First, I wish to thank the City Council for amending the ordinance on living with bears ("Missoula City Council: Tougher trash rules passed for bear zones," Missoulian, Feb. 9). We have, over time, invited bears into our fair city - now we have to learn how to live with them.
Bear access to garbage in urban areas is now a major wildlife management challenge continentwide. Like it or not, North Americans today generate monstrous amounts of garbage, mixed with mega-tons of plastic, paper, cans, bottles. The messes the bears make extracting foods are mainly what make people angry today. Unsanitary, ugly, dangerous, habituation, surprise conflict, unprovoked attack, all come to mind. These ordinance changes will alleviate all of those garbage problems.
But there are many more bear-people problems that will continue, and eventually will have to be solved as well. Additional ongoing problems include fruit trees, bird feeders, disrupted travel corridors, chickens, natural foods in park and back-yard riparian areas, winter dens in city parks, deer, pet carcasses, road kills, gardens, pet foods, family picnic areas, bags of bird seed and more. If Montana does not act decisively, wild pigs will soon be in the Rattlesnake, Grant Creek and Bitterroot areas as well. They will feed the bears, but will also make our bear problems look like kid's play.
The garbage is highly attractive to the bears, but constitutes a fairly small part of a Missoula bear's diet. The old orchards, though 50-plus years not attended, still are the major problem. Plus, there are literally thousands of new fruit trees in town, and more each year. The annual crop of fruit (mostly apples) amounts to many, many tons of sweet, juicy bear foods every year - maybe about 50 tons, in the good years. A bear with that kind of food can eat 100 pounds overnight, and gain up to 6 pounds per day.
So, the bears come to Missoula. The pear, peach, apple, plum, cherry, wild plum, mountain ash, apricot, grape, blue berry, black berry, black cherry trees and vines, all domesticated, offer many, many truck-loads of sugar to the bears. In poor wild berry or orchard years, the bear conflict period will be far more intense - the garbage problem will be greater, and the challenge will be far bigger than just a garbage problem, so get ready, City Council.
We created these bear problems, so it is not right for us to blame the bears. We need to solve the problems. We can live with the bears and share their habitat, but we need to do it right. The grizzlies and maybe the pigs will soon be here, so let's figure it out now.
For almost a decade, the Great Bear Foundation's Apples Project has been trying to deal with the fruit problems. Our program starts in late July with the cherries and the yellow transparent apples. Next, it is the apricots and certain pear trees, then, by late August, everything is coming ready, somewhere in the city, and picking usually goes until early November. We cannot pick all the fruit, so we focus on the "edge areas" and riparian, city park, travel corridor areas.
What else could the city do? Well, making the city parks nicer, more productive and more accessible is creating more excellent bear habitat, right in town. One by one we are letting the wildlife corridor areas get trashed. New development areas are being allowed without strict rules on conflict trees and shrubs. More and more urbanized areas are being closed to hunting.
Our surrounding four states and three provinces all have wild pigs now. Only North Dakota is dealing with the problem that pigs bring - they have state officers as the only people who can hunt. Elsewhere, pigs get sneaked in for trophy hunting, and then the trouble starts. The pigs will make our Rattlenake bears look like kittens if we don't act soon.
And what about Missoula wolves, bear aversive conditioning with Karelian bear dogs, official wildlife corridors, senseless sprawl, closed areas within city parks, jail time? I could go on.
Charles Jonkel is president of the Missoula-based Great Bear Foundation.
