by John Dowd
Part of living in Montana is dealing with the local wildlife. In the case of ground squirrels, conflicts may at best be the total uproot of a garden. In the case of bears, the outcomes can be far worse. According to one biologist who has made it her mission to help both people and the bears in these conflicts, there may be a tool yet to be employed.
Jessica Reyes is the program biologist with Wind River Bear Institute. She works to train campground hosts and recreation staff for the Forest Service and the community on living and recreating safely in bear country. She also assists Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) to respond to human-bear conflicts, investigating with Karelian Bear Dog Wildlife K-9s. Throughout her years of working with bears and people, she has found a calling for doing so with education outreach, using Karelian bear dogs as “Wildlife Ambassadors” bridging the gap between the people and wildlife. As part of obtaining her Masters in Geography, community and environmental planning, Reyes has decided to use her master’s thesis to both obtain that degree and to create a potentially powerful new tool for both the community, and bear managers, in western Montana.
Her thesis will employ the creation of a “conflict map,” showcasing points of conflict between bears and humans. The thesis will be to correlate human-bear conflicts with land cover changes, considering increasing development and loss of croplands and forest lands over the last 10 years. To do this, she is analyzing the FWP human-bear conflict database. The reports there will be organized using bear attractants as categories, including things like chicken coops and garbage.
Her goal for this project will be to see which attractant types see the highest and most serious conflicts between bears and people, and how these have changed over time in location and frequency. According to Reyes, she has heard many times how such a resource could help bear managers target conflict-mitigation strategies more efficiently.
Reyes will also be comparing Missoula and Ravalli counties, and addressing how each one mitigates human-bear conflicts, with certain tools and resources such as bear-resistant trash cans or electric fences. This will be especially interesting, as they have both historically taken different paths in dealing with human-bear conflicts.
According to Reyes, Missoula has adopted ordinances in high-conflict areas that make it unlawful to allow bears to access human-associated foods and is working to achieve a bear-smart community status, while the Bitterroot National Forest is the only forest in Montana that has not yet adopted a food storage order. A food storage order requires any human-associated food to be stored in a bear-resistant manner, to reduce the likelihood of human-bear conflicts while recreating in the national forest.
Part of the hesitation in the Bitterroot is due to the national forest that overlaps the Idaho border. Idaho allows baiting bears, which would in spirit conflict with such a food storage order, chiefly because much of the bait that is used is human food, such as doughnuts.
Reyes’ map will hopefully allow experts to see which areas have actually seen the most conflict with bears. This could not only show how that has changed over time, but also help to identify high-conflict areas to establish “bear buffer zones” as conflict mitigation areas. These would promote safety for both bears and people in the wildland-urban interface in Ravalli County. They would also aid in focusing conflict prevention resources and in supporting “bear smart community” initiatives in both counties. Reyes believes this will also allow professionals to better address these high conflict areas, and use limited resources to achieve the greatest impact.
Reyes spoke about an ongoing effort in the Bitterroot to protect both people, and the bears, from conflict. A group known as the Bitterroot Bear Resource Committee has been working since 2021 to mitigate human-bear conflicts through various strategies, such as education outreach at local community events, schools and homeowner Associations, “fruit-gleaning” and electric fence projects to help residents protect their fruit trees, chickens and bee yards and getting bear-resistant trash cans to residents and parks and in high-conflict areas tracked by Bitterroot Disposal and FWP.
This started with a Lolo joint grant by the FWP and Defenders of Wildlife. That money was then used to purchase 20 bear-proof cans. However, according to Reyes, even though they were giving these cans away for free, no one wanted them. Even today, they still have a number of these cans left. The group has made some good use of them, having distributed them to residents in Florence, where two sub-adult grizzly bears spent some time in the fall of 2022.
When speaking about the disinterest, Reyes considered several factors of why this may be. Citing her ongoing study, Reyes compared Missoula to the Bitterroot again, saying that it has a lot to do with the attitudes between the two kinds of residents that find themselves in either place. It may be that Missoula residents more rarely see bears, and often are more compliant with regulations like food storage orders. For those that live in the more rural Bitterroot, it may be that they have a perspective that views bears as a “part of living in Montana.” Though many residents of the state, no matter where they live or what perspective they have, love seeing the bears, the latter perspective may inevitably be harmful to the welfare of the bears.
To explain this, Reyes said, “they have a food memory bank,” when describing bears. She spoke about her experiences and education with bears, and said they seem to remember shapes and smells the best. They also associate those shapes and smells with places and times of year. This will eventually create a “food map” in the bear’s mind, and this is taught from one generation to the next.
Eventually, these bears that associate humans, and objects such as garbage cans or bird feeders, with food, will come into conflict with humans. According to Reyes, bear conflicts are often broken down into levels. At the lowest level, which she called the “kindergarten level,” bears obtain a human-associated food reward from the edge of the wildland-urban interface, such as where homes lie along a creek with natural foods growing nearby. These are natural travel corridors for bears, so if a home here has bird feeders or garbage cans at the edge of their property, a bear may stumble into it. This might draw a bear closer to homes where these “shapes” may be on the porch.
At this lower level of conflict, a bear may simply be seen on a property, passing through, or obtaining its first human-associated food reward. Reyes said this is still cause for reporting, because it can give experts an idea of where bears are, and especially when these bears appear in areas frequented by humans. These are the kinds of reports more often seen from Missoula residents, likely because they do not expect to see bears in urban areas, according to Reyes.
For those in the Bitterroot, these kinds of “conflicts” are less often even considered a conflict and are under-reported. This is making the creation of Reyes’ map that much more difficult, since she is using those reports to build the map.
At the highest level of conflict, when a bear physically enters a human structure, such as a house, vehicle or garage, they are automatically seen as a threat to human safety, and are so bold at this point that they become almost impossible to re-educate. According to Reyes, at this high level, a bear is often euthanized. She stated that when a bear gets this bold, they have so strongly associated food with people that they will lose their fear of people, increasing the risk for both people and bears. Additionally, these behaviors can be taught to younger generations.
Fortunately, at the lower levels, Reyes said there are ways to create a “negative association” with people. When captured at earlier stages, bears are taken far away from people and are “hard released.” During these releases the bears are scared away from their traps by barking dogs, people yelling and shot at with rubber bullets. This is what Reyes called “hazing,” and it’s meant to create a very negative memory of human contact which will hopefully deter any future conflicts.
Reyes estimates that the bear conflict map will be available to the public by December of 2024. Reyes hopes this map will become “a community planning resource showing high human-bear conflict areas to prioritize conflict mitigation strategies and guide bear-smart community initiatives.” Her dream is to see it eventually become interactive, and allow community members to report human-bear conflicts directly to FWP or the Missoula Bears website and see those conflict points immediately populate onto the live map.