Daniel Perez on Bigfoot Population Estimates
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on November 8th, 2007
As I stated to the reporter who interviewed me for the Press-Enterprise, anyone past, present and future talking numbers (population) for Bigfoot is in the guesstimating business, as there isn’t much data to base it on. Yes, you can get a rough idea as to what an unknown population might be based on populations for, say, bear, coyote and deer but the crucial thing here to consider is these are known animals. Bigfoot is the great “X”, the unknown. So when I say 100,000 Bigfoot in North America, in my humble opinion, that is a drop in the bucket, as North America is a bloody massive land mass. Anyone who has flown from, say, Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. has an opportunity to see how vast the land is just in one “plane” corridor in the United States. In other words, as far as your eye can see from the window of the plane. People see one hundred thousand and think that is a big number. Well, yes, it is. But put that number in perspective… all of North America with an estimated size of 9,460,000 square miles and all of a sudden 100,000 looks like just a very, very small amount. Myself or any other researchers/investigators on Bigfoot would not be able to argue a higher or lower population as it is all just a great intellectual exercise of guesstimating.
Best,Daniel Perez
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
Sounds like he still doesn’t know what he’s talking about hehe
10 million in North America, is 1 per square mile. Now that kind of has a nice ring to it. 1 per square mile, on average.
Respectfully…neither do you….JMHO
I think Daniel’s estimate is more accurate than most proffered and based upon defensible quantitative deductive reasoning.
live and let live…
ole bub and the dawgs
Drop in the bucket? Now here’s an expert who knows his facts.
For a better perspective, check out this great Map from Global Forest Watch:
http://www.globalforestwatch.org/english/us/images/map1_forweb.gif
In estimating possible population numbers,I’ve always used the comparitive of cougar/ sasquatch sightings. Up here in Manitoba, the number of sightings of cougars and sasquatch have been reasonably equal over the years. I feel the amount that Daniel Perez states is high. Keep in mind that you do need enough animals in a givin area for a viable breeding population, but 100,000…just seems like alot.
Question is, would sasquatch be solitary creatures, like cougar, or are they social animals, like gorillas, chimps and bonobos?
Male orangutan are known to be loners, but females stay with their young for years.
I00 000 !! I think 20 000 would be a big number !! but 100 000…..i don’t think so !!
Wow – all those hominids and still not one single dead corpse.
Would the estimate given by the cryptozoologist on the Sasquatch segment of MonsterQuest last night be more accurate? As far as I can REMEMBER it was basically on the same level as Perez’s.
I agree that it may sound a bit high, but a question for olejason—
If he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, do you?
Just wondering. I wouldn’t be qualified to make an estimate, but on the whole, I’d rather have an overestimate from someone at least SOMEWHAT qualified than no estimate at all.
Been a while since I’ve been here. However, I must say that 100,00 does seem like a lot…. I haven’t researched this, but is there that many grizzlies in North America? I don’t think so… If I have to guess.. Then I’d go with 10 to 20,000 at most….
Just a guess…
Cheers!
CBFresearcher- 10 to 20 thousand grizzlies in the U.S.? Not even close. During the 1800s, the grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) numbered around 50,000. Note that this is half what Perez estimates for sasquatch. During the 70s, the grizzly population in the States dropped significantly, reaching a low point around 1975, when the population dropped to less than a thousand animals. Today, the population is estimated at between 1,100 and 1,300. These are grizzly bears, of course, not black bears which can be found in greater numbers.
So where does this leave me on the sasquatch population estimate of 100,000? I think it is high. Grizzly bears are a keystone species, which means they have a top down effect on other animals in the ecosystem. If a keystone species like this has been reduced to such low numbers, I find it difficult to believe an 8 foot tall creature like the sasquatch could be thriving in such high numbers. Don’t let the land area statistics of the continental U.S. fool you, there is more to population numbers than how much space is out there. The health of the ecosystem, amount of resource rich land, ability to compete with other animals, and various other factors will all play a role.
