| |
All Attractants Articles
As many as 26 black bears face a possible death sentence if conservation officers find they're still reliant on the dog food a Christina Lake man fed them for a decade, B.C.'s environment minister says.
The docile bears were discovered during a police raid on a suspected marijuana grow-op in August. The animals acted like friendly pets -- one lounged on an RCMP cruiser and watched as the officers did their work -- and police suspected they had been trained to guard the drug operation.
Revelstoke Bear Aware Community Coordinator Janette Vickers has been working with Ron Larsen and Jeff Bolingbroke at Parks Canada to create a Google Earth Map to view bear sightings on the Revelstoke Bear Aware website, www.revelstokebearaware.org. The Google Earth Map is an interactive tool for residents to view bear sightings and associated bear attractants in our community. Currently, the map includes reported bear sightings for 2009, 2010 and our first bear sighting of 2011 on April 23rd.
Most kids will have stories about the Easter bunny today, but how many will get to talk about the Easter bear?
The Ward family will, after a black bear boldly strolled into their garage late Sunday, climbed into the family’s minivan and helped itself to their Easter treats.
The Wards, who live on Pinegrass Street in Pineview Valley, had just returned from a trip to Kelowna around 11 p.m. They opened their garage door, pulled in the minivan and started unloading.
CAIRO, NY (WNYT/NBC) - A 53-year-old woman was lucky to escape a mauling by a large black bear, despite a lack of visible injuries on her as she sat in her hospital bed at Albany Medical Center.
Still, Joy Bayer-Mozynski said her back is very sore from where she was pinned down by a large black bear.
It happened Wednesday afternoon.
Bayer-Mozynski saw the garbage cans outside her Round Top home, a hamlet of Cairo, New York were knocked over, and the lids were off.
Despite what seems like the renewal of winter this week, Whistler residents are being asked to prepare for the awakening of the local black bear population.
The emergence from hibernation comes at the same time the municipality has received funding to hire a Bear Aware community coordinator for Whistler. This is the fifth year that the B.C. Conservation Foundation has subsidized a community coordinator position in Whistler.
They’re awake and crawling out of their dens looking for food, any food: the tender green shoots of plants reaching for the warm spring sun as well as bugs, bark and carcasses of animals that didn’t make it through the winter.
And garbage.
For some black bears, especially those living in green spaces and forests around the Tri-Cities, humans’ garbage is as good as anything because they aren’t picky eaters. They’ll eat the plastic wrap off a stale chocolate bar.
In this paper the authors tested the ability to use stable isotope analysis (by plucking hair from captured bears) to quantify garbage in bear diet. They contrasted hairs taken from spring harvested bears and bear captures in Missoula, Montana in 2009. Results: 1. Stable isotopes seem promising for actually identifying garbage in diet, but there are still some issues to be worked out; 2. Garbage was not a significant food source for bears around Missoula in 2008.
A new study from the University of Calgary suggests you might be saving an animal's life when you take a walk in the woods.
The study, published in the journal Public Library of Science One Wednesday, found that while predatory animals like wolves, cougars, and bears tend to stay away when humans are in the area, prey like elk, moose, and deer are more likely to stick around.
BILLINGS, Mont. — Wildlife officials in the Northern Rockies are considering an overhaul to a program that tests bear-resistant containers in response to increased demands on the government-subsidized effort.
Gregg Losinski with the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee says the group's seal of approval for bear-resistant trash bins, campground food boxes and other containers has drawn interest from across the country and as far away as Eastern Europe.
Containers are certified by the committee if they survive intact after being filled with food and placed in an enclosure with a captive grizzly bear. As demand for such products increases, wildlife officials are considering contracting out the testing through a nonprofit organization and increasing certification fees.
Have you helped kill a black bear? Have you contributed to its forced relocation, a stressful move usually, into another bear's territory?
Sometimes I think we should relocate a few of the folks who contribute to bears taking to our streets instead of staying in the backcountry.
If you leave pet food outside, fail to rake up birdseed on the ground, leave birdseed in a bear-reachable feeder overnight or put fish skin and bones in a garbage can, you may be visited by raccoons or bears.
Prince George, B.C. - The City of Prince George has three steps to complete before it can be certified as a "Bear Smart" community.
Bears are not uncommon sites in Prince George, in fact, last year, Conservation Officers received 1925 calls about bears in the community and attended 310. Of that number, 86 black bears and one grizzly were destroyed, and one black bear was relocated.
