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All Non-lethal bear management Articles
MISSOULA, Mont. - If you think the bears Ryan Alter catches in his traps are cool, you should have seen the skunk.
Alter has built a bear trap that sets itself, takes mug shots and phones home when it catches something. It's undergoing its third season in the field with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks bear managers.
"The nature of what we do is: You don't know until you look," said Alter, whose East Missoula-based Alter Enterprises builds high-tech gizmos for field biologists. So it wasn't too surprising when his trap's onboard camera got shots of a Condon-area skunk sneaking bites of the deer-haunch bait last fall.
A hiker in Teton Canyon used pepper spray to fended off a reported grizzly bear Sunday, Wyoming Game and Fish officials said Thursday.
Former Colorado resident Chris Laing was hiking about a mile up the north fork of the Teton Creek Trail, the trail that goes to Table Mountain, when “he contacted a reported grizzly bear sow with two cubs of the year,” Wyoming Game and Fish Specialist Mike Boyce said.
The bear was apparently chasing Laing’s dog when it veered off and headed for Laing.
CALGARY - B.C. wildlife officials overseeing the fate of the so-called Lake Christina grow-op bears say they've had to destroy one post-hibernation bruin.
But conservation inspector Aaron Canuell said fears many of the black bears emerging from their winter sleep would seek human handouts they'd become accustomed to at a property discovered by RCMP last summer have so far proved largely unfounded.
A little black bear cub that came to the Northern Lights Wildlife Shelter near Smithers has been returned to the wild from where she came.
When Abby arrived at the Shelter in October, the cub was on 10 pounds, and had suffered a severe injury. Angelika Langen, one of the owner / operators of the Shelter explains what caused the injury. "She had been caught, in what we assume in a snare and by trying to get out when that wire tightened around her neck, she pulled part of her neck and her ears off, and was in pretty rough shape when we got her, and we doctored her and she came all around, kept growing and today we set her free and let her go back out again where she belongs."
A wildlife biologist scheduled to speak in Durango next week says her research shows that black bears become human-food chow hounds for life if they forage in urban areas as cubs. Rachel Mazur studied black bear sows and cubs for 11 years in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks in California where she worked for the National Park Service. She now works for the Forest Service in Nevada.
In the national parks, Mazur's research subjects included bears that fed only in the wild and bears that lived off easily accessible campground garbage cans and loose trash left by day-use visitors.
The manager of a Moncton zoo says the recent attack on stranded black bear cubs in New Brunswick needs to be investigated.
Last week two cubs, only weeks old, were rescued from a utility pole near Allardville in the northern part of the province.
The Magnetic Hill Zoo has since taken in the animals and reports they are both doing well considering the circumstances.
MISSOULA, Mont. -- Wildlife officials in Missoula had to put down a bear causing trouble in Missoula's Rattlesnake neighborhood Wednesday. Fish, Wildlife and Parks says it's unfortunate it had to happen, especially this early in the season, but it did give them a chance to try a new tool.
It's a sound a bear never wants to hear.
As grizzly bears venture out of their dens in Western and Northern Canada, the world will appear to them much as it did the spring before: snow on the ground, stomachs empty, the promise of winterkilled meat to scavenge and the perils of living cheek-by-jowl with an ever-expanding human footprint of growing rural towns, mines, pipelines and roads.
They will not know that they are once again under a national microscope that will determine the fate of them and their progeny.
Well, it's that time of year again. Grizzly bears, some with young cubs in tow, have emerged from their dens only to be exposed to a slew of threats that imperil their long-term survival in B.C.: Hunters, mines, growing rural towns and an expanding web of roads and pipelines. Starting April 1, the bears' greatest threat - trophy hunters - will begin sighting their rifles with the hopes of catching a grizzly in the crosshairs. Without commenting on the ethics of this age-old custom, it's worth reflecting on the number of bears that die every year in B.C. at the hands of humans.
VANCOUVER - The David Suzuki Foundation wants the B.C. government to set up what it calls bear parks, so grizzlies can roam free from the threat of human activity, including hunting.
Spokesman Faisal Moola says government records suggest more than 300 grizzly bears were killed in B.C. by hunters last year, but the real toll could be double that because of illegal poaching.
Or is it fear ruling Alberta’s wildlife rehabilitation program?
For a party that pledges allegiance to the dictum of “small government,” the Alberta Tories sure seem inclined to unnecessarily meddle in the lives of Albertans who have committed to give injured and infirm wildlife a second chance at life. Last summer, approved facility plans and permits in hand, wildlife rehabilitators across the province received in the mail a surprise from Alberta Sustainable Resource Development (SRD): An insidious “appendix” that contradicts their current permits and curtails, in a single stroke, the types of animals rehabbers routinely care for and release into the wild.
EDMONTON - The provincial government is forbidding wildlife rehabilitation groups from taking in and treating more than 20 species of animals — including cougars, bears and moose — out of concern for human safety.
Those who rehabilitate animals say this is misguided thinking that forces them to act against their mission and puts the public in more danger.
The new rules are still a work in progress, but Alberta Sustainable Resource Development hopes to have overall standards finalized this year, said spokesman Darcy Whiteside.
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.
They may look cute and cuddly, but don't expect them to walk up to greet you.
That's the way it should be, Northern Lights Wildlife Shelter operator Angelika Langen said, looking into the enclosure where Bella Coola natives Lori and Dean are, along with their grizzly cousins Jason and Drew.
Theirs is a sad story, beginning with the tragic loss of their mother, quickly followed by the loss of their sister. Once the twins were two-thirds of a set of triplets, who were learning the tricks of the wild from their mother.
TRUCKEE — The Department of Fish and Game (DFG) has successfully returned two California black bear yearlings to a remote wilderness near Truckee. Both female cubs were orphaned last summer.
One cub was illegally dumped last June on the front porch of Ann Bryant, executive director of the BEAR League. Weighing only 12 pounds, the cub was emaciated and starving. The other cub was reported by a citizen who kept seeing it alone and bawling near Markleeville last August. A DFG investigation determined the bear was an orphan. “It weighed about 30 pounds and was unusually lethargic for a cub,” said Cristen Langner, DFG's bear biologist in the Tahoe Basin.
To assess the likelihood that different sex and age classes of bears that use landfills would display problem behaviour following landfill closure, we conducted the McLeod Lake Landfill Grizzly Bear Behaviour Project over a 3-year period: 2000 (pre-landfill closure), 2001 and 2002 (post-landfill closure). Our study was designed to identify attributes or behaviours that may be used to predict which bears are more likely to seek out alternate human-food sources after a landfill closes, thus becoming problem bears and posing a threat to humans. If we are able to predict whether certain classes of bears are more likely to become problems than others, this knowledge could be applied during subsequent landfill closures where those bears with an
increased likelihood of posing a threat to human safety would be destroyed, while the remaining
bears would be allowed to live.
The author tested the efficacy of aversive conditioning (AC) and conditioned taste aversion (CTA) on American black bears (Ursus americanus) in Whistler, British Columbia. The study used AC (rubber bullets fired from a shotgun and marbles fired from a sling shot) in an attempt to increase bear wariness toward humans and decrease the time bears spend in human developments. Thiabendazole, an emetic with low toxicity, was used to teach bears to associate illness with specific attractants that cause human-bear conflict.
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.
B.C.'s three major wildlife rehabilitation centres are inundated with skinny bear cubs struggling to survive without their mothers.
The problem of malnourished cubs surfaced recently at the North Island Wildlife Centre in Errington, where seven black bear cubs are in care and another two were euthanized. Usually the centre cares for one or two cubs a year.
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