Why Wildlife Doesn't Need Your Help — What Rangers Really Want Visitors to Know

The three most common wildlife mistakes visitors make in national parks are feeding, rescuing, and getting too close. Most people who make them think they're doing something harmless. Some think they're helping.

In this episode, Ranger PamPaw draws on nearly four decades of National Park Service experience to explain what actually happens when wildlife gets conditioned to human food, when a well-meaning visitor picks up a fawn, and when a visitor closes the distance for a selfie with a bison.

You'll hear about bear school at Katmai, the remarkable return of black bears to Big Bend National Park, the baby squirrel call at San Antonio Missions, and a close encounter with a mother bear and her cubs on the Basin Loop Trail — an encounter that worked because a ranger knew when to step aside.

This episode is about the chain of good decisions that makes wild places stay wild — and your role in it.

 CHAPTERS:

0:00 — Cold Open: The Kid at the Wall — Rainbow Curve

02:04 — Segment 1: Feeding Wildlife — Why It Matters

08:20 — Segment 2: The "Rescue" Instinct

13:06 — Segment 3: Proximity, Phones, and the Selfie Problem

16:37 — Segment 4: What Respectful Wildlife Observation Looks Like

20:57 — Closing: The Chain of Good Decisions

Ranger PamPaw Podcast is hosted by Mark Tezel — known to his grandkids as Ranger PamPaw — after nearly four decades with the National Park Service. New episodes drop every other Wednesday. Part of the Tezels on the Road family.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There is a specific memory I have of Rocky Mountain National Park. I was young, elementary school age, and we pulled into the parking area at Rainbow Curve, a scenic overlook on the Trail Ridge Road. Before I even looked at the mountains, I ran to the Lone Stone Wall, because that's where the chipmunks were. They were everywhere. Bold, fast, absolutely unafraid of people. I remember my parents buying small packages of peanuts. I believe you could get them at the store in the park, and feeding them right out of our hands. It felt magical. These wild animals coming to us, trusting us. By the time I was in high school, the science had changed. Don't feed the wildlife. I didn't think much about it at the time. But by the time I became a ranger, it was strictly prohibited. And I was the one explaining why. Here's the thing about that family: nobody was trying to harm those chipmunks. My parents weren't careless people. They sold the pinnacle store right in the park. The chipmunks were right there, practically asking for it. And yet the outcome of enough people doing what we did over enough summers with animals that become dependent on food sources that vanished every October. Animals become addition to human food and don't always figure out how to go back. Some of them don't survive. I tell that story not to make anyone feel guilty about a childhood memory. I tell it because it's the clearest example I know of how wildlife problems almost never start with bad attentions. They start with good ones. I'm Ranger Pampall. Today we're going to talk about what wildlife in national parks actually need from us. Turns out the most helpful thing you can do looks a lot like doing nothing at all. Hi everyone, I'm Ranger Pampall, Mark Tetzler. I'm glad you're here. Most people who have visited a national park have seen the signs. Don't feed the wildlife. It's one of the most consistent rules across the entire national park system. And most visitors, if you ask them, will tell you they know it. What fewer people understand is what actually happens when the rule gets broken. Even once, even casually, even with the best intentions. I want to take you to Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Katmai was originally set aside to protect the remarkable landscape created by the eruption of Novaropta Volcano. Today it's known for something else entirely. The bears at Brooks Camp. Brooks River runs a short distance between two lakes. About midway is Brooks Falls. Every summer, salmon are required to leap over those falls to reach their spawning grounds. The bears know this. And during peak salmon season, dozens of brown bears gather at the falls and along the river to fish. And during that same window, even more visitors arrive to watch them. There is no chance, zero, that you will not have a bear encounter at Brooks Camp. Walking around the lodge, along the trails, near the falls viewing platform, bears and humans interact constantly. Which raises an obvious question, why is it that this go wrong more often? The answer is bear school. Every visitor who arrives at Brooks Camp, whether by float plane or by boat, is met immediately by a ranger and attends mandatory orientation, bear school. You learn that the primary goal of every bear you will see is to eat as much salmon as possible before winter. Their survival through the long Alaskan winter is determined almost entirely by how much weight they can put on during this short season. They are not interested in you at all. They are interested in the fish. The main lesson is simple: stay out