Human Bear Interaction Can Be Fatal, For Bears, Not People!

IDAHO FALLS -Think back to one of the first fairy tales you were told as a child, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, who was the one who had all the trouble? Sure, Goldilocks had the daylights scared out of her, but wasn't it the poor bears that had the privacy of their home invaded? Not to mention their furniture vandalized and their food tampered with? Today, in real life Idaho a similar story is being retold, only this time the bears usually end up losing their lives because of their addiction to human related food sources. During the Fourth of July holiday weekend, Idaho Conservation Officers Charlie Anderson and Clark Shackleford were forced to deal with a black bear that for over a week had been making brazen daylight raids on the forest service campground at Teardrop Lake in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest. The bear which had originally been trapped in early June, near the Jenny Lake Campground in Grand Teton National Park, had clearly come to learn that wherever humans could be found, so too could improperly stored food and garbage. According to District Conservation Officer Doug Petersen, "The animal had a regular pattern, almost down to the minute. So the officers put the trap out at 8:00 AM and by 8:30 AM the bear was in the trap." Per IDFG protocol, the bear was shot because an animal that is so habituated to human related foods that it is willing to make repeated daylight appearances around humans cannot responsibly be trapped and released again. While forage conditions in the backcountry appear to be good, thanks to recent rainfall, bear problems are heating up! A young female grizzly bear that was trapped near Alta, Wyoming just before last Thanksgiving was put down last week near Cody, Wyoming by Wyoming Game & Fish because it had started getting into human related food sources nearly from the moment it came out of hibernation. The bear was originally trapped near Driggs, Idaho and moved because it had failed to enter into hibernation and was getting into peoples' bird feeders, barbeque grills and garbage on both sides of the state line. According to Chris Servheen, who is charge of grizzly bear recovery for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, "This speaks volumes for the need for enhanced food storage and outreach in this Idaho area where she started her death. She really died in Idaho... " To underscore Servheen's comments, only two days after IDFG officers were forced to put down the black bear at Teardrop Lake Campground, they were hard at work setting up large trailer mounted culvert traps at three different locations just outside the grizzly bear recovery area. While in all three cases the suspect problem bears were all probably black bears, they all could just have easily been grizzly bears. According to Petersen, "In all three cases, the bears were being drawn in by some type of human-related food source. In one place it was stored feed grain, another garbage, and another by hummingbird feeders." In most of these situations the bears are not the true intruders, instead it is they who are adapting to an ever-expanding human population. Just as the bear's cottage was inviting to Goldilocks, poorly stored garbage and other human-related foods sing out to be tasted. But in this case when it comes to mixing with humans, there is no "just right". Ultimately the bears lose nearly every time.