Bear Smart Tip of the Month

It's never too early to plan for bear season

It’s late autumn, and the bears will soon disappear into their dens for the winter. While they may be out of sight, they shouldn’t be out of mind.

Start planning now how you can bear-proof your home or business, so when those beautiful (and sometimes troublesome) bears reappear in the spring, they won’t be tempted to gorge on your garbage. Click here to learn how.

What’s New

Help us improve our new website

As you can see, we’ve given our website a makeover. We think it’s pretty good, but we also know it could be better. And for that, we need your help.

Please send us your favourite journal articles, reports, news articles, op-eds, or other information related to coexisting with bears. We’ll add them to our online database so they can help others improve their BearSmart IQ.

Click here to make your submission today.

Planting trees to keep bears safe

Get Bear Smart partnered with the Habitat Improvement Team (HIT) to plant another 100 mountain ash trees (sorbus sitchensis) on Whistler Mountain. This brings the total number of mountain ash planted on Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains in the past two years to over 350.

Enhancing natural habitat in areas surrounding human development can be a good way to keep bears out of residential areas. Mountain ash trees produce fruit during the fall when other food sources have been depleted and conflicts in the valley bottom are high. The idea is to draw bears out of conflict areas and up on the mountains where they can feed out of conflict.

It is also important to remove trees and shrubs in areas where bears are not welcome. The plants used for this project were removed from The Residences at Nita Lake in Whistler. They were replaced with a species that that does not attracts bears, in this case, a variety of maple.

Many thanks to the strata council and residents of Nita Lake as well as the property management company (Mountain Country Property Management) for helping to organize the event. Many thanks as well to the volunteers for their hard work digging.

Just yesterday 11 mature mountain ash trees were removed from Blueberry Estates in Whistler after a resident was bluff-charged by a sow with cubs.

In the News

Jeanie's story

Jeanie makes the front page of a local Whistler newspaper. She- the only black bear to have her own Facebook group (www.bearsmart.com/Jeanie.html). She's now been fitted with a GPS radio collar and reserchers are monitoring her movements. The goal is to stop her from getting into town and into trouble. The team will use bear aversion tactics to deter her. If you've been keeping up with her story, you'll know that she's lost all three cubs and mated again in early September - a rare event in the bear world. Read the most recent news here.

Pennsylvania learns to live with bears

Northeastern Pennsylvania has "a lot of bears," says columnist Tom Venesky, and residents should get used to living with them. "We moved into their habitat, not vice versa. Now it’s up to us to do our part to coexist with black bears."

He suggests bringing bird feeders in at night and keeping trash stored securely until the day of pick-up.

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