An Alaskan Speaks about Bear Spray

Bear spray canisters and holsters
(Udap brand).

A spate of incidents in Alaska (and the Northern Rockies) have some people asking, "Does bear spray work?"

Alaska news-blogger Craig Medred has posted on this repeatedly. The main issue seems to be that minority of black bears (not griz) who turn predator, but grizzlies are always of concern as well.

Twenty-seven-year-old Erin Johnson from Anchorage died June 19 after she and a coworker were attacked by a predatory black bear while doing environmental studies in brushy forest about five miles from the state’s largest underground gold mine. . .

Sean Farley, a bear researcher and wildlife physiologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, emphasized that bear spray has proven hugely effective on charging bears, especially charging grizzlies.

But he noted the physical state of those bears. They charge with eyes wide open, nostrils flaring and often huffing air into their lungs. They are fully exposed to the active ingredient in the spray – oleoresin capsicum, an oily extract from the pepper plant.
Unlike tear gas, which appears to work poorly on bears, capsicum causes more than just irritation to the eyes. Inhaled, it inflames airways making it temporarily harder to breathe and from what is known about research on humans, it might do even more than that.

A charging grizzly is likely to get a big dose of capsicum. That is not necessarily the case for a predatory bear. . . . Farley describes predatory bears as approaching with eyes squinting, mouths shut and  nostrils narrowed. They come in like bears approaching beehives ready to suffer a bit to get the food they want. Their physical preparations would serve to minimize the dose of spray hitting the bear.

The post goes on to talk about risk-assessment: "Statistically, you are orders of magnitude more likely to die in a motor vehicle or boating accident in Alaska than to be attacked by a bear, let alone killed by one." But fear of bears is more primal than fear of motorboats.

And there is speculation on the changing nature of predators world-wide. Read it all.

The big about bears approaching beehives reminded me of when my late brother-in-law was raising hogs on his farm in southeastern Missouri. His was a small operation, maybe a dozen or so at a time, partly for the family and partly for sale.

He told me about one particular hog that would bust through an electric fence. The pig knew that it would get shocked, so it started squealing before it hit the fence, but it still wanted to break through more than it did not want to be shocked. There is no reason why some bear might not take the same attitude toward bear spray.

I still carry it at appropriate times, however. It also works well on overly aggressive dogs. And I see that Medred still carries it too.

First Scout Camera Bear of 2017

This lanky young black bear was out ambling around on Sunday the 18th, but I just changed out the SD card in that camera today and found its picture.

Bear sign has been scant, which is probably a good thing, if it means that they are dispersed and finding stuff to eat. I did have a birdfeeder knocked down the night of June 4th, which reminded M. and me that it was time to go into summer mode and bring them in each evening.

I this color phase a "Siamese bear," as in cat, because the old fur being shed looks light over the darker undercoat.

A Colorado Moment and a New Book on Yellowstone Death, Nature, & Science

So I sold a pair of World War 2-vintage snowshoes on eBay and used the money to buy hemp oil (CBD) for my dog.

A Colorado moment, circa 2017.

I probably could have asked more if I could definitely have linked those 1943 snowshoes to the 10th Mountain Division — Dad did acquire them in Colorado in the 1960s — but that was just a "maybe."


What I want to read:
 
Jordon Fisher Smith, whose Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra is one of my favorite reads, has a new book out, Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature.

"Harry Walker had come to Yellowstone in 1972 in search of himself. Instead, he became a tragic symbol of poor wildlife management and the killer grizzly bear. Walker’s death prompted a fierce debate over the human role in engineering nature, with some of the biggest names in wildlife biology at the time on either side.

"While a tempest of people, places and ideas rage within the pages of Engineering Eden the author is a calm voice in the storm, letting the reader take it all in and form an opinion of their own."

In this interview with a Florida NPR station, he says,  "“I wanted the artistic form of this narrative nonfiction work to resemble the endless interconnection of nature itself. Instead of saying to my reader, ‘Okay, now watch this. I’m gonna try to really make this complex web of relationships right in front of you,’ I just did it.”

(I really dislike the phrase "find yourself" or "in search of himself," etc. You don't just find yourself out there lying on the ground out in the woods; you build yourself by what you do day to day.)

Where to Eat in San Luis, First Aid, and Other Links

¶ Where to eat in San Luis now that Emma's Hacienda is closed. And there is a new-ish coffee shop and bakery, Rosa Mystica, that I keep meaning to try.

