century, a variety of the big bears roamed the grasslands, oak and piñon-juniper woodlands, and pine forests from the Sierra Madre in Sonora and Chihuahua, Mexico, to the Manti La Sal Mountains on the Colorado Plateau in Utah. Before the 1870s, Anglo travelers and settlers reported frequent sightings of el oso plateado, "the silvery bear," named for the pale-tipped hairs which give a silvery sheen to its hump-backed shape. But thousands of settlers poured into the Southwest after the Civil War, bringing millions of head of livestock. Grizzlies became enemies, to be hunted relentlessly. By 1935, sixty years later, these unique Southwestern grizzlies were gone from New Mexico, exterminated, the last one shot on Rain Creek in the Mogollon Mountains.
Only stories remain of these grizzlies: their huge size - up to 800 pounds, six to seven feet tall when standing on their hind legs; their ferocious tempers and alleged preference for killing livestock. We do know that these grizzlies - like black bears, our state animal - were omnivores, varying their diet with the seasons. Rocky Mountain grizzlies, their northern cousins, eat carrion, large and small mammals, fish - and moths, grubs, spring roots and bulbs, mushrooms and of course, berries.
Rocky Mountain grizzlies are solitary except during mating season. They mate in June and July, hibernate from October until April, and only bear cubs every other year or every several years. In a warmer climate, with food available more of the year, did our southern plains grizzlies mate earlier? Hibernate for fewer months? Move into the desert during the rainy season to dig for flowering bulbs and roots? Were they truly more aggressive than the Rocky Mountain silvertips? We cannot know: except for the stories, and the long-clawed footprints chipped into the rock, they are gone.
In her book Secrets from the Center of the World, the poet Joy Harjo writes:
A summer storm reveals the dreaming place of bears.
But you cannot see their shaggy dreams of fish and berries,
any land signs supporting evidence of bears, or any bears at all.
What is revealed in the soaked rich earth, forked waters,
and fence line shared with patient stones
is the possibility of everything you can't see.