Posted on 12/31/2020 12:54:04 PM PST by SJackson
When I was 23, I spent a summer working as a counselor at an overnight camp for eight-to-12-year-olds near the central mountain town of Genesee, Colorado. After a stern talking-to about what might happen if anyone went to bed with a snack in their sleeping bags—bears, people!—we’d zip the kids into their tents for the night, lock up the cabin containing our kitchen, and try to catch a few hours of sleep.
One morning around 5:30, after a particularly long night of comforting tearful, homesick tweens, I dragged myself into the kitchen for coffee. Two other counselors were already there, surveying the wreckage: a broken window, boxes of food strewn across the linoleum floor, burst bags of hot cocoa mix, and a maze of chocolaty paw prints. We’d assumed our supplies would be safe from intruders, but the flimsy windows were no match for a hungry bear.
That incident was a textbook case of food conditioning, according to wildlife biologist Wes Larson, who researches human-bear conflict. “A bear that breaks into someone’s campsite now understands that they can get this really calorie-dense food,” he explains. “It’s a huge payoff for relatively little effort, compared to spending hours picking berries.” The bear that broke into our camp kitchen was constantly doing a risk analysis—no matter how much she didn’t want to interact with humans, she was too tempted by the reward to stay away.
“That’s when they start doing un-beary things,” Larson says. In other words: they start getting into trouble.
Nearly every bear at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center (GWDC) in West Yellowstone, Montana, has a similar backstory. The center is a nonprofit educational facility that houses grizzly bears unable to survive in the wild for one reason or another. It is also home to three small packs of captive-born wolves, a handful of injured raptors, and five American river otters.
When a wildlife official from anywhere in the American West, Alaska, or Canada has a nuisance grizzly bear and wants to avoid euthanizing it, the GWDC is often near the top of their call list. (Unfortunately, due to the center’s limited capacity, the answer is frequently that it can’t take another bear. In that case, says Randy Gravatt, the GWDC’s container testing coordinator, bears typically have to be euthanized.)
Coram, a male grizzly whose weight fluctuates between 550 and 680 pounds depending on the season, wandered through Kalispell, Montana, checking porches for dog kibble. Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks officials trapped him three times before he ended up at the GWDC. Spirit, a female grizzly, couldn’t stay away from a golf course in Whitefish; she was relocated six times—once as far as 100 miles away, but she kept finding her way back to that easy source of food—before one of her cubs was hit by a car and she was taken to the West Yellowstone facility.
Coram, Spirit, and the six other bears that live at the GWDC aren’t just wasting away in captivity, though. They have an important job to do: they test containers to determine whether they’re bear-resistant.
“It’s not just for the bears’ sake,” Gravatt says. “When bears become unafraid of humans, there’s potential harm to us, too.”
Every spring, Gravatt begins filling coolers, bike panniers, backpacking canisters, and trash dumpsters sent in by big-name manufacturers like Yeti, Cabela’s, Pelican, and Igloo with veggies, dry dog food, fish, honey, and—the bears’ favorites—peanut butter. “They don’t really like mushrooms or onions,” Gravatt says, adding that the bears will eat just about anything else in their quest to pack in around 15,000 calories per day during the summer (more when they’re getting ready to hibernate).
Sam, a 1,050-pound grizzly bear, tests a cooler at the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center (Photo: Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center)
Once the containers are full of goodies, Gravatt gets them in front of the bears, which poke, prod, claw, bite, smash, and sometimes use what he calls “the CPR method,” wherein bears place their front paws atop a container and pump, almost as if they’re trying to revive the unfortunate object. If the container remains intact to a certain standard—gaps, tears, and holes can’t be larger than an inch for trash containers; for food containers, it’s a mere quarter-inch—it gets the bears’ literal seal of approval: a sticker depicting a grizzly’s head and shoulders and the product’s certification number. The GWDC is the only testing facility in the world where products can earn a certificate from the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (IGBC).
The committee was formed in 1983, a decade after the Endangered Species Act made it clear that the grizzly bear, with its capital-e Endangered status, needed coordinated management. About 450 products—ranging from lightweight plastic bear canisters for backpacking to the heavy-duty coolers you might bring on a multiday river trip to industrial-grade metal dumpsters—have earned a place on the IGBC’s list of bear-resistant products, says Scott Jackson, leader of the U.S. Forest Service’s National Carnivore Program and adviser to the IGBC.
The IGBC Executive Committee includes 13 representatives from major federal land agencies, including the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, and the governments of the four U.S. states where grizzlies are found (Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming), plus two Canadian partners. The committee meets twice a year to discuss local issues, educational programs, and other initiatives.
During the 1980s, urban sprawl and increased outdoor recreation meant that humans and bears were interacting more and more. The IGBC faced a growing challenge, Jackson explains, with grizzlies and garbage cans at local residences, campgrounds, and backpacking sites. So the IGBC came up with recommendations for keeping food and garbage away from them.
Later in the decade, the IGBC began issuing instructions on building homemade bear-resistant containers—mostly modified metal ammo cans. They tested these products with mechanisms meant to simulate bears’ teeth and claws, attempting to exert similar force by dropping a weighted penetrometer mechanism—what Gravatt describes as a “pointy metal object”—onto them to mimic bites.
At the same time, the grizzly started to rebound—in the 1970s, according to the National Park Service, there were fewer than 140 grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE); today, there are more than 700. The U.S. Geological Survey reported 73 grizzly bear deaths in the GYE in 2018, and at least 50 of those were known to be human caused, often related to habituation. Eventually, as outdoor recreation gained popularity and the market expanded, manufacturers started getting serious about mass-producing their own bear-resistant containers. But they needed an improved way to test them beyond the Wile E. Coyote–style experiments. What better way than to use actual bears, preferably ones that knew their way around a cooler?
