Wildlife officials issue warnings as bears awaken
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RONAN — Warming temperatures, blue skies, budding flowers and rapidly greening grass are all surefire signs that spring and outdoor activities are on the way.
As farmers and gardeners start planting vegetables and outdoorsmen take to the woods, several wildlife management bureaus are asking residents to keep an eye out for another thawing creature: bears.
According to a press release from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, adult males are the first to emerge from their dens.
“They are physically depleted and food is a priority,” the press release read. “They focus on finding and eating carrion, like winter-killed elk and deer, for a quick boost of energy. Grizzlies are often tempted to go where black bear, raccoons and domestic dogs are getting into garbage. If these species are already causing problems nearby, consider it an early warning that food attractants are available and need to be removed.”
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks wildlife manager Jim Williams said bears will begin waking up and moving around in the next few weeks, but said it will be some time before their digestive tracts return to normal.
“Actually, bears have a unique physiology,” he said. “They don’t eat or defecate all winter. Imagine if you didn’t urinate for a week — some problems would arise. Bears can tolerate it ... they metabolize their own waste. It’s pretty amazing.
“So, they’re going to be awake and moving around, but it will take a while for the digestive tracts to turn back on.”
Once awake, bears emerge from their dens and find a flattened area near the entrance of their den called a “porch.”
“(Once on the porch), they just kind of look around,” Williams said. “They can be there for two minutes or two weeks.”
The time spent on the porch varies significantly depending on many factors, including cubs, Williams explained.
Once finished with the porch, the bears start walking downhill and don’t stop until they find food.
“They’re going to drop to an elevation that’s low enough where there will be exposed new growth,” Williams said. “Bears are about 90 percent vegetarian, so they’re going to look for those areas. Most of their nutrition comes from huckleberries in summer, but without those berries around, they’ll be feeding on new growth and winter-killed carrion.”
Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes education officer Germaine White said bear activity has already been reported this year.
“The persistent problem we have is that bears are readily drawn by scent, so they have a very keen sense of smell,” White said. “In the spring, when bears emerge from six months of hibernation, they’re very active and search for food and protein sources aggressively.”
The search for food is often what leads bears into conflict with humans.
According to White, tribal biologists and game wardens have responded to more than 1,000 bear conflicts with domestic chickens in unprotected chicken coops since 2010.
CSKT wildlife biologist Stacy Courville said the grizzly bear population along the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem is increasing at a rate of 3 percent per year. In recent years, Courville said he’d seen an increasing number of human-bear conflicts, indicating an expanding and growing population.
But, it might also have to do with chickens.
“There’s been a recent resurgence in people growing chicken for meat or eggs,” White explained. “We’ve gotten a ton of calls (regarding bears breaking into chicken coops). The number of chicken houses in rural areas has increased, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you secure your chicken house with an electric fence.”
Courville said bears are difficult to census, so the Flathead Reservation’s exact bear population is unknown.
“We have robust populations of both black and grizzly bears on the reservation as a whole,” he said. “Grizzly bears are pretty much confined to the Mission and Jocko Valleys, but black bears are everywhere. I couldn’t even guess as to the numbers.”
There are certain numbers, however, that are difficult to forget.
Since May 2010, biologists have captured 21 grizzly bears in the area. At least eight of these were killed or shipped to zoos. Two more were shot and killed by landowners defending chickens, and “I couldn’t even tell you off the top of my head how many black bears we have to destroy every year,” Courville said.
White and Courville said the majority of human-bear conflicts involve a bear searching for easily accessible, high-calorie food. For a bear, small livestock like chickens, pigs and goats and garbage are the marrow of life.
“There’s any easy fix to protect chickens, small livestock, bears and people,” White said. “That’s the bottom line: It’s bad people behavior that’s resulting in dead bears. We’re very concerned about that. Especially grizzly bears ... as wildlife biologists say, ‘a fed bear is a dead bear.’ If they begin eating unnatural food that is easy for them to capture (like garbage and chickens in cages,) then we have a repeat offender.
“Generally, these incidents end up with a dead bear.”
White added that relocating bears and removing bears does not work. The only true way to avoid these conflicts and save chickens, bears and humans is to secure attractants. These attractants include people food, trash, fruit trees, livestock and poultry, beehives, pet food, game meat, gardens, compost piles and bird feeders.
“It’s frustrating, because it’s a simple fix,” Courville said. “We’ve done all kinds of news releases and we’re trying to get information out there. We’ve been harping on it pretty hard for the last few years, but every year I go to a new place that hasn’t heard or didn’t have a problem in the past or the neighbors had problems but they thought they’d be OK, and it amazes me.
“We find chickens and sheep and goats and pigs, and they’re right in the middle of prime bear habitat and (homeowners) are surprised when the bears get in there and eat their livestock.
“The easiest thing to avoid the whole situation is just to put up an electric fence around your stuff and secure your attractants, whether it’s garbage or fruit trees; it doesn’t take much to secure them and then you don’t have any problems.”
If homeowners do not take these steps and bears acquire a taste for chicken, biologists may have no choice but to euthanize or remove problem bears.
White said she’d seen this done, and “it isn’t something anyone should ever have to see.”