¶ From the National Outdoor Leadership School: "27 Considerations for a Wilderness First Aid Kit." Having taken their wilderness first aid class a couple of times, I think about these things more than I used to, back when my first-aid kit was a few bandaids and a small tin of aspirin.

¶ Why your dog likes bread, oatmeal, and other grain-based foods and can digest them just fine. They learned to do it to live with Neolithic farmers, apparently. They are not wolves.

¶ Instead of just shooting a suspect bear and looking at its stomach contents to see if it ate the missing camper, the National Park Service is learning to use non-lethal DNA evidence.

Smoked Links with Seal Meat

This is "good" smoke, coming from a fire-line burnout
on the Junkins Fire three days ago.

I am still catching up after the evacuation, the firefighting, the meetings, and the general nervousness of having Chinook and Skycrane helicopters thumping over the house hour after hour.  So here are some quick nature-blogging links.

¶ Talk about going against the narrative— an Inuit filmmaker creates a pro-seal hunt video.

Alethea Arnaquq-Baril: I'm Inuit, so I grew up in the Arctic. I grew up hunting and eating seal meat with my family, and as an Inuk, you just grow up hearing people complain [about] and criticize seal hunters. It's just kind of always been an issue for me, and I knew that when I became a filmmaker that I was eventually going to have to cover this issue. 

¶  When trekking poles became popular a few years ago, I had a sort of snobbish reaction. "Who needs two poles?" I thought. "They turn you into a beast of burden. Maybe if you are carrying a very heavy pack on rocky ground . . . "

Other people put a positive spin on "beast," saying that the poles make them feel like a sure-footed quadruped.

I am all for sparing your knees on long downhill trails, but I hate to have two hands occupied with poles. When I broke one of my old bamboo x-c ski poles a few years back, I cut them both down to walking-stick length and added rubber tips. But usually I carry only one, because the other hands needs to be free for a tool, a leashed dog, or whatever.

But here is Randy Newberg, one of the few makers of hunting videos that I can stand to watch, making the case for them — with a video too.

“You can laugh at me all you want,” says Newberg. ” But there’s a reason why this 51-year-old, gray haired fart, who drives a desk for a living a good portion of the year, can go and hunt the mountains: trekking poles.”

¶ Another video: Put a camera on bears in Yellowstone and let them wander — and see what happens when they encounters wolves.

Swift Fox in an Apishapa Getaway

Our neighbors the wildlife rehabilitators had been caring for this swift fox (Vulpes velox) for months, and in mid-March Colorado Parks & Wildlife decided it could go free along the Apishapa River in the prairie-and-canyon country east of Walsenburg.

Sometimes all you get with wildlife releases is a phone video, as with Fortuna the bear, but this one was done by Jacob Way, a district wildlife manager with more photographic skill, so thanks, Jacob.

For more on swift fox conservation efforts — in other words, trying to forestall a federal "threatened" listing with the complications that would bring — read about Colorado Parks & Wildlife's Swift Fox Conservation Team. You will find information on range, habitat, and so on, including the answer to the vital question, "What's the difference between swift foxes and kit foxes"?

Vulpes velox — is that a cool scientific name or what? As for the river, most people say ah-PISH-pa or ah-PISH-uh-pa. It is supposed to come from a Ute name meaning "stinking (stagnant) water," since its flow usually slows down to almost nothing in after the spring runoff.

Louie the Bear has a Fundraiser! Help Louie Eat!

I posted in October about Louie the pizza shop bear and his little buddies. M. and I have been helping out a little — some big bags of puppy chow and some big bags of peanuts — but those go fast. Louie's caretakers at Wet Mountain Wildlife could use some help, so they have started a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign. But first . . . Louie in the pizza shop!

OK, you saw him, now help him bulk up for hibernation by contributing here!

Bears in Greece and Colorado

Louie and two smaller pals.

When I was in Greece last month, I saw no Eurasian brown bears, since I was on the bear-free island of Corfu. But in the English-language edition of the newspaper Kathimerini (sort of the Wall Street Journal of Greece), I did read about a sanctuary for bears that for one reason or another cannot be released into the wild.

In that sense this sanctuary, Arcturos, is more like Mission: Wolf here: it offers fairly large, fairly wild enclosures to animals that still must be fed by their human caretakers.

