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.

Bear 399 began a new era of bear management in Grand Teton. Park wildlife managers formalized a "control the people" policy similar to Yellowstone's, allowing people to view roadside bears, ideally under the supervision of rangers. In 2007, the park formed its Wildlife Brigade, a group of full-time Park Service employees, volunteers, and interns with the express purpose of reducing bear conflicts, especially at bear jams.

While advocates say such controlled viewing opportunities are good for bears and for people the policy raises questions. Will habituated bears - those that become accustomed to humans - become more likely to get hit by cars, get shot by hunters and get into human food?

History has shown that mixing habituated bears with people doesn't always work. Grizzly 399 and/or one of her cubs attacked a jogger in the woods near Jackson Lake Lodge when he unwittingly got too close to an elk carcass she was feeding on. Park officials determined that 399 acted naturally, and no action was taken against her.

In another example, Yellowstone's bear 264, who gained fame in the late 1990's, was so tolerant of people the female grizzly didn't attack when a visitor walked into the meadow where she was grazing and petted one of her cubs, but she was later fatally injured when she darted out in front of a truck.

Even within the Park Service, a rift exists. In particular, wildlife managers at Glacier National Park use noise, dogs, rubber bullets, fire crackers and bear spray to haze bears away from roads. And, while Yellowstone and Glacier both say their way is best for them, Grand Teton officials say there's no sure way to know which method will ultimately work in Jackson Hole as grizzlies continue to expand their territory southward.

Modern bear management in parks evolved from Yellowstone's first bear jams in 1910, when a black bear started panhandling food from visitors in horse-drawn wagons. Feeding bears soon became popular, and eventually, Yellowstone officials erected bleachers at several dumps in the park so people could watch grizzlies scavenge for human food. From 1931 to 1969, park officials reported an average of 48 bear-inflicted human injuries and 138 incidents of property damage per year.



To haze or not to haze?

When the park banned feeding bears and closed the dumps in 1970, most of the panhandling bears that continued to beg in the front country were trapped and killed or sent to zoos. In the 1980's, the bear population rebounded and bears that were low in the social hierarchy - especially females, subadults and black bears - began to reappear on the road sides, pushed out of prime natural habitat by the more reclusive, adult males.

At first, Yellowstone managers captured these habituated, but not food-conditioned, bears and relocated them to remote locations in the park. But the bears soon returned to the roadside.

Hazing in Yellowstone didn't work either.

As early as 1944, famed naturalist Olaus Murie considered hazing bears ineffective. "Experience has shown that the bear learns to recognize the particular person or car that administers the shock or other punishment, and he simply avoids that person or car in the future, but does not fear other persons or cars," he wrote in a study on Yellowstone bears.

Yellowstone's bear management biologist Kerry Gunther came to a similar conclusion 64 years later. "Unfortunately, bears seemed to recognize park vehicles, staff, and the distance at which rubber bullets could be effectively fired," he wrote in a 2008 paper on bear habituation that he co-authored. "Bears also had a much greater pain threshold and tolerance to hazing than the park had staff time and budget to counteract."

Wildlife managers began informally managing people at bear jams about 20 years ago, Gunther said from his office in Yellowstone. "We've been managing this way since 1990 without having any problems," he said. "But it does take a lot of staff time."

There are several good reasons to allow the public viewing, which causes "bear jams," that inevitably occur when a bear appears on the roadside, Gunther said. Among them is the educational value of letting visitors see grizzlies up close.

"I think it builds a constituency of people who appreciate bears more," he said. "People are more willing to protect something that they see and appreciate. Those people are more willing to protect bear habitat because of that."

Also, Gunther said some of Yellowstone's roads are built in the best bear habitat. "If you tried to discourage [bears] from using [roadside habitat] it would reduce the carrying capacity in the park for bears."

The numbers seem to show that allowing people to view bears in Yellowstone is working. While the number of Yellowstone bear jams per year has increased from fewer than 50 in 1985 to nearly 300 in 2007, with a total of 6,089 bear jams since 1990, those bear jams haven't resulted in a single bear-inflicted human injury.

Bear-vehicle collisions have increased slightly from an average of 0.2 grizzly bears and 0.9 black bears killed each year in the 1980's to an average of 0.4 grizzly bears and 1.1 black bears killed each year from 1990 to 2007. Bear managers think the majority of those bears that die in vehicle collisions are backcountry bears that dart across the road.

Grizzly-human conflicts have decreased from 9.1 per year to 5.1. Last year, Yellowstone recorded no grizzly-human conflicts with the exception of one flattened tent.

