This Bear Was Here

Next time, please face the camera

Beside the photo from the 18th, I had been seeing other signs of a hungy bear in the neighborhood: another dumped garbage can (not photographed) and a couple of big fresh bear turds with green apple skins in them. 

So maybe this individual, who ambled past a camera set about a quarter-mile from my house, is the one? Good luck finding those daily 20,000 calories, Bear!

A Bear Was Here

Put your garbage out the night before pickup, and a bear will find it.

Some years back, a Colorado Division of Wildlife (as it was then called) public relations job opened up in Montrose, and I seriously considered applying for it. M. was not keen on the moving there though — later she changed her mind about Montrose County — but I had already moved on.

I had done institutional public relations before — in higher ed — so I did not have too many illusions about my role in a bureacracy. And yet that was a reason for my ambivalence — I have always done best in jobs with a fair amount of autonomy, and that probably was not one of those jobs.

The other thing about institutional p.r. is that you put out the same news releases at the same time every year — and that has to be done, I understand. Like every year about now you have to tell people that bears are trying to bulk up before hibernation and so will be aggressively checking out food sources, "legitimate" or not.

Bear doing what they do (Colorado Parks and Wildlife)

Here is this year's CPW news release: "As fall approaches hyperphagia begins, bear activity increases in preparation for winter."

 Black bears in Colorado are entering hyperphagia and will spend up to 20 hours a day trying to eat more than 20,000 calories to fatten up for winter. As bears start to prepare for hibernation and hunt for food, Coloradans may see more bear activity in urban areas.

I am not sure I could visualize 20,000 calories. 

This year, at least along my creek, there are almost no acorns ("mast") on the Gambel (scrub) oaks. An unexpected snowstorm last May 22 hit the oaks when they were flowering, and many never set fruit. Lots of leaves, but no acorns.

Those acorns are a high-calorie food for bears, deer, turkeys, and other animals. So I don't know what they will do. Pulling potato chip packaging out of the garbage won't make up for no acorns.

Serious money is spent on bear-human relations. Here is one example:

Bear Smart Durango - Greater Durango Human-Bear Challenge: $206,539 awarded

Partners Bear Smart Durango and the Community Foundation Serving Southwest Colorado applied for funding on behalf of the Bear Working Group with a partner match and in-kind contribution of $297,135 for a total estimated project cost of $503,932. Their project is aimed at infrastructure and personnel. The infrastructure side will provide all-metal bear-resistant trash containers, food storage lockers, and conflict mitigation materials. The personnel aspect will create a Bear Enforcement Officer and a Fruit Gleaning Coordinator. The grant will cover the first two years for the Bear Enforcement Officer, with La Plata County and other partners assuming expenses by year three. The Fruit Gleaning Coordinator will expand the capacity of this existing position to develop and implement an on-demand, bear mitigation gleaning strategy

Fruit-gleaning? I will admit that I went out today and picked all the apples off this little Haralson apple tree that is just starting to bear. It is surrounded by hog wire to keep the deer from browsing it, but a bear would plow right through that.

It produces tart little green apples. Sometimes I harvest some, but it would not bother me if an athletic bear went after them.

 How many apples make 20,000 calories?

Tarantula Tourism Is Taken, Why not Tumbleweeds?

Migrating tarantua in southern Colorado (12News Denver).

For polar bear tourism, Churchill, Manitoba, is the spot. For grizzly bears, probably Yellowstone. For sandhill cranes, try western Nebraska or the annual festival in Monte Vista, Colorado. For snow geese, it's Lamar, Colorado.

For tarantulas, it will be La Junta, Colorado. The financing is in place.

Adding to the news of the new logo, director Pam Denahy said the board has received $20.000 in a grant from the Colorado Tourism Board, La Junta matched it with $5,000 for an educational campaign on the Tarantula. It would include creating a microsite with the Visit La Junta Site that would focus on inspiring responsible and respectful visitation during the migration season. That includes advice on how to visit the tarantulas and how to leave them alone.

Denahy said that information became much needed. "We even got a call, I think, last summer from a pet shop in Denver saying that people were taking the tarantulas from here and trying to sell them up in Denver," she replied.

