merkle et al. 2012 - bears, humans, conflicts (fair chase)

7/31/2019 Merkle Et Al. 2012 - Bears, Humans, Conflicts (Fair Chase)

1/5Fair Chase Fall 2012

A landowner told me the best way to knowwhen apples are ripe is when you start seeinglittle presents under the trees. We stood staringat a rather large black bear scat that had been de-posited rom high up in the tree above us. Wow, Ithought to mysel. This guy is not in the habit ochecking how ripe his apples are getting in the all.He just waits to see bear sign, and then tries to pick

his apples beore the bears eat them all.I pondered the scat a little longer, then asked him what

happens ater he picks the apples. Do you see bears anymore? Hetold me the bears just disappear ater his harvest, and he rarely seesthem again.

As I normally did with landowners in my study area, I wenton to ask about other things on his property that might attract bears.Do you ever have problems with bears getting into your trash?

O course not! he replied. I keep my garbage in my garageuntil the morning o garbage day. I have never had a problem.

Little did I know at the time, but this conversation wouldbe central to my masters work on reducing human-bear conictswithin urban areas.

The Trouble with Bears

Conicts are a reality in most societies that co-exist with wildlie.In scientifc terms, human-wildlie conicts are interactions be-tween humans and wildlie species that lead to a negative impacton either the animal or the human. Society spends billions o dol-lars per year trying to reduce human-wildlie conicts such as croplosses to insects and vehicle collisions with wildlie.

Human-bear issues result rom the interactions between bearoraging behaviors and the habits o humans. Bears are omnivorous;they can eat everything that humans eat. They also rely heavily onmemory and previous experience when searching or ood and decid-ing where to go. Humans acilitate the interactions because theylive, grow ood, and recreate in bear habitat. The detrimental eectsinclude damage to property and threats to human saety.

Bears have ew manners when trying to obtain ood. Theywill claw open coolers in campsites, break windows in cars, tearopen doors o houses, pull down walls, and even rip into rerigerators.

HOW BOUTTHEM APPLES:

By Jerod A. Merklewith Paul R. Krausman and

Bethann G. MerklePhotos by Jerod Merkle, Bethann Merkle

and Rita Wolfe

ABOVE: A large male black bear spends the day in a large

backyard tree, waiting or the cover o nightall to slip out

o the city limits.

Panoramic photo o downtown Missoula and the

Rattlesnake, taken rom Mt. Jumbo saddle.

Insights onreducinghuman-bear

conficts


2/54n Fair Chase Fall 2012

All o these incidentscost society money. For

example, Yosemite National Park sometimesspends over a hal million dollars per yeardealing with damage caused by black bears.Moreover, bears do not always perceivehumans as innocent spectators. In certainhuman-bear interactions, the bear may viewa human as threatening, in the way, annoy-ing, or in very rare cases as prey. The risk o

serious injury and death is uneven betweenthe two species. Since 1900, about 60 peoplein North America have been killed by blackbears. Compare that to the hundreds o bearsthat lose their lives each year as a result ohuman-bear conicts.

Reducing these conicts is a goodidea or both humans and bears, but how dowe do it and where do we start? In the past,wildlie management agencies relied on reac-tive management strategies such as trapping,relocation, hazing, and euthanasia. Asiderom euthanasia, these methods may nothave a lasting eect. The homing abilitieso bears allow them to fnd their way backto their original home range, even ater long-

distance relocations. As a result, managersfnd themselves dealing with conicts in thesame areas time and time again.

That is why many wildlie manage-ment agencies, conservation groups, andlandowners are adopting more proactive

strategies or minimizinghuman-bear conicts.The ocus shits awayrom the individual bear,and instead concentrateson human behaviors andconditions in the land-

scapes where people live.Thus today, signifcantportions o human-wild-lie conict budgets arebeing invested in educa-tion eorts with the aimo inorming the publichow to live responsibly

with bears. Many wildlie managers are grow-ing reluctant to trap a problem bear unlessall bear attractants have been permanentlycleaned up and the bear continues to exhibithabituated behavior.

