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All Encounters Articles
Well, the bears are waking up in Glacier National Park. Since the start of the month there have been at least three separate track sightings, and at least one bruin was compelled to dig a hole in the Belly River area.
Tracks were spotted by visitors near Many Glacier and Lake McDonald, according to park officials.
“With these early March reports of bear activity, park visitors are reminded to be alert for bear activity and to be familiar with and comply with safety regulations," said Glacier Superintendent Chas Cartwright.
New Jersey’s black bear population has soared to nearly 3,500, a level that can no longer be controlled solely by non-lethal methods, a wildlife biologist said today as the state Fish and Game Council adopted a management policy recommending a six-day hunt in December.
The biologist, Patrick Carr, said the main reason for the growing population is the abundance of food state residents willingly and unwillingly provide. The result, he said, is that the bruins are living longer and giving birth to more cubs than bears in other parts of the country.
TERRACE, B.C. - People around the world can now go online to peek inside the den of a rare kermode bear in B.C. while the animal hibernates.
A state wildlife expert in DeKalb County said Friday the number of resident black bears has increased significantly since just a few years ago. Tracy Nelson, a wildlife biologist with the Alabama Department of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries, said he estimates as many as 10 black bears now make their home in DeKalb County, mostly on Lookout Mountain. He said that's up from no resident black bears just eight years ago.
A confrontation with a bear in Allegany County is going to cost a Niagara Falls reservist a week’s salary but he hopes, at least, the incident may serve as a cautionary tale to anyone confronting a wild beast in the woods.
Michael Moore, who has done two stints in Iraq with the Army and is now an Air Force reservist, said he could have been fined up to $2,000 and spent time in jail for killing a bear while hunting this past November in Allegany county.
The bear came up upon Moore in the woods in Birdsall on opening day of deer hunting season November 21.
“I sat there for a good thirty seconds, to see if he would go away,” Moore said as he recalled the incident from his Niagara Falls home in Cayuga Village. “I turned to my right and fired a warning shot.”
In spring of 2006, a female grizzly began regularly herding her three cubs onto the roadside near Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park.
While the park had seen grizzlies before, bear 399 marked the first time a grizzly became such a prominent roadside fixture for park visitors. Bear jams formed when the family appeared, and park rangers conducted crowd control to make sure the masses kept a respectful distance as the sow and her cubs foraged for plants along the roadside or broke through the ice on Oxbow Bend to harvest stranded fish.
The Bear Aware Program Delivery Specialist, Betty Offin, and Joanne Siderius, the program’s provincial supervisor, gave a presentation to city council on Dec. 18, detailing the program’s successes in 2009.
The provincial program aims to reduce human-bear conflicts.
In 2009, of the 10,303 black bear reports in B.C., 88 were made in the Castlegar area.
Offin said the numbers have been in sharp decline.
Whistler's favourite resident black bear may have gone into hibernation, or she may have met with some other fate.
The Get Bear Smart Society hasn't seen a trace of Jeanie since her tracking collar went offline in late October.
The bear, who's been called "the icon for Whistler," was fitted with a GPS radio collar that same month in order to monitor her movements. However a day after getting her collar her signal disappeared.
INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev.-Wildlife officials in Incline Village, located on the north side of Lake Tahoe, continue to look for a 700-pound black bear that they say has caused $70,000 of destruction in the last three years.
BANFF, Alberta - Two mothers from Canmore, out for a stroll with their toddlers, got a scary reminder that grizzly bears don't den up just because there's snow on the ground. A large bear trailed them for about five minutes at a distance of 45 to 60 feet before it wandered off toward a nearby creek. They told the Rocky Mountain Outlook that the bear showed no signs of aggression.
Bears are a part of the fabric of Whistler life and lore - to longtime locals, they're almost like stray dogs or squirrels. Admit it: we all love to tell tales of the majestic creatures we share this valley with (especially with anxious tourists).
But their comfort level with humans can have tragic results, and just because we're used to having these animals around doesn't mean we shouldn't have a healthy respect for the creatures. In fact, one local bear advocate believes we need to work at living in harmony with the black bears. So, she decided to publish a book on the topic.
Warning Calls You Can Make to Avoid an Encounter - the 30-minute MP3 that could save your life.
Bears are always turning up in the news doing crazy things. But not all of the following bizarre bruin stories are real; see if you can guess which one isn't.
When members of the Ayers family snapped photographs of a grizzly bear spotted on their ranch north of Fort Benton in the early summer, they were documenting the return of the species to its former home on the range. "I don't think you would have any accounts of the bears after 1880, when the buffalo were all gone," said Jack Lepley of the River and Plains Society, an organization that operates history museums in Fort Benton.
A sudden increase in bear activity in and around Whistler Village is prompting conservation officers to remind the public to be diligent about managing garbage and picking fruit off of trees near built-up areas where possible.
Big game hunters are in a position to encounter bears and we must do our part to act responsibly for grizzly bear recovery. This means seeking out information from the agencies about hunting in grizzly country and carrying bear spray.
Provincial funding for the local Bear Aware program might disappear in 2010, threatening the program's existence in Squamish and other B.C. towns.
Two bowhunters from Columbia Falls fired pistols at a family group of bears early Sunday morning in the Great Bear Wilderness, but Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials were unable to locate any dead bears. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks recommends that hunters carry pepper spray for self-defense. Bear sprays have proven effective for deterring bears in multiple encounters.
One of the United Kingdom's largest newspapers runs a story about black bears breaking in to multimillion-dollar homes in Aspen, Colorado.
Northeastern Massachusetts has been the site of more black bear sightings than usual recently, including this story of a bird feed-eating young bear in a Harvard backyard.
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