 OK, so tarantulas are taken. What about tumbleweeds? The migration takes place in the early winter, and it is "oddly terrifying."

 

Retrievers and Me (5): Half a Lab, Totally Brave

Already published

Part 1: The Retriever Who Did Not Retrieve

Part 2: A Professional Golden Retriever

Part 3: A Bulldozer of a Dog

 

Part 4: Hardscrabble Jack

With Shelby and Jack on a spring hike in the Sangre de Cristo Range

Shelby was the mystery dog. She was our first "rescue," not through a group, but through a neighbor. M. and I were her third owners, and I guessed her age at around two years at the time. If that is true, she lived to be fifteen, so she had a pretty good run.

Allegedly she was half Labrador retriever and half Rough Collie. Her coat was long and silky, like the Rough Collie's, but her ribcage was more round and her muzzle not as long as the "needle-nose" purebred strain. She weighed 75 lbs. (34 kg). And she was black, with a small white blaze on her chest. "Shelby" was the name she came with.

She had nicknames too. "The Bandit Queen" was one of them. Before she came to live with us, she aready had a small posse of her own who followed her for quite some distance.

If Jack was "my" dog, M. hoped that Shelby would be "her" dog, but in fact, Shelby was Shelby's dog. 

Another of her nicknames was "cat in a dog suit." Although she stuck with us, we felt that she always had a Plan B in case we let her down, and possibly a Plan C as well.  

In personality, she was a collie. Walking in open country, she would not be up front quartering like a hunting dog, but off to one side — with the invisible herd of sheep in front.

She was more predatory than any of the Chessies. Once I found a dead fox squirrel in the snow near the house, and the snow told the story of how she had caught it as it tried to cross from tree to tree, killed it, whirled it around in a war dance (blood splatter), and then left the carcass for me to find.

Another time I came out to find her playing Keep-Away with Jack around the vegetable garden, having possession of a still-warm dead chicken. Another neighbor's dog was shot for chicken-stealing —  did she care?

Victor the cat and Shelby shared a fashion sense.

She and Jack were a sort-of pack but she also was close to our cat Victor, who shared her long silky black coat with a white blaze. It was a cross-species genetic connection of some sort.

I credit her collie side with how she was "crazy-brave." Once M. told me how she charged a black bear near the house, but consented to be called back.

But that was not her peak of crazy-brave.

When she was twelve (?), Jack was gone, replaced by Fisher. One morning in late summer I was walking them both off-leash up the Forest Service road.

Fisher, still young, had "the zooomies," and he went racing down into a deep gully, up the other side, and into a thicket of Gambel oak. Shelby, now slow and arthritic, plodded along by my side.

He ran into the oak brush but suddenly shot out again at a run, pursued by a medium-size black bear. (The bear was just loping. Don't underestimate their speed over a short distance.) 

He dashed back down through the gully, ending up in a face-off with the bear, who was on the far side.

There was a poor mast crop (acorns) that year, but that particular clone-cluster had a lot, which had attracted the bear.

I was calling him, but he was too overwhelmed by events to come to me. Meanwhile, Shelby launched herself at the bear.

Old and arthritic? She forgot all about that! Barking furiously, she charged down into the gully and up the other side. Head down, tail flowing in the wind, she went for the bear like a black guided missile.

The bear turned and ran into the brush, pursued by Shelby. 

I ran to grab Fisher, saying good-bye in my heart to Shelby: "You lived a good life." I fully expected to hear the shriek of a dog being disemboweled. 

There was silence.

Something black moved in the oak brush. Dog or bear?

Shelby trotted out into the open, squatted, and pissed with her back to where the bear had gone. Then she consented to notice that she was being called.

With a dog collar in each fist, I hustled them toward home.

Crazy-brave.

Next: Fisher, the Most Difficult Dog

A Bear and His Dog

Dogs I have had seem to take one of two attitudes toward black bears. The three Chesapeake Bay retrievers all believed in keeping a safe distance and barking a warning. Come to think of it, Jack (1996–2009) once treed a bear cub while walking with the woods with M., who — once she realized what had happened — grabbed him and vacated the area. Shelby, our crazy-brave collie-Lab mix, charged solo after bears several times — and lived to tell about it. There was a reason she was called The Bandit Queen.

