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Bear activity on the rise in Owens Valley |
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Monday, 11 August 2008 |
 Humans may consider a bear ripping up a campsite or foraging through a trash can as “aggressive” behavior, but bears are just doing what they do, looking for food. Bears can tear open tree trunks looking for something to eat so ripping open a car door is not much different to them. Some small measures can be taken to prevent bears from destroying property and help save the bear’s life. Photo by Mike Gervais By Mike Bodine
Register Staff 8-9-2008
Seeing a bear in the Owens Valley is an exhilarating experience, but should not be totally unexpected – they do live in the nearby mountains. What is unusual, according to law enforcement and one prominent expert in the field, is the number of bears coming down to the arid valley, and this early in the year.
It also seems that this spring and summer the bears have chosen the Owens Valley as their exclusive stop along the Sierra Nevada corridor, with no unusual bear activity reported to the west or north.
“There is an earlier increase in lower lying and residential areas” countywide than in years past, Inyo County Sheriff Public Information Officer Carma Roper said of the recent bear activity.
In June, a bear was spotted in West Bishop near Otey Road, then on the east end of the Bishop Paiute Reservation and again on Keough Street. The same bear was then sightestrolling through J Diamond Trailer Park, where it climbed a tree before fleeing from local law enforcement. More recently, in July, a bear plundered a neighborhood and destroyed pets near Round Valley.
Renowned bear specialist Steve Searles of Mammoth Lakes said he has never had so many calls of bear sightings from the desert areas – Lone Pine, Big Pine, Olancha – as he has this year and, particularly, at this time of year.
“This is a different kind of year … Typically we see this behavior later in the feeding system,” he said, when natural food sources run out or dry up and the bears travel farther away from their usual forage grounds for food in preparation for winter.
Speculation abounds about why the bears are coming down: forest fires, drought, loss of habitat. But no local government agency or representative will give an official response as to the reason.
As reported in Ridgecrest’s The News Review, a spokesman from the Kern County Fire Department said that the nearby Piute Fire could have caused the bear that mauled a woman and killed one of her dogs near the Tehachapi mountains to travel outside of its usual ranges and probably behave more aggressively because of it. The incident has been called very unusual, and garnered national news coverage.
In an incident closer to home, and what might seem aggressive to humans but was, according to Searles, a somewhat natural occurrence in the animal kingdom, 40 Acres homeowners Kent and Diane Frates watched as a hungry bear made off with one of their beloved pets.
On Saturday morning, July 27, a bear wandered, or was enticed by something smelly, onto residential properties in the 40 Acres area, killing two family pet goats. Diane Frates said that at around 1:30 a.m., she was startled out of bed by crunching sounds and the breaking of her gate. She looked out to see a bear on top of her pet goat, Violet (this was after the bear had killed another pet goat next door to Frates).
“I made the error of trying to scare the bear. My mama bear instincts took over,” Frates said, explaining that she and her husband threw rocks and yelled at the bear, but that only seemed to anger the ursine. The bear then took the goat and hopped another fence. The Frates’ called the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department then jumped in their truck to look for the bear. Sadly, they found the animal nearby, “tearing into our goat.” Frates said deputies arrived and located the bear that eventually “vacated the carcass and wandered off,” but sheriff and Department of Fish and Game personnel were unable to re-locate the ursine.
Frates said the bear was back again that Sunday, Monday and again Thursday. She knew it had been back because neighbor’s trash cans had been tipped over and Frates’ early-warning system, beer cans filled with rocks, had alerted her when the bear came back into her yard. She said she is exhausted from sleepless nights worrying about what the bear might do next.
County Supervisor Linda Arcularius, whose district includes 40 Acres, said, “people are nervous and rightfully so.”
The DFG has issued the Frates’ a depredation permit, which allows landowners to destroy the animal themselves or they can hire a trapper to do it. Depredation permits are given to owners whose livestock or other properties have been attacked by wildlife, but have not yet caused an immediate threat to humans or the general population. At this point, the DFG steps back and the matter is left up to the landowner.
Wildlife that become a public safety hazard and threat to humans are destroyed by official agencies, according to DFG representative Steve Martarano from Sacramento.
The DFG Bishop office refused to directly comment on any issue relating to bears.
Martarano, serving as mediator, said that biologists from the Bishop DFG do not believe that the increased bear activity is due to recent local fires in the Sierra. They do know that bears are food-driven and once they get a taste of the easy pickings of human food, it is impossible to get them to abandon their new favorite diet.
Former National Park Service law enforcement officer Jon Peterson said that in Maine, he had witnessed re-located bears travel over 150 miles in 3-4 days to get back to a campground or favorite trash bin. These bears would eventually be destroyed as they became more aggressive around humans in search of easy food.
“A fed bear is a dead bear” is a statement reiterated by both Martarano and Inyo National Forest Public Information Officer Nancy Upham.
“We don’t necessarily have a bear problem, but a human-bear interaction problem,” Upham explained. Upham said education of locals and visitors is key to understanding and preventing negative bear interactions.
According to Upham, the INF has a “high interest” in this matter and is “very involved” with bear habitat, however, INF’s focus is primarily habitat. Nearly all trailheads and campgrounds in the INF are equipped with bear-proof food lockers and trash receptacles. This is all part of the INF’s nationally recognized Be Bear Aware campaign. Bear behavior, she said, is primarily a DFG issue.
Upham also noted a campaign of five years ago, presented by the Coalition for Unified Recreation in the Eastern Sierra or CURES, a local business-motivated public education plan with “great cooperation” between the public, business and commerce and government entities as “very successful” in educating the public about bears.
While bear activity rises in the Owens Valley, it is shrinking in other parts of the Sierra Nevada. Department of Fish and Game biologist Carl Lackey said there has been no more activity than usual in the Reno/Tahoe area and even a decrease from last year. Rachel Mazur, biologist for Sequoia and Kings National Park, said human-bear interaction is actually decreasing on the west side of the Sierra and within the park due to a re-vitalized, diligent bear management program and constant public education.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Bishop and surrounding areas where human-bear interactions are so infrequent that public bear education and safety can be overlooked and under-appreciated.
“Public education is the most difficult,” Searles explained, especially in a vacation community with a constant influx of visitors where trying to teach each new visitor is even more difficult. “Bears are the only consistent part of the equation,” he said.
Searles explained that there can be a balance found between bears and humans, but the balance is out of whack right now and Searles said he’s trying to make sense of it. Searles said he does not tolerate bears destructing livestock or showing aggression toward humans, but he is fascinated by the bear-human interaction. He explained that every culture around the world where the bear is part of the environment, such as in the Pacific Northwest, the bear becomes an integral part of that culture and religion.
According to the INF Bear Management Plan, of the estimated, 30,000 to 35,000 bears in California, about 40 percent live in the Sierra Nevada from Plumas to Kern County – that’s 0.5-1.5 bears per square mile. In California, more than half of natural black bear habitat is in the hands of private ownership.
On a positive note, Searles was adamant about declaring bears, like coyotes and cougars, as “indicator species” in that they too thrive on and seek out clean air and water, lots of food and good people. “They’re the canary in the mine,” Searles explained, meaning that when the bears stop visiting a place, the place has become virtually uninhabitable.
“You don’t see too many bears in Long Beach,” Searles said.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 13 September 2008 )
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