Having eaten his watermelon, 15-year-old Manolis stands up on both feet and appears to wave. His brother, Kyrgiakos, continues to munch away at his own watermelon a few meters away, indifferent to our presence. When they were cubs, the two brothers were found by a person who took them in as pets. But when they tipped the scales at 250 kilograms [550 lbs.] and grew to 2 meters in height, they simply became unmanageable. When Arcturos was called in to help, the two bears were completely used to living with people. It would be impossible for them to live in their natural habitat now, which means they will have to live their whole lives in captivity. However, they could do far worse than the Arcturos Sanctuary, an area of some 50 acres offering food, guaranteed care and optimal living conditions.

 Greece does still have a small, but growing, population of wild bears:

“With more than 450 registered bears, Greece’s bear population is considered one of the most significant in the Balkan region. The bears are part of a common clade ranging from the Swiss Alps to Greece. This new evidence challenges data found in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of endangered species, which suggests that there are no more than 200 bears living in Greece,” Arcturos’s scientific coordinator, Alexandros Karamanlidis, told Kathimerini in a recent interview.

Home from our trip, M. and I yesterday visited the local wildlife rehabilitators and saw a Colorado celebrity, Louie the pizza shop bear.

Blanca Caro, the Colorado Springs police school resource officer at Palmer High School, said the bear's presence in downtown Monday nearly caused the school to go on lockdown. But further investigation revealed that the animal was not a threat to students and had made its way to Louie's Pizza on North Tejon Street.

Lockdown. For a bear cub. I can only hope that they were protecting the bear cub from high school students, not the other way around.

Louie and his two companions (from another rescue) were very shy, which is good. The rehabbers predict that with about ten weeks to go, they can have the cubs fat enough to enter hibernation in the wild. I need to drop off a contribution of puppy chow. A 40-pound sack should last them . . . two days?  We brought watermelons and acorns yesterday. Both Greek and American bears love watermelon.

"Seeing Any Bears?"

This bear was slow to shed last winter's coat, which is all bleached out but still clinging.
I think that that is a cub walking beside her in the lower photo, but the grass is so tall!

I bumped into a former neighbor at the bank a couple of weeks ago, and that was her first question. It's right up there as a late-summer conversation starter with "Getting any rain?"

My answer was "Not around the house," and I like to think that is because of the (finally!) good acorn crop and the other natural food that has been available thanks to the very wet spring.

Just yesterday, I had pretty much the same conversation with a state game warden who works mainly in Chaffee County. Not too many "bear problems" up her way.

The Denver Post reports Front Range bears getting up to "their usual mischief," which is to say, trying to eat and live in a bear-unfriendly world.

"Since the second week of July, things went crazy," said Jennifer Churchill, a spokeswoman for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

And there's a simple explanation for the migration. The bears, who typically eat about 20,000 calories a day during the summer, are hungry.

A "localized food failure" in northeastern Colorado has bears "out looking hard for food," Churchill said. "We are definitely seeing bears in places we don't typically see them." 

Is the difference between southern and northern Colorado just the lack of Gambel oak (scrub oak), which peters out pretty quickly north of Castle Rock, roughly speaking?

Oak brush provides cover and nesting habitat for many forms of wildlife (birds, mammals, amphibians, etc.). The foliage and acorns offer valuable food for many of these wildlife species, such as wild turkey, mule deer, and black bear. Acorns produced by the larger stands of oak brush are critical for turkey.

This Post story, which skips around various Western states, has a Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologist estimating our state's bear population at higher than previously thought, as many as 16,000–18,000.

It's also difficult to chart the number of dead bears. While Parks and Wildlife relocates or euthanizes scores of problem bears, the state hasn't been able to keep up a database with that information since about 2011, said Jerry Apker, the statewide carnivore manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Countless bears are killed and not recorded by local animal-control officers, law enforcement, poachers or motorists.

In 2014, some 17,000 hunters harvested about 1,400 bears, an 8 percent success rate.  What those numbers tell you is that many of those 17,000 bought a bear license "just in case" while they were out for deer or elk primarily.

She Could Be Timothy Treadwell's Mother (In Spirit)

Surveillance photo at Jo Ann Medina's home. (Colorado Parks and Wildlife)

It's one thing to be the "crazy cat lady," but quite another to be the "crazy bear lady."

Now, the woman is under arrest and at least three of the bears she has reportedly been feeding will have to be put down because they've been caught before near humans. The remaining bears will be evaluated to see if they can survive being relocated. It's a possibility they also will have to be killed.

She is out on $800 bond: 

Neighbors often complained that Medina fed black bears - some of which got too close for comfort. One woman complained that a bear "charged" her and another neighbor counted at least 10 bears visiting Medina's house seeking food in 2012. . . .