But now here is a German shepherd (Or shepherd-mix, if it is the dog that I think it could be) hanging out on the ridge up behind the house with a bear. That is a first for me, and also for our wildlife-rehabilitator friends, who said it was "really strange."  Maybe these two did not read the part in the manual that says dogs and bears are supposed to be antagonists?

Click the photos for a larger view.

A small (subadult?) black bear wanders toward the camera.

 

An hour and a half later, here is a German shepherd.

But the bear is still hanging around too, and they seem unperturbed by each other.

 There were no further photos of either animal after that.

Black Bear Bolts in Rocky Mountain National Park (Updated with Video)

Young black bear boar runs for freedom (National Park Service)

At six a.m. last Thursday (the 20th) this young male black bear and his "cellmate" had some visitors: three National Park Service employees and two Colorado game wardens. The last were there to instruct the former in the fine points (heh) of darting and tranquilizing bears.

The two "boys" (subadults) came down from Rocky Mountain National Park to a rehabilitation center in southern Colorado after the East Troublesome Fire last year. They spent the winter getting fat — and somewhat bored — until finally it was time to release them in a area not so much frequented by park visitors.

One of the NPS staffers reported, "The boys were very well-behaved and calm on the trip. The release went really well — away from visitors."

The GPS-tracking collar shown is designed to come off after a time.

I would probably enjoy traveling up I-25 through Denver more if I could be tranquilized in a windowless trailer too.*

The rehabbers were curious if the two bears would pal around together for a time, but the GPS evidence said they did not.

"The bears stuck together for less than two minutes before going in separate directions. They're sub adults and their genetics are telling them to go off and find their own territories," one of the NPS stafers reported.

* Actually, bears in transit are usually recovering from the anesthesia with the aid of another drug. For one thing, it means one will not end up lying on top of the other and possibly smothering it. An exception might be if they have to be moved from the transport trailer on a sled or something, where they need to be kept quiet longer.

120 Colorado Bears Killed Last Year, Mostly over Human Trash

This bear's ear tags, caught in an infrared photograph show that it was trapped
and relocated before. "Two strikes and you're out. (My scout camera photo, 2014.)

Some 120 bears were "euthanized" (often with a state-issued .308 rifle, I think that means) in 2020, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife reports.

This number refers to killing judged necesary by game wardens, not by hunters during the fall season, which is tallied separately.

Another 89 were trapped and relocated.  

“Unfortunately I would classify 2020 as a fairly ‘normal’ year for bear activity,” said Area 8 Wildlife Manager Matt Yamashita. “‘Unfortunate’ is in reference to the still substantial number of conflict bear calls across the state. Compared to 2019 statistics it appears that human-bear conflict numbers have decreased and the situation is improving. However, wildlife managers are hesitant to draw conclusions from a comparison between two years.

Often you will find a sow bear being killed and its cubs sent to our neighbors the wildlife  rehabilitators. I have hauled a lot of donated food for those cubs and helped get them loaded up for return to the wild. I know the rehabbers do their very best for them. But it's still not real life, so to speak.

A skinny black bear mom and her cub.
(My scout camera photo, 2020.)

"CPW responded to almost five thousand bear reports in 2020. Of those, a third had trash documented. Bird feeders (411 reports), unsecured chicken coops (254) and livestock (391), among others, are all pieces of the puzzle wildlife officials document when tracing conflicts.

"Trash and bird feeders are typically a bear’s first association with people. It is their first step that leads them to becoming habituated, or losing their natural fear of humans. After learning this house or neighborhood has easy calories available to them in those forms, the next place they may look to for more is in an open garage, or pet food on your deck, or even break into your car for a treat it can smell.

"Being rewarded with food over time makes a bear willing to take greater risks to get the calories it needs. The next and most dangerous step they may take is to break into a home. In 2020, CPW documented 362 reports that had bears breaking into homes, cabins, dwellings and garages (forcible entry into a garage, not walking into one left open)."

This is CPW's "Be Bear Aware" page, and its advicce works outside Colorado too. 

It helps to remember this part: "With a nose that’s 100 times more sensitive than ours, a bear can literally smell food five miles away."