In the end, I think we just do not know enough about sasquatch to make any kind of accurate guess. Population estimates can be hard even with known species, it is a tricky thing sometimes. We do not have any solid knowledge on sasquatch movements, nutritional requirements, mortality, birth rate, nor much of anything else. We don’t even know if it is out there at all. It would be very daunting to come up with anything close to an accurate figure for such a creature.
Some have brought up using sighting reports as a gauge, but there are problems with this in my opinion. First of all, you have to separate the good reports from the bad. Then you have to consider that likely those reports that do come out are likely only the tip of the iceberg. Tip of the iceberg I said? Well, that must mean there are a lot, right? Wrong. To the best of my knowledge there is no truly reliable way to recognize individual creatures from just the reports. One sasquatch could wander and cause a whole rash of sightings, which could create the impression that there are more than there really are. I think sightings are useful in many ways, but not as an indicator of population density in the case of Bigfoot.
I think 100,000 is high, but as I said, we just do not know. Bigfoot is a bit of an enigma at this point. I could be totally wrong.
I’d be surprised if there numbers were more than 10,000 to be honest and they could be as low as 2,000 – 3,000. The fact is, much of North America is simply unsuitable as Sasquatch habitat and i’m not sure if we can conclude that these animals even exist outside of the Pacific North West.
Some more thoughts concerning the difficulty we face in trying to gauge numbers of sasquatch.
Let’s for a moment imagine that sasquatch is a real creature, just for argument’s sake. Any sort of wildlife population census comes with a slew of inherit problems that are only compounded by the lack of data on the sasquatch. While we can get an idea of possible sasquatch behavior from sightings reports and so on, we simply do not know a lot of the requisite information needed in order to come to an estimation. I will try to illustrate some of the problems, but bear in mind this is not an exhaustive list.
Problem number 1, it must be emphasized that animal populations are not static. Life span, reproductive habits, rates of reproduction, and mortality are all things which play a role in shaping any given species’ population at any given time. Because of this, these factors play a big role in trying to figure out or predict wildlife numbers. Although we can speculate, we know next to nothing for sure about any of these things concerning sasquatch.
Problem number 2 has to do with behaviors. Animals can be more active in some seasons than others, and can also demonstrate a wide variety of activity cycles. They can be diurnal (active during the day/sleep at night), nocturnal (active at night), or crepuscular (active during twilight or just before sunrise). These differing activity cycles can cause problems for counting even known species, yet once again we do not know for sure with the sasquatch. Granted, sightings reports could be of a lot of help here, but we have to allow for the fact that we do not know for sure.
Problem number 3 is we have to account for movement. Most animals are mobile to some degree and this must be accounted for when doing any consensus. Does the animal have a large territory? Does it remain in a limited area? Does it migrate? Does it stay put? Is it nomadic? These are things that we do not know about the sasquatch to any appreciable degree. Add to that the fact that this appears to be an animal that needs to remain secretive to survive, meaning it lives in thick forest with vegetation to hide movements or some other terrain that makes it hard to get a bead on them. Elusiveness can make it hard to count any known animal, and I would have to say that sasquatch are definitely elusive. At least with known animals there are ways to predict these movements or use tags to track them. We can’t really do that with sasquatch at this point due to lack of solid data and lack of any way to tag them.
Problem 4 is habitat. In the case of most known animals, we have species who favor habitats distributed in a non random manner, or highly versatile and gregarious creatures. The former would describe, for example, a creature which is always found in alpine forests. This allows a census to be taken in a fairly reliable manner because, simply, we know where the animals are. The latter would be a species which can be found in a wide variety of habitats, making it harder to predict where the bulk of the population is focused at any given time. By all accounts, the sasquatch seems to be the latter, being sighted in a mind boggling variety of habitats and ecosystems. It appears to be a highly versatile animal and this makes it a lot more difficult to take an accurate census of.
This is just a basic sample of some of the things that need to be considered when trying to come up with an accurate number of any species. They are things that can be tricky with even documented animals. In my opinion, we are in no position to really come up with any sort of figure for sasquatch, and any number is pretty much as good a guess as the next. I tend to think that with a large creature like sasquatch, which is most likely a keystone species, it would be prudent to start with a lower number and go higher if the data points that way. Maybe there ARE around 100,000 of them, but I doubt it at this time.