Medina admitted spending nearly $1,200 a month in 2008 on bird seed to feed deer, a citation shows. That year, she told an officer it wasn't a "bad thing to do," especially because she only did it during the winter when deer looked "so hungry," the citation said.

When suspected the following year of feeding bears, Medina told an officer that "it was the will of God for her to continue feeding the bears" to help them survive, another citation said.

(If you can't get enough Timothy, YouTube is your friend.)

UPDATE August 19th: A second bear hanging around her house has been trapped and killed by wildlife officials. But it sure rambled in its day.

On Attracting and Repelling Bears

• Illegal campsites are usually trashy. Yes, that's a stereotype, but stereotypes have to come from somewhere. And when you have trash in the Colorado mountains, you have bears. Hungry bears. Bears that don't want you to get between them and the food.

• Man gives bear the angry-hominid treatment in a Swedish forest  (You Tube).

I have been told that Eurasian brown bears, Ursos arctos artos, like North American black bears, are generally shy of people. Is that because they both primarily live in forests? (But some live on steppes, I know.)

Likewise, some argue that grizzly bears, Ursos artocs horribilis, which were originally found on the prairies (although often in riparian corridors) and polar bears have a "take no prisoners" attitude because they have nowhere to seek refugre if, for instance, their cubs are threatened.

Evolution or adaptation to pressure from humans?

Black bear mamas — and I have seen this a couple of times — will send the cubs up a tree and run away themselves. Whether that is for self-preservation or to lure away the perceived threatening agent, I will let someone else decide.

• If you have read this far, you too are fascinated by people's complex relationship with bears. One takeaway from David Rockwell's Giving Voice to Bear — which includes some northern European as well as North American cultural material — is that bear-hunting must be the most ritualized of all hunting.

More than any other animal, Bear is not only quarry but teacher. A great deal of "bear magic" is not just hunting stuff but herbalism. People say that they or their ancestors learned how to cure from watching bears — or from getting the power of bears.

But can bears teach them how to live in the woods?

Bear 1, Scout Camera 0

I went to check the scout camera nearest to the house on April 25th, and as I approached, I saw it lying on the ground. Apparently a brief series of events took place the day before.

Here was a trail through the scrub oak, pine, and Douglas fir. Nothing happening, it would seem — but something had tripped the infrared sensor.

A minute and a half later. But wait, the camera has been turned 180 degrees! This must be the perpetrator, a bear shedding its bleached winter coat. It just smacked the camera as it walked by?

Uh-oh. It came back.

And now the camera is facing another direction. And then — not shown — it's on the ground, with the mounting bracket broken.

OK, so I have ordered another "bear box" security box from an eBay seller that will fit not this camera but another model.

Yet other bears at this same location have paid the camera no attention while acting a little goofy. They are individuals.

Blog Stew: I'll Eat my (Coyote Brown) Boots

 I have so many links to offer. Does anyone still click on hyperlinks? Here is a start, anyway.

Note crucial color difference.

• The Army is switching to "coyote brown" boots, just so you will know. "Desert tan" is just so Operation Enduring Freedom. Having the better boot color will aid the fight against Islamist terrorists.

• "Guntry clubs" — apparently this is a "thing" now, as people say on the Internet. "Savvy investors" are interested, says the Washington Post.

The average age of new target shooters is 33, while 47 percent live in urban or suburban areas, and 37 percent are female, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for the firearms industry.

Me, I will stick with the Blood of Christ Shooting Sports Club.

• Hunting-angling-food blogger Hank Shaw on the dangers of trichinosis, particularly from eating bear meat.

It is a fact that bear and cougar meat are the most prominent vectors for trichinosis in North America. Pigs, which are what most people think of when they think of trich, are actually not commonly infected.

This is a link that you definitely should click.

How Not To Become Prey

Bears biting backpackers. Mountain lions munching mountain bikers.

Every time that some carnivorous critter bites or kills a human, there will be voices proclaiming, "They were here first. We live on their territory."

That is true in a long historical view —  and it is also true that human populations have lived alongside big carnivores throughout history — but Wyoming writer Cat Urbigkit's new book, When Man Becomes Prey: Fatal Encounters with America's Most Feared Predators, adds some nuance and some new information.

Her book is divided into species-specific chapters

• Black bears
• Coyotes
• Gray wolves
• Mountain lions
• Grizzly nightmares
• Greater Yellowstone grizzlies

plus two more, "Habituation and Alaska Attacks" and "Learning to Coexist with Predators."