Black Bears Matter

M. and I  been watching (and hauling food for) this young black bear sow since July, when she was brought to our neighbors' rehab center after having been arrested in the little town of Beulah on a charge of raiding chicken coops and porches for food. Not the most efficient raider, she weighed only about 35 lbs. (16 kg.) at the time— undersize for a yearling.

So she came to the center and occupied a large enclosure alone, being too big to be put in with this spring's group of orphan cubs. She ate. She was bored. They tried to give her some "enrichment" — things to play with etc., most of which she destroyed, being a bear, after all. She smashed a couple of dogloos too —again, not a surprise. (They go through a lot of dogloos.) And she ate.

I saw her on the two weeks ago and was astonished at how she had grown — up to 140 lbs. (63.5 kg.), they said.

Gretchen Holschuh, the district wildlife manager who had trapped her (that's her cranking open the gate) chose the release site, which was on private land this time, with a cooperating landowner. They always wait for all the big-game hunting seasons to be over before releasing bears — by December, bears should know it's time to get serious about hibernation.

Free at last, she ran off into the snow as fast as she could. Considing the summer's drought, she was probably better off in terms of weight than most of the other bears. I hope she stays away from chicken coops this time.

Skinny Mom, a "Cinnamon" Bear

Cubs playing in the little spring — Mom still wearing last year's coat.

About 45 minutes' walk from the house (over a steep ridge) is a tiny spring that is a wildlife magnet.  That is where I have gotten my only scout camera mountain lion pictures, including this one.

Last year the camera photographed a cinnamon-phase black bear that looked skinny and unhealthy. I mean like cigarettes-and-Pepsi-Cola skinny. But she was back this year — with cubs. Wild animals . . .

I hung the camera in early May, and the batteries died on July 15th. What happened after that, I do not know. But here she was, wallowing in the spring that the elk had been stomping through.

It's a hard life being a bear mom in a drought year. I wonder where they are now.

Brome Grass and Bear Shit — Thinking about this Summer

I

Liatris punctata

The Liatris are starting to bloom, which marks beginning of Late Summer here in the foothills. Funny thing, with last spring having been so wet, I expected a wildflower explosion. And the summer has been fairly rainy, although with a hot and dry period in July.

Nope. Where are the wild geraniums? Golden banner? Where are [fill in the blank]? Some asters, vetches, locoweed, yarrow . . .  they showed up.

At higher altitudes, there is much more profusion. We must have been in some kind of  meteorlogical "doughnut hole" again.

The Magyar Menace

Instead, early summer turned into March of the Brome Grass.  There have been patches of it here and there, but something — presumably the extra moisture — really threw its switch this year.

Fun fact: Smooth brome was imported from Hungary in 1884. Some consider it invasive, but the ranchers seem to like it. Not like cheatgrass, in other words, which is a brome too but which is evil.

What are some alternatives? The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources suggested these natives:

• Big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii)
• Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum)
• Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans)
• Prairie cordgrass (Spartina pectinata)
• Bluejoint (Calamagrostis canadensis)

I tried my own line-up this year with plants bought from Hartungs' Desert Canyon Farm in Cañon City, one plant each of Indian ricegrass, Achnatherum hymenoides; big (giant) sacaton, Sporobolus wrightii; and silver spike grass, Achnatherum calamagrostis. 

These are my three test plants. They are hard to see, but all are doing well. Now it's a matter of harvesting seed.

And the bears!

A black bear left this little calling card near the house on July 24th. Fisher the dog had been on alert that night — rushing out onto the veranda barking, then into the back dog run barking — he knew Somebody was out there.

It looked like the bear had eaten some immature currants, but I don't know how much nutritional value it extracted. One bush not far from the site was pretty well stripped. I ate on currant for form's sake the next morning, out of a sense of brotherhood with the bears, who taught the peoples what to eat.

That was Early Summer. Now it is Late Summer, mushroom season. More to come about all that.

Give a Man a Pile of Rocks . . .

. . . and he will spend a while trying to stack them into a balanced cairn.

I say "man" because the boot tracks down here were pretty large, just in case you are questioning my gender assumptions.

There used to be a road under this slide, but then came a forest fire, followed by flash-flooding.  I used to know the area well. Now it's all changed. Time for re-exploring.