of their way. If you encounter a bear on the trail, step aside and let it pass. Don't approach, don't retreat quickly, just move to the side and let it go about its business. The morning after Elise and I arrived, we got up early hoping to beat the crowds to the falls viewing platform. We were alone on the road when we saw a large brown bear boar walking directly towards us. Now I will admit my first reaction was something close to panic. Then bear school kicked in. We stopped the side of the road, and the bear did exactly what the ranger said it would. It lumbered past us, barely glancing our way, completely focused on where it was going. That encounter worked because the bears at Brooks camps have not been conditioned to associate humans with food. The MPS works hard to keep it that way. Every piece of food is secured. Every visitor is briefed. The bears remain wild, which means they remain safe. And for another bear success story, let's go from Alaska down to Texas. Big Ben National Park had no bears for most of the 20th century. Hunting and cattle ranching had pushed the Mexican black bear out of the Chizos Mountains entirely. By the 1950s, they were effectively gone. Then in the 1980s, something started to change. A sighting once every year or two, then once a month, then once a week. By 1988 and 1989, there were enough confirmed sightings to establish that bears were breeding on their own again in Big Bend. On their own without any human reintroduction, recolonizing from northern Mexico as the habitat recovered. By the time I was visiting the park for work between 2005 and 2015, I was seeing bears daily, not just in the Chizos Basin, sometimes down at Panther Junction in the foothills. Here's why that recovery went well. The park staff in the late 1980s, when this first sighting started, immediately put infrastructure in place. Bearproof food storage was added to every campsite, both in the basin and in the backcountry. Education programs went up. And even though, I will be honest with you, in those early days, early years, it seemed like a lot of effort for something that was barely there yet. Those decisions made this decades earlier are exactly why Big Ben's bear are still there today. Still wild, still largely unhabituated. A fair bear is a dead bear. That phrase gets used way too often. Starts to sound like a slogan. What it actually describes is a management reality. Once a bear connects humans with food, that behavior accelerates. It doesn't plateau, the bear becomes bolder. It approaches campsites, it damages property. Eventually, it injures someone. And at that point, the options left are relocation, which often fails, or euthanasia. The bear didn't choose that outcome. The first person who left food accessible did. And it doesn't have to be a bear. The chipmunks I fed as a child were part of the same pattern on a smaller scale. Ground squirrels at overlooks, ravens at picnic tables, deer that learn to approach cars. Every species has a version of this story. The details change, the mechanics don't. People want to help. They see a fawn lying still in the tall grass and assume it's been abandoned. They find a bird on the ground and pick it up before it can be hit by a car. They watch a coyote close in on a ground squirrel and feel the urge to intervene. Every one of these impulses comes from a place of real compassion. And in almost every case, acting on it makes things worse. Let me start with that fawn, because it comes up constantly at parks with deer populations. A fawn lying still and alone is almost certainly not abandoned. It's hiding. Those leave their fawns for extended periods during the first weeks of life. They browse at a distance while the fawn stays motionless, relying on camouflage. The fawn's instinct is to hold still, which it does extremely well. A fawn that looks like it does abandon is in most cases doing exactly what it's supposed to do. When a visitor picks up that fawn, two things happen. First, human scent transfers to the animal. Those have been known to reject fawns that have been handled. Second, and sometimes worse, a well-meaning person may carry the fawn to a visitor center or call it in as an injured animal, at which point it becomes a wildlife management problem that didn't exist an hour earlier. The same principle holds for birds. A grounded bird on a trail is usually either a fledgling learning to fly, which is normal in temporary situation, or an injured adult. In either case, picking it up, however gently, causes stress. For young birds, especially, human contact can disrupt their feeding relationship between the bird and its parents. The kindest response in almost every situation is to move it gently off the trail if it's in if it's in immediate danger, and then leave it alone. San Antonio Missions is an urban park, part of a living city surrounded by neighborhoods. The wildlife you encounter there is generally on the smaller sides, squirrels, birds, small mammals. And the visitors being urban often have different expectations than you'd find at a backcountry park. One day a visitor came into the visitor center to report a baby squirrel lying on