Hey, just an FYI. This episode is all about an ecologist mission to protect wildlife, but as part of that, there are some graphic descriptions of a dead animal she encountered in the wild.

Just a heads up. Okay, on to the show.

When Dr Ray Wynne Grant spotted the bear, it was lying in a stream.

Like a stream.

like a stream that was you know maybe three or four inches deep at its deepest so

not a stream that any person or animal could drown in, but it was like head down in a stream.

Ray's a wildlife ecologist and back in 2013 she was working for the Department of Wildlife in Nevada when she and her mentor got a call about this bear.

It had been found dead face down in less than four inches of water.

I mean, that was eerie to begin with.

It was super weird, but of course we were coming with this expectation that it had been

shot.

It is incredibly rare to find a dead bear in the wild.

To stumble upon one that had died of natural causes

is almost unheard of.

They're like going somewhere secret to die,

like to their cave or like what's the what's that we don't do we not know we don't know yeah I could tell you

Where a dead bear is if it's wearing a GPS color, but if there's no collar, honey, I don't know where they're dying,

I don't know where they're hibernating, like we don't know.

For every bear that you see like in your backyard or off the road like there are 300 bears

that you're not seeing better somewhere else. So this bear was a bit of a scientific marvel and definitely a mystery.

As Ray and her mentor stepped off the trail to investigate, neither of them said a word to each other.

They were cautious, even a little bit nervous.

...