Yes, the ridge in the background was burned pretty thoroughly. Gambel oak is coming up in profusion, so the deer, bears, and turkeys will benefit from acorns.

Motherless Cub Gets Another Chance

Goodbye, little bear. Your luck has been good until now. I hope that it holds.

You and your litter mate were found in central Colorado Springs last summer, victims of some unfortunate events. Lucky for you, the game wardens caught you both, and you were taken into the rehab center.

There you ate and played with your two new cage mates, and you ate some more. All that fish and fruit and grass and Walmart avocados by the carton.

Today they came and shot you with a dart gun. After a while you fell asleep, were weighed (110 pounds / 50 kg), given one last anti-worm shot, and loaded with your sister into a wooden crate.

By now, you two should be bedded down inside that crate, which is filled with straw and covered over with straw and snow to serve as a bear den for the rest of winter. You are on a big ranch in the Wet Mountains, away from the highway, behind locked gates.

The cattle have been moved to lower elevations, so even the ranch hands will not be around much. It should be nice and quiet.

When you feel like getting up, you won't have Mom to follow after. You will be on your own. Look out for each other. Keep a low profile. Watch out for bigger bears. Stay away from the houses. Eat and eat and eat. You have a pretty good chance of survival.

(When I see those ranch hands next summer, I will ask them if they have seen you two. If they say that they have not, that might be a good thing. On the other hand, I want to know . . .  )

It's Tuesday, So It's Bears-day

 A news report on today's bear release.

I did not sleep well last night because I knew that I was getting up earlier than usual.

Wash, dress, walk and feed the dog, fill a go-cup with coffee, and be on the road to the wildlife rehabilitation center.

A tranquilized bear is weighed. The white ear tag
marks it as release from a rehab center.

The game wardens were already there, four of them: two men, two women, all from the Colorado Springs area.  They had already started "darting" the bears — two them lay sleeping in a corner of their enclosure, while one hung woozily from the chain-link wall.

My job as a Colorado Parks & Wildlife wildlife-transport volunteer was just that: transport. In this case, I was a bear-stretcher bearer. Once a knocked-out bear was on the stretcher, one of wardens and I carried it to a hanging scale, where it was weighed (less 15 lbs. for the stretcher and webbing). Then it was out across the snow to a waiting culvert-trap, now repurposed as a transport trailer.

Two trailers, four yearling bears in each, butt to butt, so that they would not accidentally roll onto each other's muzzles and cut off breathing.

Then, after two hours (that's 15 minutes per bear, pretty good teamwork), the two rigs left the property, headed north to somewhere in El Paso or Teller counties. (Exact location of the artificial dens is confidential, of course.)

When bears are released in summer, they are given a wake-up drug first, so that they, literally, hit the ground running. 

Game warden Corey Adler arranges the
tranquilized bears for transportation.

In the winter, however, they are hauled on sleds to the man-made dens, four yearlings to a den, and left there, still tranquilized, to wake up later among familiar scents.

To see those dens, view the photos with Jennifer Brown's article in The Colorado Sun.  That"180 acres" is wacky wrong though. The wildlife rehabilitation center is much, much smaller.

Weighing between 110 and 160 pounds (50–73 kg) , the seven males and one female are roly-poly fat, thanks to massive donations of fruits and vegetables from the Cañon City Walmart, fish from CPW, and meat donated by big-game hunters. Trying to grab hold of one is like grabbing Jello.

All the while, photos are being emailed to a CPW public relations guy, and the TV station crews will be waiting near the release site.

Six more bears remain to be released in the near future.

Most of these bears were orphaned last year when their mothers were killed, either by vehicular collision or by a game warden when the mother had repeatedly broken into homes, looking for food.

The wardens know that they have to make that difficult decision sometimes, but they don't like it. As one of them said today, "This is our chance to show that we don't always kill bears."

Dart 'em and Release 'em

Via Patrick Burns' Terrierman blog:

Biologist Heather Reich of the the Nevada Department of Wildlife is not afraid of grizzly bears in Montana or black bears in Nevada, but she's terrified of a "Tahoe-area animal rights activist" by the name of Carolyn Stark who lives in Incline Village and who has chased her down the freeway as she works trapping and moving bears in conflict with humans.

Ear-tagging, now that may be going too far.