Still, Gunther acknowledges that Yellowstone and Glacier are different. "The [terrain] up there kind of funnels people and bears into the same [habitat], so they probably have more encounters," he said.

John Waller, a wildlife biologist at Glacier, said the terrain is just one of the reasons the park hazes bears away from roadsides. "Our viewing distances tend to be much shorter," he said. "It's much steeper and heavily vegetated. We... don't have the Lamar Valley, where you can look out [using binoculars and spotting scopes from a safe distance] and see bears hunting elk calves."

The park has less money to pay for staff to sit at bear jams, and it has a higher concentration of bears, Waller said.

But another reason for hazing is philosophical.

"It's dangerous to have bears that close to people, because people are so unpredictable," Waller said. "It's hard for a bear; some person might throw rocks at it... or somebody else might throw food at it.

"Those are things that we try to prevent by hazing them away from the roadside at every opportunity," he continued. "We get some grief about it. People don't understand why we do it. It's understandable that people react that way."

Waller said the numbers show that hazing works for Glacier.

"We have very few incidents of property damage," he said. "It would be unusual to have one in a year. We have about two people injured by bears per year. That seems to have been declining over the past 10 years, and the injuries tend to generally be minor.

"We've been averaging about one fatality every decade, and that seems to be declining somewhat too," Waller continued.

The question of whether human-habituated grizzlies that leave the parks stand a greater chance of getting killed remains unanswered. One of 399's cubs left the park and was subsequently killed by a hunter in the Ditch Creek area.



Can people be trusted?

The Gardiner, Montana area, just north of Yellowstone, typically sees several grizzlies killed by hunters every year. In a report released by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, researchers reported 48 known and probable grizzly mortalities in 2008, 37 of which could be attributed to human causes. Twenty of those human-caused mortalities, or 54 percent, were due to hunter conflicts.

"That is one of the differences between the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and [Glacier]," Waller said. "The level of hunter conflicts is much, much lower [in the Glacier area]. Preventing hunter-caused mortalities "is one of the reasons we do what we do. Bears are highly mobile and don't stick to park boundaries."

"A good proportion of our bears' home ranges span the [Glacier] park boundary where people may be less tolerant of that [habituated] behavior," he said.

In Grand Teton there's likely not an increased risk of habituated bears getting killed by hunters, senior wildlife biologist Steve Cain, said. "Nobody has really suggested that there's a relationship between those habituated bears and the bears that are getting killed in confrontations with hunters," he said.

And, Gunther said there's no data that shows whether human-habituated bears from Yellowstone are more likely to die in hunter conflicts. "Generally [human habituated bears] are a lot more tolerant of people," he said. "You can have surprise encounters with them and they can be pretty tolerant."

Cain said Grand Teton officials are closely monitoring their policy of allowing bears near roadsides.

"We routinely get letters from people who talk about it being the event of a lifetime," Cain said. "[But] there are still questions.

"We do view this as somewhat of an experimental approach," he continued. "We are not changing anything at this point, but we are cognizant that there are some potential pitfalls. Our emphasis is on the long-term conservation of bears and we need to make sure that our management strategies are consistent with that."

The potential disadvantages of mixing bears and people that Waller articulated are accurate, Cain said. Further, he pointed out that Yellowstone, which has not documented a trend of conflicts with human-habituated bears outside park boundaries, has a huge land area compared to Glacier and Grand Teton.

"We have a smaller land area and developments outside the park," he said of Grand Teton. "So the question still remains, in the long term, how will allowing habituated bears to use habitat close to development and to get comfortable around people... ultimately affect their survival given that some bears will leave the park and will continue to feel comfortable around humans."

Louisa Willcox, a senior wildlife advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said she thinks programs like Grand Teton's Wildlife Brigade are the future of bear management.

"At the heart of this is a difference in attitude about the human capacity to live in the company of bears and in close quarters," she said. "[Yellowstone and Glacier] are reflecting a different human view about the relationship between bears and people. The two of them embody this debate which is about what people are capable of and if you can trust them."

Willcox said efforts like Grand Teton's and Yellowstone's bear management programs will take commitment and resources. "If the park service got really serious about budget cuts, this program probably wouldn't work." She said.

Chris Servheen, grizzly bear recovery coordinator for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said it's hard to know which approach is better. He also pointed out that the policies don't affect bears that remain in the backcountry away from people.

"You'd be hard pressed to say that there's something detrimental going on in either of these parks," he said. "The vast majority of the population isn't being affected."