the ground near one of the mission compounds. The visitor was, of course, concerned. The animal was small, it wasn't moving quickly, it seemed vulnerable. We thanked them and went to check it out. It was away from the main visitor routes, not in immediate danger, and not injured in any obvious way. We didn't rescue it. That response can feel counterintuitive, even harsh, if you haven't spent time thinking about it. But urban wildlife is still wild. The best outcome for that squirrel was for nature to take its course. If it was a fledgling that had come out of the nest too early, the mother was likely nearby. If it was injured, intervention was unlikely to improve the outcome. What's certain is that removing it from its environment, handling it, or attempting to care for it would have introduced a set of stresses and complications that weren't there before. Leave it alone is not the same as don't care. It is, in most wildlife situations, the most informed response available. There is one more version of the rescue instinct worth naming: the visitor who tries to intervene in the predator and prey event. A hawk taking a rabbit. A coyote running down a ground squirrel. This is genuinely difficult to watch, especially for children. And yet, predation is not malfunction. It's how those ecosystems work. A ranger stepping in to save the rabbit is not an act of kindness to the park. It is a disruption to the system that the park exists to protect. What rangers want you to know about is this. If you see an animal that appears to be genuinely injured, not just resting, not just young, the right call is to report it to park staff and let them assess it. That is what they are there for. Your job as a visitor is to be a good witness, not a rescuer. The third behavior is getting too close. And this one has gotten considerably more complicated over the last decade or so. National parks have distance guidelines for viewing wildlife. At most parks, the standard is 25 yards, roughly the length of two school buses between you and any wildlife. At parks where bears and wolves are present, that buffer increases to 100 yards for those specific species. These are not arbitrary numbers. They are based on what research and field observation tell us about the distance at which wildlife begins to show stress response. By the time the phone and camera and social media era really arrived, I was no longer working in the field in the same way. But I watched what it did to visitors' behavior from the management side, and I heard it regularly from rangers who were. The pattern they described was consistent. A bison, an elk, a bear, a wolf, any large or charismatic animal would be spotted near a road or trail. A visitor would stop, another would stop, and within minutes there were 20 people, many of them with phones out, moving slowly toward the animal to close the distance for a greater shot. The animal would begin showing stress signals, stop feeding, raised head, changed posture, repositioning away from the crowd. And most visitors didn't notice. They were looking at their screens. The bison goring incidents at Yellowstone are not isolated events. They are a pattern. Bison are not domesticated animals. They are large, fast, and unpredictable when stressed. The visitor who got a great photo from 15 yards away and then walked away fine does not know that the visitor three days later, doing the exact same thing, ended up being airlifted out. Parks have responded with increasingly direct signage. Some have gone to Pacific measured distances posted at trailheads. Others have used interpretive programming to explain what stress actually looks like in wildlife, so visitors know what they are watching for. Rangers spend a meaningful part of their days in popular wildlife areas managing proximity. Not because visitors are malicious, but because the pull of the phone camera is strong and the feedback loop is slow. The animal doesn't charge every time, so visitors conclude it's fine. There's also a nesting dimension to this that doesn't get enough attention. Ground nesting birds in particular are extremely vulnerable to trail disturbance. A visitor who steps off the trail to get a better angle to scene may have no idea they are standing 15 feet from an active nest. Repeated disturbance during nesting season can cause birds to abandon nests entirely. It's about the animal's ability to behave normally in its own habitat. When you close that distance, you are not just getting a better photo. You are inserting yourself into the animal's environment in a way that has real cost, even if it doesn't look like it from where you're standing at the time. I was at Big Bend on temporary duty, a work trip, and I finished early one afternoon with enough light for a hike. I chose the basin loop trail, short enough for the time I had, but full of mountain scenery that makes the Chizos Basin one of the most remarkable places in a national park system. At one point, the trail descends one side of a ravine, crosses the wash at the bottom, and then climbs out the other side. As I was heading down, I heard a snort from somewhere ahead of me. And then I saw her, a