Yes, "bear-human conflicts" are usually the humans' fault, but I have worked with many game wardens and biologists who genuinely love bears. They don't deserve such treatment.

Bears Are Hungry in the Fall

Grizzly bears (US Fish and Wildlife Service)

• Tennessee: A black bear killed a man in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Some confusion ensues.

Park officials have shot and killed the bear associated with the investigation into a man's death.

Spokeswoman Julena Campbell said it happened around 9:45 Sunday morning [Sept. 9].

A news release Wednesday said the National Park Service had euthanized a male bear after finding it near a man's body in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. On Friday, the park said rangers actually had not yet found and killed the bear.

• Wyoming: A bowhunter and his guide were attacked by grizzly bears in the Teton Wilderness; the guide was killed.

As initially reported, a grizzly bear attack on an elk hunter and his guide wounded the client hunter Corey Chubon, from Florida, and left the guide, Mark Uptain, dead. His body was recovered yesterday from the scene in Turpin Meadows at approximately 1:15pm.

After interviews and visiting the scene, Undersheriff Matt Carr said Uptain was rushed by a grizzly bear in “a very aggressive manner.”

“They were field dressing this elk. They were in thick timber and this bear was on them very quickly,” Carr said. “There was apparently no time to react.”

UPDATE: More information on the incident. Apparently bear spray was used.

• Oregon: A woman hiking was killed by a mountain lion in the Mount Hood area.

The hiker who went missing on Mount Hood in late August and was found dead at the bottom of a ravine Monday was likely killed by a cougar, authorities said — a shocking twist in the missing persons case. 

The body of Diana Bober, 55, was found Monday [Sept. 10] at the bottom of a 200-foot embankment on the famous Oregon mountain's Hunchback Trail, the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday.

Day Bear, Night Bear, Muddy Bear

A series of photos from May at Camera Trap Spring, where even a little seep of water the size of two hands cupped is enough for a bear to sit in.

Some Facts and Figures on Bear Attacks

Rarely, black bears become predatory too (Science Daily).

If I never hear again that joke whose punch line includes, "grizzly bear shit has bells in it," I will be a happier person thereby.

Alaska journalist Craig Medred offers some facts and figures on bear attacks — based on Alaska data, of course, but worth nothing anywhere.

“As of 2015, 75 instances of bear spray use were recorded (in Alaska) of which 70 (93.3 percent) were successful in altering bears’ aggressive behavior whereas five (6.7 percent) were not,” [Brigham Young University professor Tom] Smith and [noted Canadian bear researcher Stephen] Herrero write.

“However, of the 197 persons involved in those 75 encounters only four received slight injuries (2 percent) – all inflicted by grizzly bears.”

There is a significant likelihood, the scientists add, that the spray worked on a lot more bears than are in the study. Smith and Herrero says information on bear attacks, which involve people being injured by a bear, is limited, and information on incidents, in which people are involved in non-injury incidents, even more so.

“Unquestionably,” they write, “many incidents go unreported for a variety of reasons. It is believed that many human-bear interactions resolve peacefully, are not newsworthy, and therefore underreported. This (also) includes times when persons successfully dispatch a bear with a firearm.”

And this:

Lifestyle changes are clearly reflected in the data, too.  Since 1980, attacks on joggers went up nineteen fold from one to 19, and those on cyclists grew five fold from one to five.

“None of these joggers or bicyclists [was] carrying a bear deterrent, and we believe that contributed to the outcome,” the study added.

Hikers and hunters remain far and away the largest category of people attacked by bears. Attacks on hunters have been going down, though, with attacks on hikers going up, probably representative of another lifestyle change.

And then there is the whole issue of dogs and bears, with which I have had a little experience. You should read the whole thing.

A Journey of 100 Miles Begins with a Single Dart

District wildlife manager Justin Krall and some of the crew,
with two bears loaded in the culvert trap for transport.

The four bears were getting big and bored, maybe with some tendencies toward bad. What had been hungry cubs in 2017 were now hefty sub-adult males, weighing around 160–170 pounds (~75 kg).

They had spent months at the wildlife rehabilitation center, eating, sleeping, climbing tree trunks, eating, wrestling sumo-style, eating, splashing in stock tanks — but now it was time to go!

