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Grizzlies leave Yellowstone for leftovers when sportsmen clean out wild game.
Associated Press.
BOZEMAN (AP) – State and federal biologists say grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park seem to know when elk hunting season begins in Montana and Wyoming: They leave the park and head for the piles of intestines and discarded animal meat hunters leave behind.
“Bears can understand that,” said Kevin Frey, bear management specialist for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “The same way they know the salmon are going to run up the creek at a certain time.”
The Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, a group of state and federal bear specialists, issued a draft study in September.
The team tracked radio-collared bears that live in Yellowstone and found that, when hunting seasons open in mid-September, bears, particularly males, leave the park.
The study appears to back up what bear managers as well as some experienced hunters and outfitters have been saying for a long time: When elk start bugling and people start setting up camps, bears know it means food on the ground.
The study tracked the movements of eight grizzlies that ranged along the park’s northern boundary and 11 that lived near the southern boundary. Of those animals, 15 started spending more time outside the park when hunting season started in September. Biologists analyzed bear movements between 1983 and 2000.
It’s a trend that could spell trouble both for bears and for people because the bears are moving out when more people are moving in.
Frey said in recent years he’s heard numerous cases of “people and bears arguing over an elk.”
On Tuesday, Great Falls hunter Timothy Hilston, 50, was mauled to death, likely by a grizzly, while he was cleaning out an elk on the Blackfoot-Clearwater Wildlife Management Area, northeast of Missoula. The bear buried the elk carcass.
Frey said last week that hunters in the Rock Creek area in the Gallatin Range returned to a kill site to retrieve an elk, only to find that a grizzly had claimed the animal.
The report estimates that hunters leave 370 tons of intestines and discarded meat in the field every year in areas close to the park.
For a grizzly bear desperate to put on fat before a long winter’s sleep, that’s an opportunity so powerful that it is changing how bears forage, where they travel and how they act around people.
“During recent years, anecdotal descriptions from outfitters, guides and hunters from both the northern and southern areas indicate encounters between humans and bears are a common occurrence during the hunting season,” the report says. “Two decades ago, many of these same outfitters and guides considered observations of grizzly bears a rare event.”
Chuck Schwartz, head of the IGBST, said Tuesday that he’s heard some stories of strange bear behavior.
Two hunters in Wyoming were dragging a deer down a trail when they felt resistance, he said. When they turned around, there was a grizzly pulling on the other end of the deer. That bear wound up dead.
Grizzlies have tried to steal carcasses loaded on horses, and they’ve followed pack animals loaded with meat all the way to the trailhead, he said.
Frey advised people hunting in grizzly country to move gut piles away from carcasses, remove their meat quickly and, if possible, quarter and hang carcasses immediately.
Sometimes, grizzlies will give up a carcass when people approach, but sometimes they defend that carcass fiercely.
“I wouldn’t push it,” Frey advised. “If you keep going closer and the bear isn’t giving up, I’d say it’s not worth the argument.”
Associated Press.
BOZEMAN (AP) – State and federal biologists say grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park seem to know when elk hunting season begins in Montana and Wyoming: They leave the park and head for the piles of intestines and discarded animal meat hunters leave behind.
“Bears can understand that,” said Kevin Frey, bear management specialist for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “The same way they know the salmon are going to run up the creek at a certain time.”
The Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, a group of state and federal bear specialists, issued a draft study in September.
The team tracked radio-collared bears that live in Yellowstone and found that, when hunting seasons open in mid-September, bears, particularly males, leave the park.
The study appears to back up what bear managers as well as some experienced hunters and outfitters have been saying for a long time: When elk start bugling and people start setting up camps, bears know it means food on the ground.
The study tracked the movements of eight grizzlies that ranged along the park’s northern boundary and 11 that lived near the southern boundary. Of those animals, 15 started spending more time outside the park when hunting season started in September. Biologists analyzed bear movements between 1983 and 2000.
It’s a trend that could spell trouble both for bears and for people because the bears are moving out when more people are moving in.
Frey said in recent years he’s heard numerous cases of “people and bears arguing over an elk.”
On Tuesday, Great Falls hunter Timothy Hilston, 50, was mauled to death, likely by a grizzly, while he was cleaning out an elk on the Blackfoot-Clearwater Wildlife Management Area, northeast of Missoula. The bear buried the elk carcass.
Frey said last week that hunters in the Rock Creek area in the Gallatin Range returned to a kill site to retrieve an elk, only to find that a grizzly had claimed the animal.
The report estimates that hunters leave 370 tons of intestines and discarded meat in the field every year in areas close to the park.
For a grizzly bear desperate to put on fat before a long winter’s sleep, that’s an opportunity so powerful that it is changing how bears forage, where they travel and how they act around people.
“During recent years, anecdotal descriptions from outfitters, guides and hunters from both the northern and southern areas indicate encounters between humans and bears are a common occurrence during the hunting season,” the report says. “Two decades ago, many of these same outfitters and guides considered observations of grizzly bears a rare event.”
Chuck Schwartz, head of the IGBST, said Tuesday that he’s heard some stories of strange bear behavior.
Two hunters in Wyoming were dragging a deer down a trail when they felt resistance, he said. When they turned around, there was a grizzly pulling on the other end of the deer. That bear wound up dead.
Grizzlies have tried to steal carcasses loaded on horses, and they’ve followed pack animals loaded with meat all the way to the trailhead, he said.
Frey advised people hunting in grizzly country to move gut piles away from carcasses, remove their meat quickly and, if possible, quarter and hang carcasses immediately.
Sometimes, grizzlies will give up a carcass when people approach, but sometimes they defend that carcass fiercely.
“I wouldn’t push it,” Frey advised. “If you keep going closer and the bear isn’t giving up, I’d say it’s not worth the argument.”
