Not a fan of this article. Typical armchair-conservationist whining about the number last year provides zero context of what happened - this article reads as of it was written by someone in the otherside of the world with that stat as the lone figure to base assumptions on.
“Securing garbage and fruit trees” is written as the boogeyman but the underlying problem was a lack of food in the wild for them. “Urban expansion” is not the cause here - hell a couple of the communities on this list including one I live in have had negative growth.
Wild huckleberry production is probably the single largest indicator to how many bears move into communities and last year they were devastated by the drought. Between this and the pressure from yet another insane wildfire season, bears were driven into human contact, and yes, bad human habits made this a problem from there.
I guess my point is that they weren’t simply lured in, as this shoddy journalism suggests. This is yet another consequence of climate change. This will only get worse.
Another point of contention - COs were woefully understaffed and under resourced. Trapping and relocating animals just wasn’t an option when you have one trap per town at best. Often RCMP were dealing with bears and I bet you can guess which tools they have at their disposal.
My field recon suggests this year to be better for wild berries in my area maybe, but I’ll wait and see. I hope some good studies can surface over this whole ordeal and we can work out better solutions before this gets out of hand next time.
The good news is that this was a bumper year for salmonberries, huckleberries and thimbleberries — there have been so many that I and a number of bears and deer have been happily out harvesting them together with plenty left on the bushes that not even the birds have bothered with.
Hopefully the blackberries do just as well in August/September and none of us need to head into town to supplement our food supply.
You are so right about the drought.
My family lives on the eastern slopes of the rockies and bear activity has been sketchy this past three years.
Those experienced people just randomly got eaten at yaha tinda for instance, I know that area like the back of my hand and something like that happening is pretty much unheard of.
Two years ago I got charged by a grizzly for the first time - but it’s so outlandish people struggle to believe my story. I was in nordegg in the spring hiking up a fire line with a friend and we could see several kilometers ahead. Friend and I saw 3 black dots maybe like 5km up and we were pondering whether the objects were getting closer or further from us as we hiked on. After some time it became obvious and it was indeed a mom and two cubs charging straight towards us. We ran back to the truck, by the time we ran 1km the bears had almost closed the entire distance. I’m not sure what the fuck that was about, even if they could smell something in the truck that is just plain desperate behaviour.
Trapping and relocating also isn’t very effective. There’s pretty much no area that’s both suitable bear habitat and isn’t in another bear’s territory. Relocated bears will often be pushed out of territory after territory for hundreds of kilometres until they end up in another urban area hungry and pissed off.
People need to stop feeding them and keep their garbage locked up.
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