Each chapter begins with some narratives, the kind that you want to read in the daytime with a clear view of your surroundings. They then cover relevant scientific research and practical ways to avoid conflict with bears, mountain lions, or whatever. "For some hikers [in coyote habitat] rocks-in-pockets becomes a routine at the start of every hike."

For instance, I was raised to believe that while they were a threat to dogs and cats, coyotes left adult-size humans alone. Urbigkit leads with the 2009 killing of Taylor Mitchell in Cape Breton Highlands National Park by a small pack of three coyotes — all healthy. "Wildlife officials suspected that these coyotes had become habituated to humans during the tourist season, and this may have involved the animals receiving food rewards from humans." (There have been other attacks on children and adults , but she was the only recorded adult human fatality.)

Attacks on pets, even leashed dogs with people, are also increasing. Geographically, coyote attacks seem most common in parks, where no hunting is allowed, and into urban areas, again without hunting and with a variety of food resources.

A certain degree of hunting, she suggests, does encourage predators to stay away from people. Yet with mountain lions, for instance, "wildlife managers believe that when heavy localized hunting results in the harvest of older mature males, more young mountain lions are likely to disperse into those areas, creating an increase in [lion-human] conflicts."

Some other take-aways:

• While people think that black bear sows with cubs are the most dangerous, "the majority of the fatal attacks on humans involved male bears, and most attacks took place during the daylight hours." While most black bears are shy, some do prey on humans deliberately. Also, "no one killed in a black bear attack carried bear spray."

• Urbigkit, who lives on a sheep ranch south of Grand Teton National Park, believes in bear spray: "You don't have to be an excellent shot to be effective with a can of bear spray — a cloud of spray between you and a charging bear should be enough for your immediate retreat from the area."

She also offers a case where bear spray stopped an attacking mountain lion. I myself have used it only on aggressive dogs, where it worked well, so I suspect that it would work just as well on a wolf or coyote.

• There are no documented cases of black bears attacking humans in defense of a carcass, but as Northern Rockies hunters are learning, grizzlies, where present have done that a number of times.

• The old idea, from books like Jim Corbett's Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944), is that the predators who attack humans are usually elderly, crippled, or wounded. With grizzly bears, that is sometimes true, Urbigkit writes. But there also more North American predators than there used to be, thanks to recovery programs and more-regulated hunting. In addition, we have created such predator-friendly places as parks and food-rich subdivisions.

Consequently, they become habituated to us — and we become habituated to them, sometimes forgetting that they "are not loveable toys to be enjoyed when convenient [Yellowstone wolf tours?] and then discarded or destroyed when they reveal their true natures.

"Predators should be treated with a realistic acknowledgment that they are animals that kill prey to survive, and should be respected for the wild creatures that they are."

Any backcountry hiker or hunter, anyone who visits parks like Yellowstone or Great Smokies, and anyone who sees bears, coyotes, or deer in their neighborhoods — where there are deer, there are lions — ought to read When Man Becomes Prey.

It is available from the publisher, Lyons Press, or from the usual online source.

Why You Don't Want a 'Water Feature' in Bear Country

The attribution for this photo was stripped off in the process that brought it to me, but I understand that it was taken in Beulah, Colorado (western Pueblo Country), located in the foothills of the Wet Mountains, which have a healthy population of black bears.

Bears will walk along a shallow stream flipping over rocks to see if anything edible is underneath — these two probably found nothing in the artificial pond and stream, but being bears, they had fun anyway.

Fortuna Runs Free

Colorado Parks & Wildlife officers releasing a bear into the wild at an undisclosed location.

When you hear the woman's voice say that this bear has not run that far in six months, that is because she (the bear) had been in a large cage all summer and fall. And if she looks a little chunky, that is a Good Thing, since she is on her own to find a den site for the winter.

I will let the wildlife rehabilitator tell the story.

Members of the Bear Aware program were with the game warden that came to her rescue. Bear Aware volunteers educate the public on how to live with bears without conflict. 

They gave her the name Fortuna because she was fortunate enough to get the attention she needed. Close inspection could not find any breaks or serious injuries to the leg. She weighed only 40 pounds [18 kg].

Within a week Fortuna was no longer limping and eating everything put in front of her. As time went by her thin body began to blossom into a gorgeous healthy bear.