Missoula, a Magnet for Bears

The big question about the new strategiesis, do they work? This question was o keeninterest to the Rocky Mountain community

o Missoula, Montana. This town o about67,000 lies in a valley at the conuence otwo renowned trout-fshing rivers, the ClarkFork and the Bitterroot. Six small valleysconverge here, each dissected by mountaincreeks and rich riparian vegetation. Asiderom some adjacent grasslands, Missoula iscompletely surrounded by orest. All told,Missoula sits right in the middle o blackbear habitat.

Missoula has a long history o human-black bear interactions, but conicts havebeen rising or the last 40 years. This increase

started in the 1970s as Missoula began itssprawl into ormerly rural areas. This trendwas exacerbated in the late 1990s by a coupleo unusually dry summers that limited thegrowth o natural bear oods. One result wasthat Montana Fish, Wildlie & Parks feldedover 275 human-black bear interactions peryear within city limits. This was a signifcant

ABOVE:A young black

bear in a Missoula

residents backyard

considers climbing a

ponderosa pine tree.

RIGHT: Typical culvert

trap or capturing bears.

FAR RIGHT: Jerod A.

Merkle collaring a small

emale black bear.

4n Fair Chase Fall 2012



jump over the 15 interactions per year re-ported prior to the mid-1990s.

Responding to calls and managingconicts during these chaotic years put astrain on agency personnel. On the upside,in 2000 it sparked collaboration amongMontana, Fish Wildlie & Parks, landowners,and Deenders o Wildlie. The outcome wasa coalition called Missoula Bears,missoulabears.org , that has been very

active in monitoring and working to reducehuman-bear conicts within Missoula. Itsapproach is to feld sightings and conictreports, provide inormation to the publicand keep neighborhoods clean. Althoughthe eorts seemed to work, biologists and

landowners did not see human-bear conictsdisappear. They wanted to know why.

Thus began my Masters study at theUniversity o Montana, located in Missoula.The initial objective was to describe themovements and diet o black bears living inMissoula. I quickly fgured out where bearswere going (into town) and what they wereeating (ood sources provided by humanresidents). I had to think more deeply about

how to develop a research project that couldactually assess and inorm proactive manage-ment strategies and reduce the probabilityo human-bear conicts. The key to appliedresearch is in asking the right questions. Mykey research question boiled down to this:


4/56n Fair Chase Fall 2012

What is the most important human oodsource that changes bear behavior by draw-ing them out o the mountains and into thetown o Missoula?

Keeping Tabs on Town Bears

Studying the bears required the ability tokeep track o them. I placed large culverttraps near Missoula houses and captured16 bears. These animals were ftted with

Global Positioning System (GPS) col-lars, which communicate with satellites torecord the locations o collared animals.Locations o each bear were reported everythree hours and their daily movements wereollowed or over two years.

With the bears on the air, I set aboutdetermining what they eat while in the urbanarea. My days commenced with checking tosee where the bears had been the night beore.For locations on private property, I wouldvisit with the landowner and identiy whatthe bear was doing there. It was easy to assesswhat the bears were eating. For example ithey were eating garbage, it would be strewnall over the yard or the street. I the ood

source was a ruit tree, I could documentbroken branches, claw marks rom climbing,hal eaten apples, and applesauce scat.

I also determined the seasonal avail-ability o natural and human oods o interestto bears. Within the urban area I monitored

the periods o time when apples were ripeand the days o the week when garbage con-tainers were set out or pick-up andpresumably available to bears. In the wild-lands outside o town, I monitored fveberry-producing plant species to learn whenberries were ripe and available to bears. Fi-nally, I monitored when spring green-upoccurred in both the urban and wildlandareas using images obtained rom NASA

satellites.Then I worked on determining which

oods were the strongest attractants. I beganby analyzing all 14,000 individual GPS loca-tions to identiy which ones were nearhouses. This revealed that some bears hadmore than 60 percent o their GPS locationswithin 100 yards o a house, while otherbears rarely came into town. The next stepwas to identiy the date o each event whena bear walked near a house. The bears inthis study generally let their dens betweenlate March and late April, and were back in

their dens between late November and lateDecember. I observed almost no activitywithin the urban area during March andApril, ollowed by a slight increase o timespent near houses in summer (May throughJuly). Bear behavior changed drastically inAugust. Bears that normally spent their sum-mers in wildlands switched to spending mosto their time near houses during autumn.This type o behavior continued to increasein requency until about mid-October andthen slowly decreased as bears headed totheir dens or the winter.