Not all bears hibernate in the winter, especially the bears at the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone.
The grizzlies stay up for the entire year, making them ideal candidates for bear-resistant container testing during the winter season.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks bear manager for the Missoula region James Jonkel, Patti Sowka of the Living with Wildlife Foundation, located in Condon and the staff at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center held a unique wintertime bear-resistant container testing session last Thursday.
Officials in Kamloops, as well as other cities on the fringe of wild areas, encourage homeowners to keep garbage indoors in order to deter bears.
In the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains in Montana, it's not quite so simple. And rather than just black bears, the population includes bigger and wilder grizzlies.
But the concept of keeping people and bears safe, by keeping them apart, is the same.
NORTH ELBA, N.Y. — It was built to be impenetrable, from its “super rugged transparent polycarbonate housing” to its intricate double-tabbed lid that would keep campers’ food in and bears’ paws out.
The BearVault 500 withstood the ravages of the test bears at the Folsom City Zoo in California. It has stymied mighty grizzlies weighing up to 1,000 pounds in the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park.
But in one corner of the Adirondacks, campers started to notice that the BearVault, a popular canister designed to keep food and other necessities safe, was being compromised. First through circumstantial evidence, then from witness reports, it became clear that in most cases, the conqueror was a relatively tiny, extremely shy middle-aged black bear named Yellow-Yellow.
CHEYENNE -- Portable electric fences as night pens for domestic sheep in the Upper Green River region of the Wind River Mountains last summer protected sheep and sheepherders from predatory animals, according to a rancher.
Speaking before the Wyoming Animal Damage Management Board last week in Cheyenne, rancher Mary Thoman also said the pens reduced the number of grizzly bears removed from the area because of conflict.
Buffalo, NY (WBEN) -- Effective immediately, feeding black bears is prohibited in New York State.
The State Department of Environmetal Conservation announced the ban on feeding black bears Friday afternoon. There has been a ban for many years in certain areas, but it's now been expanded to include the entire state.
The ban applies to both intentional and incidental bear-feeding. The DEC says says residents can avoid unintentionally providing a meal to black bears by - among other things - cleaning up birdseed or pet food given outside, tightly sealing garbage cans and keeping them indoors whenever possible, and not putting meat scraps on compost piles.
Who knew grizzly bears knew CPR?
At least, that's what it looks like when residents of the Montana Grizzly Discovery Center test the latest bear-resistant food container. In a video shown to the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee meeting on Wednesday, a 1,000-pound silvertip placed its paws just like it shows in the Red Cross handbook and pumped away on a lightweight backpacking jug.
The patient did not survive.
Patti Swoka of Living With Wildlife Foundation displayed the jug during the IGBC's morning session: It was snapped in half. She also held up another container almost identical to the failed model. That one survived the grizzly's "CPR" - and everything else the Discovery Center's product-testing bears could inflict. And it won the right to declare its product IGBC-standard bear resistant.
The Get Bear Smart Society is working to record — and reduce — the number of wildlife deaths on regional highways.
Dawn Johnson, project coordinator for the society, explained that although there were 10 confirmed bear deaths on local highways in 2010, the number might be much higher. The society is putting out a call to the public to report any past incidents of vehicle collisions with animals.
One of the most rewarding discoveries for a bear in an urban area is an unsecured grease vessel. Many restaurants and eateries use these vessels to store used cooking oil which is then collected by companies that recycle the oil into products like biodiesel. Although this is an important environmental service, when mishandled, it can come at the cost of a bear’s life. A full standard barrel contains 210 liters of oil. That translates into a whopping 1.6 MILLION calories for the smaller vessels (in bear terms, that is a MAJOR SCORE… equal to many weeks of foraging for berries). The caloric value, combined with the smell of tasty fryer fixings, makes grease vessels irresistible. Attractants such as this draw bears into urban areas. Once there, it is often easy for bears to opportunistically find unsecured food, garbage, or other attractants. It only takes one food reward for a bear to start becoming food conditioned. Food conditioned bears are at a much higher risk for being killed due to human-bear conflict.
This report to experimentally tests the efficacy of education and enforcement in altering human behavior to better secure attractants (garbage) from bears. We conducted 3 experiments in Aspen CO, USA to evaluate: 1) on-site education in communal dwellings and construction sites, 2) Bear Aware educational campaign in residential neighborhoods, and 3) elevated law enforcement at two levels in the core business area of Aspen.
|
|
|
