bears

Recalling Western Exposure's posts earlier this summer on the various bear attacks in the Rocky Mountain West, we wonder if the bears of Canada and Alaska have heard about the Bear Wars coming their way:

• In southern Alberta, a three-year-old bear with no apparent fear of people, which had been living in and among the people of Canmore, was killed in downtown Fort St. John by the RCMP. "A lot of us were pretty discouraged," Alberta senior wildlife biologist Jon Jorgenson told Canwest News Service. "We worked with this bear quite a bit. We knew the bear quite well. He didn't seem to mind being near people."
• Hiking upslope in the dark through a thicket of hemlock near Sitka, deer hunter Karl Wolfe ran smack into a grizzly that promptly gave him two chomps on the arm. Wolfe smacked the bruin with his rifle and, while lying down, chambered a round and fired it. Then he managed to escape. Wildlife officers on Baranof Island in southeast Alaska are on the lookout for a brown bear, possibly wounded. Wolfe isn't sure if his shot hit the bear.

-- Robert McClure

First people targeted wolves, then bears. Now even beavers can't hide.

Trappers killed 10 beavers that made a Kenai, Alaska, drainage system their home, according to the Associated Press. When the beavers began plugging up drainage culverts as dams, the Alaska Department of Transportation called the state's Department of Fish and Game to prevent damage to a nearby road.

"We were experiencing what could have been a catastrophic failure of the road that could have caused millions of dollars in damage," said Carl High, Peninsula District superintendent with the DOT.

A special permit granted the Kenai Peninsula Trappers Association permission to remove the beavers, but the hides had to be turned over because the beavers were caught out of season and within city limits. Some locals were displeased with the killings.

Officials say they would rather have relocated the beavers or used "beaver exclusion devices" that allow them to build dams on the upside of culverts but don't affect water flow. But the DOT wanted the situation taken care of pronto. Officials say more beavers are likely to return, and they want to try different solutions in the future. Interesting that they didn't try the other solutions this time.

- Emily Linroth

InvestigateWest took a decidedly pro-bear stand here last week in defense of the bears of Aspen, and this week, the Colorado Division of Wildlife is coming around a bit. They're admitting that the "us-against-them"game plan hasn't worked too well, so they're back to the the drawing board, the Aspen Times reports today.

What's weird,  Carolyn Sackariason writes, is that this summer hasn't been a tough food year. The bears just seem, well, ticked at the humans, and smart. They're coming in the houses and rummaging in the fridges. While heavy rain earlier damaged the berry supply, it wasn't the "full natural food failure" that in previous years has driven the bears to extremely bad (from a human standpoint) behavior. The bears seem to have simply figured out there's a lot of food inside those houses, lured by the trash outside the houses, and the increasing number of humans and their dwellings.

So far this summer, 22 Aspen area bears have been relocated, and four cubs have been sent to rehabilitation centers. Eleven bears have been killed. Nationwide attention focused again on Aspen last week when a bear entered a man's house and attacked the man, causing superficial scratches. Other humans also have been attacked, including a sleeping woman scratched by a bear on her deck.

But wildlife officials' "two strike's policy," in which problem bears are first relocated, then killed the second time they break into a home or garbage can,  is apparently now up for review.  More public education and more hunting licenses are two of the agenda items to be studied during the coming long cold winter of hibernation. And we're hoping the bears won't be curling up in any ski lodge spare bedrooms.

-- Rita Hibbard

I just can't help rooting for the bears of Aspen. Much as I would hate to be that Aspen guy, in his own house last night, only to discover an angry bear ready to tousle me. Or author Susan Orlean, coming home to my vacation cabin, only to find bears had rummaged through my fridge, and consumed the OJ. Or any one of the couple of dozen people who have met up with bears over this summer.  My gosh, would I be upset. Still, the guys with guns are winning, and you know, the bears were there first.

In Aspen last night, the guy heard his dogs going crazy and he attempted to round them up. He was upstairs when the bear came on up and attacked him. After he was injured, he got back downstairs, got a window open, and the bear went out. He was taken to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries, the Aspen Times reports. But the bear has a death sentence.

Colorado Division of Wildlife spokesman Randy Hampton said a trap has been set and seven DOW officers were on scene. Authorities were patrolling the neighborhood.

"Obviously if we find the bear, we'll put him down," Hampton said.

 I like to think that this year the bears had a conference, and they decided to get out there and be proactive. Well, it's probably not gonna work, guys. But they must have seen other options failing. Friendliness didn't work in Montana. In August, wildlife officials shot and killed a 17-year-old female grizzly guilty of being "disturbingly friendly" to campers. One of her cubs bled to death from the tranquilizing dart. The other cub went to the Bronx zoo.  So why not bring it in Colorado, they might have reasoned. But the score isn't pretty so far.

British Columbia's poor salmon returns are beginning to hit more than the fishing industry. Grizzlies and black bears along the coast are starving to deathfrom lack of food, reports Mark Hume in the Globe and Mail. Officials attribute the strikingly low number of bears observed to low chum salmon runs the past few years, and suspect some bears may have died in their dens over the winter because they lacked the body fat necessary to survive. Conservation Director of Pacific Wild Ian McAllister states it plainly:

"River systems that in the past had 50,000 to 60,000 chum have now got 10 fish. The chum runs have been fished out. We've seen the biological extinction of a [salmon] species, and now we're seeing the impact on bears."

McAllister and others made a statement to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans requesting it cancel this fall's grizzly bear hunt and shut down all chum salmon fisheries. This comes after the Fraser River crisis, which InvestigateWest reported on further here.

"The collapse of the Fraser sockeye and now the north-coast chum salmon runs is leading to ecological collapse of our coast ecosystems," McAllister said.

– Emily Linroth

Those Aspen bears mean business. They aren't just toying with author Susan Orleans' Aspen retreat as we wrote about recently. Wildlife officials in the Colorado resort town euthanized another bear in Aspen last weekend, and another in nearby Glenwood Springs, in a season that could be among the most deadly for bears "lured by human food and irresponsibility," writes Janet Urquhart in The Aspen Times. To date this season, two bears have been euthanized in Aspen and two have been relocated. Wildlife officials have killed three bears in Glenwood Springs and relocated one, and two bears have been killed in the Vail area. The bear that was killed Sunday had been breaking into homes with her three cubs, teaching them the tricks of the trade. (The cubs were given a reprieve.)

"I heard she was totally not afraid of people," said Colorado Division of Wildlife spokesman Randy Hampton. "People had habituated her with their trash and birdfeeders and all that stuff."

Bears are acting up all over. First it was the bear breaking into author Susan Orlean's Aspen home, which set the Twitter world, well, a-twitter. Now, black bears in Wyoming are breaking and entering, reports the Casper Star-Tribune. So far, we know of no bears on Twitter.

A bear broke into the Aspen home of New York writer Susan Orlean, and ate stuff out of her fridge. Orlean, author of "The Orchid Thief," posted about the episode on Twitter, reports Colorado Independent reporter John Tomasic, who complains her tweets were "banal," apparently not up to her usual standards. But come on, it's 140 characters. Susan, an inveterate twitterer, wrote: "Our house in Aspen was vandalized last night BY A BEAR. Cleaned out the fridge and freezer and cookie cupboard; ate frozen OJ and waffles." The Twitter traffic continued at a furious rate after the news broke Monday.