The date o each location allowedcomparison o what types o ood were avail-able when bears were oraging near housesversus when they were oraging in wildlands.The fndings were airly straightorward. Bearoraging near houses was highly correlatedwith the period o time when apples wereavailable. No other ood item came close toexplaining this pattern. I did observe a re-lationship between time o urban green-upand the early summer period when bearscame into town. No correlation was oundbetween garbage availability and periodswhen bears were near houses. Similarly, Iound no correlation between the availabilityo natural oods outside o the urban areaand bear oraging within the urban area.These observations were supported by thedietary analysis, which revealed an urbandiet consisting mostly o apples, supple-mented marginally by garbage, bird seed,and native vegetation.

These results indicate that bears nearMissoula are busy being wild oraging onnatural oods in the wildlands during thespring and summer months. But long beorenatural oods are depleted, bears are attracted

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to the urban area or a specifc reason. Apples. My data show thatbears come to town to orage on apples even when wildland oodsare still available. Furthermore, they do not seem drawn by garbage,although they do eat it when available. This is an interesting resultbecause conventional wisdom says that bears are attracted to townprimarily by garbage, and that this shit occurs when natural oodsare scarce.

Solutions for Missoula and Beyond

How can Missoula best address its bear problem? The simple solu-

tion might be to ask all Missoula residents to cut down their appletrees. However, its more complex than that. Instantaneously re-moving all apple treesand the ood source they providecouldcause more damage than good. A slower, phased removal is a betteroption as it would allow bears to adapt to a diminishing ood source.Urban humans value apple trees as a ood source and as ornamen-tals or landscaping. And, there are otherspecies to consider; urban yards provideood and habitat or many kinds o wildlie.

The situation in Missoula is typicalo many mountain towns in western NorthAmerica. I suggest that the results o thisstudy can be incorporated into proactive

management eorts in two ways. First, pro-mote and und ruit-gleaning projects suchas the one acilitated by the Great BearFoundation, greatbear.org. Fruit gleaningremoves signifcant amounts o available oodin urban areas, thereby reducing the attrac-tion or bears. In addition, this practiceactively engages citizens in the solution,provides a ood source some people can use,and removes unwanted apples or others.Second, work with land developers and real-tors to promote bear-riendly landscaping.For example, discourage or in some cases

outlaw the planting o new ruit trees withinknown bear conict areas.Application o these results and

suggestions can be considered or other areaswhere human-bear conicts are prevalent.Bears come into town not only or garbage,but or other attractants that may not seemimmediately obvious. For example, avocadotrees can be a signifcant issue in Caliornia,and domesticated berry bushes are a keyattractant in the eastern U.S. and Canada.The reality is that so-called secondaryattractants (other than garbage) are veryimportant, and in some cases they are theprimary actor in human-bear conicts.

Do you live within a wildland-urbaninterace? I so, take a look at your landscapingnext time you walk outside. Think about theood that it produces or wildlie, and askyoursel a couple o key questions. Am Iindirectly contributing to human-wildlieconicts? Is it possible that animals arefnding ood on my property and then movingon to other areas where conicts maydevelop?

And o course i you own a ruit tree,watch your step when the apples are ripe. n

Jerod Merkle is a Ph.D. candidate in the Biology

Department at Laval University, Quebec, working on the

ecology and management o plains bison. Specifcally, he

studies their movement and oraging behavior to better

understand and predict how many bison there will be, and

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merkle et al. 2012 - bears, humans, conflicts (fair chase)

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