Very sad - Another fatal bear attack

[Foxyotter]

"This is the first fatal bear attack in the province since 1983." (Quote is taken from CBC article above)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_bear_attacks_in_North_America

Bears are scary and rather unpredictable. Many of us have literally spent years of our lives sleeping in tents and in the wilderness. Bears are just one of the unlikely but possible risk in the back country. We use awareness, prevention and preparation to prevent dying from exposure, drowning, and severe bleeds etc. Life is not without risk and I will face these odds any day. heck when I am about 105 I hope I either flip my canoe and drowned in a cold water swim or get killed quickly by a bear. My family will talk about the bad arse 105 year old out paddling who fought a bear and lost for many generations. I am sure that would be way better then all the folks I have watched die of cancer, ALS etc. This is a horrible and tragic story and will hopefully keep us all aware and prepared so it remains unlikely.


Glenn there has been lots of selection against aggressive bears and continues to be selection. Horrible and scary encounters are very rare but very memorable. I realize there are regulation around shooting or harassing bears as I believe there should be. Maybe I am wrong but I have heard a lot of stories of people killing aggressive bears when they felt threatened but I have never heard anyone have trouble with the law because they defended their life. Bears don't make the top twenty animals to kill people. Looking at that Wikipedia page I would probably have to smear honey blueberries and butter all over my 105 year old body and have some pretty crappy luck to get killed by a Bear to go down in infamy. Too bad past odds don't affect future odds for all you folks who have had aggressive bear encounters.

Stay aware practice prevention and be prepared there is no reason to not sleep soundly.

 

[Foxyotter]

Skinney Moose

As unlikely it is that I will ever encounter such a scenario like your experience it does help keep me aware, practicing prevention and being prepared. So glad she was in the backpack.

 

[memaquay]

At the moment, our town has bears roaming the streets all night long. It's probably similar in Red Lake too, most Northern Ontario small towns have this happen every fall. There is even a facebook page for people to report bear sitings as a heads up. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1778942479027871 It is odd, because it has been a banner year for blueberries, and the MNR bear scientists tell us that bears only come into town when food supplies diminish in the wild.

We used to have a hotline to report bear encounters, but the scientist types thought that we must have been making up the nightly forays, and since it didn't fit into their narrative, they cancelled the program. So now local citizens, quite a few who are truck drivers, are the active participants in an ongoing bear study, the purpose being to figure out how to dissuade the bears from terrorizing our streets every night with their dang garbage can protests.

MNR told us to stay in the house when the bears came around, and if they were trying to get in, to phone the police, but that would probably never happen, because they would be so fat and happy off the blueberries.

Instead of following the MNR pundits, I usually follow the advice of one of my favourite bear scientists, Mr. L####, who drives gravel trucks for the highway reconstruction. I was hesitant at first, because his advice sounded so sane and common sensical, but have since adopted it. The technical language might be too difficult for some of you non-scientists to understand, but in a nutshell, this is what he told me:

"If it gets too close, shoot the F###er".

 

[Iskweo]

Dont shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.

 

[ppine]

I am always the last person to get the joke when the subject is people getting killed by bears. To me it has always been a matter of life and death having worked around bears so much.
I apologize to Red for making a disparaging comment.

The tone in the United States right now is decidedly anti-science. As our society becomes less well educated, it has become popular to ignore science, and discount scientists. It is the Age of Anti-Intellectualism. I am getting really tired of it and somewhat testy about it.

Disturbances in forests like logging actually open the canopy and increase forage and food production for wildlife.

 

[ppine]

Memaquay,
There is a simple solution to bears in residential neighborhoods. Take away their food supply. It starts with steel trash cans that cannot be easily opened. Do not leave out pet food or bird feeders. Food crops need to be fenced or protected with hot wire.

In the fall bears are everywhere. They are serious pests at Lake Tahoe a half hour from my house. The pesky bears are air lifted to the mountain range behind my house.
Some large bears have learned the garbage schedules and do not hibernate during the winter. Many of them are well over 500 pounds. Neighborhoods with mandatory bear proof cans don;t have this problem. Those without controls do. People at the lake have bears spending the winter under their decks, and in dens in the back yard.

 

[PaddlingPitt]

More bear encounters. This one in Coquitlam, British Columbia.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/black-bear-coquitlam-runner-1.5705377

 

[Cheeseandbeans]

Had this little fella walk up the driveway this afternoon while I was working on a car. Thank goodness again for the dog. I would have had no idea.

 

[ppine]

I always have dogs around.

 

[Black_Fly]

I find bears avoid dogs as a rule. Probably a more effective than bear spray since bear spray does not avoid the conflict, just tries to limit it after it's escalated. I've read that dogs cause bear attacks, but after 50 years of hiking, canoeing and horse packing with dogs in wilderness, I don't buy that at all. I also don't agree with the avoidance of controversy, but degrading another member is not acceptable. And I would note that climate change is a fundamental element of outdoors in the 21st century, not controversial among the vast majority of scientists involved in hands on research. If that topic cannot be discussed rationally among outdoors people, then we are no better than a FB group.

 

[memaquay]

One of the myriad bears in town tried to claw his way through a restaurant wall about a week. Thing is, the wall didn't end in the kitchen, but in a hotel room. He almost made it. People in town were outraged and continued to harp on Facebook about the ursine thugs roaming our streets, day and night. The restaurant thug started hanging out around our little subdivision, which is just outside of the main town, but close to the greasy spoon. So the other morning, I heard three shotgun blasts, and upon looking out the window, saw three police with their short barrelled 870's walking down our avenue. The marauding bear was dead in my neighbour's back yard.

