There is a sub-species of the brown, or grizzly, bear that lives in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. However, given that the confirmed population at the time this book was released (2017), was less than 3 dozen, they may not be around much longer.
Chadwick was the writer portion of a writer-photographer team sent to Mongolia for a piece about the Gobi grizzlies for National Geographic in 2011. Then he came back to help for another 4 field seasons. Similar to Imperial Dreams, the book spends a fair amount of pages describing the landscape and the culture of the area. That the Gobi is a desert, but it's a seasonally cold, almost constantly windswept region. In addition to getting very little rain - 4 inches is considered a normal annual precipitation, and there was a 15 year stretch prior from 1993 to 2007 where it averaged half that - this is not a desert of sand dunes, but of rock. Tough granite the wind gradually breaks into grit that gets into everything, including Chadwick's eye, as he gets eye infections two years running.
Still, Chadwick seems to love his time there, for how different it is from anything else he knows. He describes the size of it, the seemingly endless expanse, is almost disorienting at first, but he comes to feel more at home the more time he spends roaming in his down time.
Most of Chadwick's time is spent in a particular protected section of Mongolia, the Greater Gobi A Strictly Protected Area, as that's the only confirmed range the bears occupy. He discusses the lives of the local rangers and biologists, who protect and study the "GGSPA", the challenges they face in getting funding, the issues with demands to utilize the resources for other things.
This is not like a national park in the U.S., where people can drive in and gawk at the critters. Access is restricted, so it's not paying for itself in tourism dollars. Mongolia has a strong pastoral culture, so livestock herders are allowed to bring their animals into certain sections of the GGSPA in the winter months to graze. This at least keeps them from competing with the bears for food (the bears are hibernating), but it's probably more grazing pressure than the plant life can tolerate.
Also, the Gobi Desert is rich in minerals, and a lot of Mongolia's economy was based on mineral extraction. So there are companies trying to get the government to open the area up so they can tear it apart. And there are the "ninja miners", people who take advantage of the desert's size and isolation to sneak in and run covert, small-scale mining operations. If caught by the rangers, they might get a fine, and their equipment taken away. Even if they shoot the rangers, they may not face harsher penalties, if they know the right people. So Chadwick also discusses the push-and-pull of trying to get government officials on the side of protecting this place and its wildlife - apparently it also has the only population of wild Bactrian camels - and how quickly the level of support can shift with changes in the administration.
All that said, what this book has Imperial Dreams didn't is they actually find the bears. Not a ton of them; in an average field season maybe 2 bears get radio-collared after they end up in one of the feeder traps, though there are cameras set up around the feeders that capture images of many more. But enough Chadwick gets to see these animals up close, not just hear about them based on recollections of someone pulling up memories from half a century ago. They seem fascinating, if only for how different they are from what I picture when someone says "grizzly bear."
They're closer to the black bears we have in Missouri in size - the largest captured is slightly over 300 pounds, and there are a couple of young adult females that barely top 120 - and live mostly on plants. There's a stretch of a couple of pages where Chadwick describes trying to learn from one of the local biologists just what the heck these bears find to live on in this place, and since there's a language barrier, it comes to him pointing at various plants and miming like he's shoveling it into his mouth. (Apparently, one thing the bears eat in abundance is the tuber the local wild rhubarb have underground, but also the flowers of certain species.)
The nice thing with Chadwick coming back for several field seasons is you can see how the research group are trying to incorporate new ideas into their work, as they gain fresh information, and how well that does and doesn't work. The feeders are mostly grain pellets, but at one point, they try adding dog food to the mix to provide more protein, because the bears do eat flightless grasshoppers, gerbils, and small lizards. The bears ignore the dog food. Why? Unclear at that time, just like it's unclear why sometimes the bears will chew on a camel carcass (based on their poop), but other times they won't. However, adding additional feeders at the same oasis, but further away, so one bear can't monopolize the food source, seemed to give females with cubs more opportunities to get some extra calories they might not ordinarily have.
I also want to mention, this book has some outstanding photographs. Of the bears, and the people involved in the work, but also some double-page spreads of the actual terrain. I might not think so if I was actually wandering around out there, but it looks gorgeous, in a stark, austere kind of way. So maybe I would like it. I like open spaces; I'm the only person I know who likes traveling through western Kansas.
'Trust me: semi-fresh grizzly shit full of partially fermented wild onion sprouts is definitely not a hoax.'
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