Mexican black bear just above the trail in the wash. A moment later, I heard rustling closer to the trail. Two cubs on the other side of the ravine bottom, on the other side of the trail. I had come very close to walking directly between a mother bear and her cubs. And what I did was stop. I did not run, I did not make a noise. I assessed where everyone was: the sow, the two cubs, the trail, and I stepped back up the slope a few feet to give her a clear line between herself and her cubs. And then I waited. She looked at me and she made a decision. She moved her cubs across the wash and up the far side of the ravine. I wasn't a threat. And within a few minutes they were gone. I continued down the trail, and that encounter worked because I stayed aware on that trail. Because I knew what I was looking at when I heard the snort, and because I gave the bear what she needed: space and a clear path to her cubs. She did not need my help. She needed me to get out of her way. That is what respectful wildlife observation looks like in practice. To be fair, there are accidental encounters with wildlife all the time. No matter how aware you are, you may still find yourself in a bad situation. But those incidents are rare. The visitor who respects the wildlife while visiting their home will avoid the bad encounters 99.9% of the time. Respect is not passive, it requires attention. You are watching where you're walking, reading the landscape around you, paying attention to sounds and movement before your brain fully registers what they mean. The visitors who have the best wildlife experience in national parks are almost always the ones who are paying attention, not the ones who are chasing the shot. Stillness is underrated as wildlife skill. When you stop moving, the part starts moving around you. Animals that would have moved away from your footsteps come back into view. You hear things that you would have walked past. Dawn and dusk are the best wildlife windows for exactly this reason: lower visitor traffic, lower light, more animal movement. That requires getting out early or staying out late. But the experiences that come from it are different in quality from anything you can get at peak midday. Binoculars and telephoto lenses are not just photography equipment. They are the tools that let you have a real encounter without crossing the distance that disrupts it. The bear you observe from 200 yards with binoculars going about her business entirely unaware of you, that is a richer experience than the bear that stops feeding and turns to you, face you from 20 yards. One of those encounters is yours. The other one belongs to the bear and it costs the bear something. Parks protect wildlife so that future visitors can experience what you just experienced. Every good decision you make in the field, staying on trail, keeping your distance, watching instead of approaching, is a contribution to that chain. It doesn't feel like much in the moment, but it's exactly what makes the next person encounter possible. I started this episode with a memory of feeding the chipmunks at Rainbow Curve. I want to end it with a different kind of memory. The Mexican black bears in Big Bens, the ones that were defectively gone from the park by the 1950s and came back in their own in the 1980s, are there today in park because of decisions made by the people who will never know the bears they protected. Rangers in the late 1980s who put up food storage before the bears were even a regular presence. Managers who funded education programs when the population was still small enough that you could go years without a sighting. And visitors who followed the rules not because they thought it mattered that day, but because the rules existed for a reason. The bears didn't know any of that. They just came back to a place that was ready for them. That is what I want you to take away from this episode. Not a checklist, not a list of things that you're not allowed to do. But a sense of the chain. The wildlife experiences that are available in national parks today, the bears at Brooks Falls, the elk in the meadows, the hawk riding thermals over the Chizos, exist because of accumulated good decisions made by people who came before you. Some of them were rangers, a lot of them were visitors who kept their distance, kept their food secure, and left the fawn in the grass where they found it. Your visit is a part of that chain now. What you do today feeds into what the next visitor gets to experience. That's not a burden, it's the whole point. Thank you for spending this time with me. If this episode gave you something useful to carry into your next park visit, I'd love to hear about it. Or if you have your own memory of a wildlife encounter, I'd love to hear about that as well. Leave a comment, share it with someone who loves the parks, or drop me a note. Next episode, we're going to have a little more fun. We're busting park myths, the ones that won't die no matter how many times rangers correct them. I've been looking forward to that one. I'm Ranger Pampel. Until next time, stay curious, stay respectful, and take care of the parks that take care of all of us.