Their human contact had been kept low — the rehab center is not a zoo — but now came more humans, two of them with CO2-powered dart guns. PPFFFTT!

The couple who run the center were there, of course, plus me as additional stretcher-bearer.

We lifted each tranquilized bear onto a stretcher, where it was weighed,  micro-chipped (as with pets),  ear-tagged (all this is wildlife-research data), and vaccinated against sarcoptic mange. Here is the one I called "Stumpy," the smallest at about 125 pounds, waiting to be loaded with his companion. 

Then they were loaded into trailers (which are actually "live" bear traps themselves) for a long ride up into the Arkansas River headwaters, into areas where the drought is not so severe. At last came release, two in one place, two in another.

Looking over the upper Arkansas River Valley

"No long goodbyes," says district wildlife manager Kim Woodruff, who made this last video. That these bears gallop away from humans is a good thing, for them. Now they have their chance.

A Chance for Bear Cubs on Pike's Peak

“To me, it is cruel to keep an animal like this in a cage,” [Cec Sanders] said. “No guarantees on what happens to them. But at least they get a chance.”  (Video: Denver Post.)

The Denver Post profiles some southern Colorado wildlife researchers and their orphaned bears, in connection with . . . I don't want to call them "bear-human" conflicts, because it's pretty one-sided.

Actually, as our non-winter wore on and the bears got fatter and fatter, the Sanders (whom I know) were feeling forgotten, wonder if Colorado Parks and Wildlife was ever going to come collect the bears.

On the other hand, they realized that the relatively warm and dry winter might not click the bears' hibernation switch right away. (Possibly related,  about two weeks ago, something walked away with a suet feeder that had been hanging by my house — nothing left but its dangling chain.)

Another Complicated Bear Story

Not one of the most recent bear cubs, but from a similar situation.

You saw the same story in the Colorado media and even nationally, which means that it came from a news release and that none of the reporters was actually on the scene. And how would they be, unless they had a radio scanner in the news room on Colorado Parks & Wildlife frequencies—which they don't. (Police and fire, yes.)

A mother bear died Thursday after Colorado Parks and Wildlife tried to remove her and two young cubs from a residential neighborhood just south of Colorado Springs.

Notice how reporter Ellie Mulder writes (or cuts and pastes), "The cubs, which can't survive on their own yet, will be taken to a rehabilitation facility and eventually released."

That reminds me how how my mother once told me that my cat and her kittens were being "taken to a farm." I still hate her for that lie, and hate myself for believing it.

Yet in this case it is true! I arrived at said rehabilitation facility today to deliver a load of food donations, having picked up a bag of "large breed" puppy chow myself.  (Black bears are a large breed, aren't they? Cubs need lots of calories and protein.)

They have eight cubs this year, and they are all hungry.

The cub pictured  — a different case — was hanging around a home on the edge of Cañon City with its mother. I saw a photo of the sow, and she looked emaciated. One day she was found dead at the house. The district wildlife manager (game warden) who investigated said that she had puncture wounds on her leg (fight with a bigger bear?) and broken ribs (hit by a car?).

Grimly but efficiently, the game warden and the homeowner loaded the sow's body into a culvert trap. Still seeking to nurse, the cub climbed in, was caught, and transported to the rehabilitation facility to dine on puppy chow and donated watermelon. It's doing fine thus far.

Back to the news story. The bear was in somebody's yard, and someone official had to do something, so they darted her, she climbed higher, and fell to her death — not the first time that has happened.

Some thoughts:

1. Why not use a culvert trap and catch both sow and cubs? Was the area too busy? Too much interference from people, dogs, whatever?  Or was it just a case of act now and wrap it up?

2. Not all game wardens will do even that much. They might just take their rifle out of the truck and solve the problem that way. (The higher-ups seem to have no problem with that approach.)  How much does the response depend on who is watching?

3. Some game wardens, however, will do all that they can to save bears. They counsel residents on how "bear-proof" their homes, do their best to catch and transport "problem bears," and issue citations to people who harm without cause. I can think of a couple like that in my area.

Mostly, I am just tired of a civilization(s)  that cannot coexist with other-than-human nations.

#colorado parks and wildlife #bears