That’s where Gravatt came in. Fifteen years ago, the IGBC asked if he’d help them formalize the program by using the bears that got there in the first place by getting into garbage. At the time, he was working as the GWDC’s facilities manager; he’d been helping fill in with animal-keeping duties because the center was short-staffed.
These days, the bears test a few dozen products every season. Manufacturers pay a fee, which helps cover Gravatt’s time, the bears’ myriad living expenses, and conservation and education efforts at the GWDC. Then they ship their containers to West Yellowstone, where Gravatt fills them with treats and lets the bears get to work. (Not all of the bears participate; 1,000-pound Sam is too big for all but special assignments, and Nakina, an Alaskan grizzly, simply doesn’t have any interest.)
Sam, a 1,050-pound grizzly bear, tests a cooler at the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center Sam, a 1,050-pound grizzly bear, tests a cooler at the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center (Photo: Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center) The goal is to have the container last 60 minutes—by this time, a typical bear in the wild will have given up. Occasionally, Gravatt has to run the test a couple times before a GWDC bear remains interested even that long. The pass rate varies, Gravatt says, and hovered around 50 percent last year. Occasionally, a product fails right away: a bear figures out the mechanism or manages to gouge a big hole.
After every test, Gravatt examines the container and fills out a report. He sends the analysis back to the manufacturers, which can also opt for a videotape of the bears’ rigorous testing process. If the product passes, Gravatt notifies the IGBC, which issues a certification number for manufacturers to display on their products.
The seal matters. Food storage regulations on many public lands in grizzly country require IGBC-approved containers. It’s not just for the bears’ sake, Gravatt says. “When bears become unafraid of humans, there’s potential harm to us, too.”
Rules aside, wildlife biologist Larson says, front- and backcountry users have a responsibility to avoid conflict by storing food appropriately. “For us, an encounter can be life-changing,” he says. “For a bear, it can be a death sentence.”
In this way, the very bears that once broke into campsites and backyards—and, in some cases, came very close to being euthanized—contribute directly to reducing food conditioning in their wild counterparts. Coram and Spirit are at the GWDC for the rest of their natural lives, Gravatt says, but thanks to their testing, other bears may avoid the same fate.
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If you can’t get a bear to stop seeking human food, at least put that proclivity to good use.
If you are in bear country and you don’t know how to secure your food at night, you have no business being in bear country.
The first in his teens as a Boy Scout, he'd brought potato chip into his tent for the night.
The bear managed to swipe under the tent and under Dad's pillow, to grab the chips. (ya, I gave him crap for the camping pillow)
The second was in his 70's when he thought that under the truck was a safe location for the cooler.
The bear came by in the middle of the night and managed to get to the cooler. (which Dad watched from inside the truck camper shell.....)
What an euphemistic way to talk about human bear conflicts caused by an ever increasing population of grizzly bears.
YOGI says this about ability to open coolers(”pic-a-nic baskets”:
“It’s because I’m smarter than the average bear.”
Camping in the mountains at Cloudcroft NM, we had to put out trash in metal cans, run a chain from side handle through lid handle to other side handle and padlock it. Horrible car crash noise at 3am. Next morning discovered that noise had been a bear flinging the entire can against a tree trunk about 10 feet up. Split the can open like an egg !
You won’t be there for long - you don’t have any food!
GRIZZLY MAN,Tim Treadwell was eaten as was his girlfriend...Two bears were killed because of tim...For all his supposed love of grizzly bears,2 of them died,he was eaten in front of his girlfriend and who knows the horror she went through by herself with no protection before she was eaten....
The Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center...aka animal reform school
Decades ago did a lot of camping at Elkmont and Smokemont in the Smokies. The tradition for cooler was to tie a rope around it and hoist it in the air overnight. Usually about twelve feet up kept the contents safe. Then one year we noticed a black bear who would circle under the cooler, then go over to where the rope was tied off and wrap a paw around the rope and try to climb the rope, which resulted in the cooler coming down for scavaging. The next time we camped there (two years later) the bear showed up or one who had learned from the first and this bear didn’t circle around under the cooler. It came into the site, stood on it’s hind paws, sniffed the air, then went directly to the rope tied off on a tree. That cooler didn’t last long, and the bear had a little black and white stripped sidekick. Bears aRE smarter than people think!
Hahahahaha! Came in with a bodyguard to scare the humans off!
Funny, humans might try to take pictures of bears or feed them, but when they see skunks...they run!
Have a nice New Year, MHGinTN!
Where’s the exploitation of animals group? And what are they saying?
There’s always someone opposed to animals being used for petty things....
To me it looked like they were having fun.
There’s a video of a bear in a kitchen and opens the fridge...Looks around,then shuts the fridge and goes upstairs..Everybody was sleeping,luckily he didn’t stay upstairs..Funny part was just before he left the house,he looks in the fridge again..You know,he might have missed something the first time around....
“15,000 calories per day during the summer.” That is a massive amount of food.
I saw a bear walking toward me while hiking in the Sequoias. The memory still gives me fear today.
Tim Treadwell and his wife did not to read a few books about bears before living with them. Then they paid for their lack of information. Brutal deaths.
Thankfully, the captive bears are given puzzles to solve to help hikers stay safe.
Da Bears!
He is what you do when you encounter a bear....
You just slap them around.
https://i.imgur.com/Miit8.gif
Man Fights Bear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84bBzAxLXFY
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