Executive Summary
Hundreds of black bears are killed every year in British Columbia as nuisance animals, and increasingly the public is asking for effective non-lethal bear management from wildlife officials. As a resort community and co-host city of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, the Resort Municipality of Whistler is under increased pressure from residents and visitors to reduce the number of bears killed annually due to conflict with people. Whistler has adopted changes to specific bylaws and garbage management and created a Bear Management Plan in an effort to reduce human-bear conflicts. These progressive steps have been taken through the guidance of the provincial BearSmart Community Program. As part of this process, in 2005 the Bear Aversion Research Team, with the Conservation Officer Service (COS), radio-collared 13 animals in conflict or suspected to be in conflict to gauge the effectiveness of aversive conditioning, increase the wariness of bears in human developments, and determine how bears respond to various non-lethal management tools.
We began by designating high human-use areas as bear exclusion zones ("No-Go Zones") with some temporal allowances for bear movement along established bear travel corridors in adjacent riparian and forested areas. Bears in the exclusion zones were given high priority for hazing or aversive conditioning. Bears in residential areas exhibiting unwanted behaviour such as eating garbage or extreme levels of habituation were targeted for radio-collaring, follow-up monitoring as well as aversive conditioning or hazing.
Fifteen bears were captured, tagged and released, of which 13 were fitted with VHF radio-collars (5 females; 8 males). We released bears at the capture site when possible, and if they had a known conflict history they were given a "hard release" (with pain stimuli from beanbag rounds and rubber bullets). If the capture site was not suitable as a release site, we still ensured that the bears were released within their estimated home range. For these releases, we generally gave the bear a short distance translocation hard release. These specific releases proved to have no measurable effect on their conflict level. One conflict adult female which was given an on-site hard release, however, did not return to her release site. The other important factor from this female's release is that the reporting party removed the attractant. Thus, we believe that hard releases have the most potential to be effective when done onsite and in conjunction with attractant removal.
When human safety became a concern and hazing was not producing any noticeable changes in their behaviour, we translocated two bears greater than 30 km. We found this management tool, in widespread use across North America, to be ineffective in these two cases: one bear died of unknown causes shortly after release, and the other was in conflict with humans near the translocation site.
Subsequent to release, monitoring that could be done from ground radio-telemetry highlighted some points of interest. Conflict frequency was very low during the July and August berry seasons, perhaps suggesting that bears in Whistler prefer natural food even when non-natural food was readily available. During monitoring, only 24 out of 235 known locations for study animals were for female collared bears. Females generally used more remote terrain than the males and were not observed in many conflict situations with humans. Subadult male bears were most persistent in accessing exclusion zones and exhibiting unwanted behaviour. With the exception of 9 events associated with a female collared bear, all non-release hazing and aversive conditioning involved male bears, and 77% of those applications involved sub-adults under age 5. Despite consistent monitoring and application of non-lethal methods, bears were able to obtain a food reward in 46% of cases. Twenty-five percent of cases involved garbage and 21% involved "natural" (landscaped) food. Bears were less likely to respond to human presence if they were eating human than "natural" food, and the only incident involving aggressive behaviour occurred when a bear was "defending" his garbage. We defined aggression as instances when a bear chose to confront humans when it had a clear option of escape. Pain stimuli did not make bears aggressive: in all events it resulted in the bear immediately running away. Using human dominance, while less effective, can be used to move a bear out of a conflict situation when the use of pain stimuli is not appropriate.
We also found aversive conditioning more effective than hazing. A subadult subjected to consistent aversive conditioning stopped entering the village for several days. However, bears subjected only to hazing did not change their behaviour, and in many cases they continued to go to extreme lengths to get nonnatural food. We found the economics of 24-hour monitoring in order to produce consistency required for aversive conditioning is probably not operationally feasible for most jurisdictions.
We recommend the municipality invest in proven bear-proof waste containers, as bears did not have difficulty obtaining garbage from the current system; non-lethal bear management may not be feasible when bears have access to widespread nonnatural attractants as they presently do. Also, we recommend that the municipality remove all the exotic mountain ash trees species from the exclusion zone, which the municipality committed to do in 2006. Finally, we recommend continuing research should help increase our understanding of the factors involved with bear conflicts and how bears respond to non-lethal methods.
This report outlines the results from year one of the Whistler Aversive Conditioning and Monitoring program.