Her diet consisted of dry dog chow drenched in yogurt and honey with sides of grapes, apples, plums, avocados, watermelon and a variety of other fruits and vegetables and peanuts, lots of peanuts. Natural foods, such as wild plums, juniper berries and chokecherry, were offered when available.

Fortuna did not like when I went into her enclosure. She would run to the opposite side, climb up her log and turn her back on me. Occasionally she would turn her head to see if I was still there. As soon as I closed the gate to leave she would race over to the feast that I left for her. Her aversion to me was just exactly what it should be. I avoided her and she avoided me.

With the hot summer temperatures Fortuna, like all bears that I have had, spent a lot of time in her water tub. She made a large nest in one corner lined with pine needles and oak leaves. 

As the days began to shorten and the temperatures dropped, Fortuna became restless. Her instincts were telling her that she needed more than a pine needle nest for the coming winter.

Fortuna was given her freedom in late November in a remote mountain area. Her weight at release time was 170 pounds [77 kg]. Her coat was shiny black and thick. She would have plenty of fat and a warm coat to survive the long winter ahead.

I know this is the time of year when you are overwhelmed with requests for charitable contributions, but let me put in a good word for Wet Mountain Wildlife Rehabilitators.

Who Came to the Gut Pile?

On the afternoon of November 5th, I walked out the back door and hiked to some burned-over BLM land about 45 minutes from the house.

Maybe it was my scouting and camera work at "Camera Trap Spring," maybe it was the red gods' favor, but about an hour after leaving home I shot a mule deer buck, three points or four points (Western count), depending which side you looked at  — not a huge buck, but since I would be backpacking the meat out, that was OK.

I boned the meat and filled my Osprey Talon 22 day pack past its design specifications, I am sure, but it's a tribute to that design that it still felt comfortable, even though heavier than I had ever loaded it.

The next morning I returned — with a larger pack —carefully glassing the area as I moved through the burnt pines, lest a bear have found the gut pile, bones, etc. No, just a few crows were flying around and talking.

Magpies came first, the morning that I set the camera.

So would a bear or other scavengers come? One way to find out — I brought a scout camera with fresh batteries, piled bones, hide, rib cage, and skull with the guts — and set it to cover the scene.

Today, twenty-four days later, M. and I went back for it. The deer's remains had been rearranged considerably.

The well-nibbled rib cage and spine were a few yards away, downhill. The hide was in several pieces, and the head was not immediately visible.

The slideshows are 19 MB and 16 MB, so if you don't want to load them, see highlights below.

The bear came later. An ear-tagged bear, meaning it has been relocated once — not like there is any vacant habitat.

The golden eagle made multiple visits.

Golden eagle

The ear-tagged bear has a feast.

Of course there were lots of crows visiting, and a couple of ravens and a red fox. And other deer walked past the scene unconcerned.

See, I Told You Bears Don't Like Scout Cams

Another from Gear Junkie: spooky scout/trail camera photos (some clearly PhotoShopped), but have a look at the video midway down.

Colorado Has More Bears, NJ Bear Goes Rogue

"Colorado bear population much bigger than expected, new study finds." The headline

Colorado black bear — and there are maybe 20,000 more?

actually describes a study in Summit County, but it is not the only one.

Researchers found that in every study across the state, in habitats that ranged from good to poor quality for bears, the bear population was double the numbers wildlife managers had been using before.

Meanwhile, an incident in New Jersey reminds you of the old joke that you don't have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than the next guy.

But  Rutgers University student Darsh Patel might still be alive if he and his friends had acted sensibly.

"The hikers broke off in different directions . . . " Not a good idea. If champion sprinter Usain Bolt was matched against a black bear over fifty yards, I would bet on the bear.

Our ancient ancestors no doubt realized that they could not outrun big bears, big canids, or big cats.  I suspect that five people standing solidly together, yelling, and throwing stuff would stand a better chance of continuing life.

Three Coloradans have been killed by black bears since the 1970s, which is a low percentage considering the number of bear encounters. (I have lost count of my own.) Most black bears are shy, but a few are not, either because they have become used to a human-provided food source—or, in some cases, because they may just be extra-aggressive individuals.

Wikipedia's North American Fatal Bear Attacks database is worth reading. It is not always possible to see what caused the incident or whether it was food-related.

UPDATE (Nov. 27, 2014): Patel's cell phone photos have been released. Was this a "mugger bear"—one that had learned to intimidate people in order to get food?

Forest Divination

Kincaid Park, Anchorage (Photo taken today.)

The Anchorage Parks and Recreation Department is so good that they know what the bears will be doing next year.