I was ambivalent about it, but thought the whiners in town would be happy.

Suddenly several facebook threads sprung up, memorializing Smokey, the destroyer of restaurants, and expressing outrage at the OPP for shooting it. These were the same people expressing outrage that nothing was being down about the bear problem.

I guess we live in a world where the currency of expression is righteous indignation. I've usually found that the more righteously indignant a person is, the bigger the arsehole they are. That's not based on any studies or statistics, just a gut feeling.

Also, I blame the interwebs, for Smokey's untimely demise, and for the arseholes.

 

[scoutergriz]

sadly Mem, too many people don't get that it's not the bear that's the problem it's themselves. Every single case I can remember starts with people leaving out garbage, birdseed, and even food out in bear country then expect hungry bears to stay away from an easy meal or to not return looking for more.

 

[yellowcanoe]

I guess we live in a world where the currency of expression is righteous indignation. I've usually found that the more righteously indignant a person is, the bigger the arsehole they are. That's not based on any studies or statistics, just a gut feeling.

Just reading comments on FB can verify that thought! So sad about the bear Mem. Is there a natural food shortage?

We were amused by moose showing up locally but now I fear for him as he is wandering too near the city of Portland. Someone will do an arsehole thing that makes capturing it ( and I am afraid it will be killed) mandatory.

 

[Canotrouge]

A few years back we had over 60 bears killed in Whitehorse and the neighborhood subdivisions... 60! All of them were found scavenging in peoples compost, garbage, chicken coop, dog food(lots of mushers up here that keep freezer full of meet and shed full of dog food), always the same people that have stuff not properly stored! 60 bears is a lot of bears!! Now if you have a chicken coop or any live stock you are strongly invited to have electric fencing..... people are just irresponsible and selfish that’s all!!

 

[memaquay]

Strangely enough, as i was driving over the bridge that connects our point to the town, I was surprised to see a bull moose swimming in front of the bridge. I hopped out of the truck and took a pic with my phone just as he was getting out of the water, two houses down from mine. My neighbours were in the yard when the moose walked right by them. Yesterday, as I was making cooking partridge for supper, one flew into my new dining room window and almost died. Add the bears to it, and I guess we are living in the boondocks. I wouldn't have it any other way.

 

[LanceR]

Dang, Mem. You wouldn't have had far to carry the meat home. I always been a meat hunter and not a trophy hunter and moose are on my short list of things I'd still like to hunt but I doubt it will ever happen especially as there are just two of us now. A whole moose sounds less like a year's worth of game meat and more like a sentence.



And I was and am endlessly frustrated by folks who are part of the wildlife-human conflicts that are knowingly part of the problem and who won't take the responsibility to change what they can. Having been deeply and actively involved throughout New York State in fish and wildlife management for years some of the stories fell (and still fall) into the "You can't make this stuff up" category.



In the last week or so a pair of out of state hunters in Alaska killed a moose, left it overnight and went back in the AM to dress and cut up the carcass. One started carrying out loads of meat while the other hunter who was unarmed stayed to cut more meat. Somewhat predictably a bear killed him.

https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/wild...officials-say/

There are so many bad decisions, that they had to have known the potential consequences of, that led up to that mans death that my mind is blown by how it could have happened. I suspect these guys will be up for a Darwin Award.



And about five years ago I traveled to a Hudson Valley, New York county to participate in an urban/suburban deer management conference with attendees from all over the state. A good friend who is a Cornell University biologist specializing (among other things) in urban/suburban deer management program development and related research was a key presenter at the conference. He arrived a day or two early and did some pre-conference checking around on deer damage reports in the host town and county. He found out that the very county hosting the event was in the process of replacing landscaping flowers in the road median strip almost within sight of the convention site for the third or fourth time that spring due to deer depredation. That's right...... The folks hosting the deer management conference were spending taxpayer money for the third or fourth time in a few months to be part of the very problem for which they were contemplating taxpayer funded lethal removal of deer.

His pictures of the roadside landscaping efforts were is first example in his presentation of people and municipalities knowingly perpetuating the problem.

Like I said, you can't make some of this stuff up. There are times conflict is unavoidable but much of it is very, very predicable. And often avoidable.

Best regards to all,


Lance

 

[memaquay]

Our bear problem this year is the worst in years, and the result of many factors. However, one of the factors is not a shortage of feed in the bush. It was a bumper berry crop this year, the biggest in years. In my opinion, several things have come together to make the situation very difficult. The first mitigating factor is that people are careless with their garbage, putting it out the night before pickup and providing ample opportunity for foraging. The second problem is that the Ministry of Natural Resources washed its hands of bear control several years ago. The third problem is that we now have multi-generations of bears who have learned that there easy pickings in town in the fall. The forth problem is that they have electrified the dump, so bears that would have been content to stop for their fall foraging in the dump followed their snouts into town.

Unfortunately, I think the only way to solve the problem now is become very aggressive with the bears in town, and shoot several of them and generally make life very unpleasant for the remaining ones. At the same time, the town needs to enact some kind of tough garbage laws to prevent future generations from developing a habit. When I lived up north on an Anishnabeg reserve, there was never a bear problem despite there being lots of attractants in town. The reason was because bears had learned that the bipeds in town would shoot them and eat them immediately.

 

[Odyssey]

Wildlife often loses whenever our mutual flexible boundaries get mixed up. Goodness knows we've proven we're incapable of living amongst them.