Along Montana's Rocky Mountain Front
March Blog
This month: news items; and the skill
and intuition involved in grizzly
bear trapping for research.
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March
News items:
From the 3/28/08 New York Times: Bear Attack? Not to Worry When I went on a dogsled and ski expedition in the Arctic, we carried a rifle and a flare gun for protection against polar bears, and we still worried about being attacked by the bear we’d heard was the most fearsome on the planet. But we were mistaken both in our strategy and our concerns, according to Thomas S. Smith, a biologist who has analyzed close encounters between humans and bears in Alaska. Good, non-sensational article from the Times about bear spray being much more effective then trying to shot a charging bear. Article link at the Journal of Wildlife Management: Efficacy of Bear Deterrent Spray in Alaska and the study page at BYU: BYU study shows bear pepper spray a viable alternative to guns for deterring bears From the 3/26/08 Choteau Acantha: Three new conservation easements signed on Front Third-generation rancher Brodie Gollehon thought long and hard about selling a conservation easement to The Nature Conservancy, but with the money he got, he purchased additional rangeland adjacent to his working family ranch west of Choteau along the Rocky Mountain Front. Conservation easements are an important tool for preserving land and habitat. With a large amount of the grizzly bear recovery zone on private land on the Front, that land is very important. From the 3/21/08 Missoulian: Condon / Grizzly route to get homes Missoula County settled a lawsuit with a local developer this week, allowing a previously denied subdivision in the Swan Valley to move forward despite its intrusion into a grizzly bear corridor. Now Swan Valley resident Karin Stolp can build Homestead Estates, albeit with some changes. From the 3/22/08 Washington Post: Endangered Listings Drop Under Bush With little-noticed procedural and policy moves over several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act. No surprise here; well, maybe surprise that some may find it suprising. From the 3/18/08 New York Times : In a Warmer Yellowstone Park, a Shifting Environmental Balance ...while walking across the Lamar (valley) last fall, Robert L. Crabtree, chief scientist with the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center in Bozeman, Mont., pointed out a cascade of ecological changes under way. The number of grizzly bears and gophers in the valley has increased, Dr. Crabtree said, an increase supported by the spread of an invasive plant from the Mediterranean that a warming climate benefits. Very interesting development in ecosystem change. What else is in flux from our influence on the natural world? From the 3/14/08 Helena-IR: FWP commission passes resolution on status review of grizzly bears
The Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission approved a resolution Thursday to require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service complete an analysis and status review for grizzly bears in the lower 48 states by the end of 2008....But the intent of the resolution, according to Ron Aasheim, FWP community education coordinator, is to try to prompt the federal government to finish its study of grizzly populations outside of the greater Yellowstone area, and to continue federal funding of Montana’s oversight of the bears. This was the final vote on the resolution discussed last December. I'm not sure it will have much affect on USFWS, but it may make the FWP Commission feel good that they are trying to do something. From the 3/12/08 New York Times: McCain Misfires at Grizzlies Op-ed piece
...this was not really a study of bear DNA but a study that used bear DNA to determine whether the grizzly bear was still a threatened species or had rebounded. Mr. McCain and his staff either failed to realize that or chose to distort the facts for political effect. Either choice is not encouraging....That is hardly frivolous. It is a prerequisite for sensible administration of the Endangered Species Act. The New York Times had to jump in on the issue, too, I suppose, after their front pages pieces last month on possible corruption and questionable relationships with lobbyists of McCain's. From the 3/10/08 Washington Post: McCain Sees Pork Where Scientists See Success - Candidate Criticizes Ambitious Bear Study
If you've heard Sen. John McCain's stump speech, you've surely heard him talk about grizzly bears. The federal government, he declares with horror and astonishment, has spent $3 million to study grizzly bear DNA. "I don't know if it was a paternity issue or criminal," he jokes, "but it was a waste of money." A rather fluffy front page piece in the Washington Post about the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project. But the staff writer for the Post points out that McCain didn't "try to block the grizzly funding by offering an amendment to remove it from the 2003 appropriations bill. And ultimately he voted for the bill." From the 3/5/08 Great Falls Tribune: Energy company cedes its oil, gas leases along Front
A fourth energy company has agreed to give its oil and gas development interests in a sensitive area of the Rocky Mountain Front to a conservation organization. Kohlman Co. out of Billings took advantage of a 2006 federal bill aimed at protecting the Front from oil and gas development by agreeing to relinquish 22 leases on 33,411 acres south of U.S. Highway 2 in the Badger-Two Medicine area to Trout Unlimited. These lease buyouts are hugely important for the Badger-Two Medicine. The Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front has been working on this for 20 years.
The article continues: Sentz was guiding top-level U.S. Forest Service officials to Goat Mountain, where Chevron wanted to drill at the time. One of the officials commented, “‘Good Lord, this should have never been leased in the first place,’” Sentz said. Sentz said he kept quiet, even though he and others had told federal land managers that same thing for years. “I think it’s a matter of people actually going into that country and realizing what a great resource it is,” he said.. There's a new issue in the news, and it's about firearms in national parks. There is a good overview of the issue and good common sense editorial the 3/3/08 Daily Inter Lake
The Department of Interior intends to reconsider gun restrictions in national parks that have been in effect for 25 years, and in some parks such as Yellowstone, for more than 100 years. Where did this come from? There has been no public clamor for a change in the policy. Maybe folks have grumbled about the requirement to keep guns stored and unloaded inside park boundaries, but it certainly has not been a burning issue at Glacier National Park...There have been no crime waves in the park and visitors have bear spray as an effective means of defense against grizzly bears. I think this push for easily accessible firearms in the National Park system is a reaction to bear/human conflicts last year, and specifically to a few vocal people (like Victor Workman, MT FWP Commissioner) who felt like firearms offer more protection to park visitors than bear pepper spray. In our national parks, people don't need to be able to quick draw and fire away like some western "B" movie. Keep guns in the parks NOT easily accessible. That makes the most sense for people and wildlife. Trapping Grizzly bears are often trapped for research; right now, there is an ongoing population trend study (to gather data on what exactly is happening with a bear population) on the Front, and in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem as a whole. I think trapping is a necessary evil. Some argue that research trapping makes grizzlies used to humans, makes them less afraid of people and their scents. The Falls Creek Grizzly was first trapped as part of a research program, the first of its kind along the Front to start the process of gathering data on grizzly bears, as there was anecdotal evidence that the populations was growing and expanding its range. Some landowners feel like the first trapping and the exposure to humans was what made the Falls Creek bear smarter than usual around people, and contributed to his wariness and his abilities to take calves and not be caught. He was able to scent the slightest human presence around snare sets, and he learned to dig out snare sets without setting them off and being caught, but there's no way to tell absolutely how he learned and why. But this is a modern, data-driven world: if we don't have evidence of a population shift (down or up), what kind of decisions can be made? Would we rather guess a population is OK? Or, would we rather have a better - but not perfect - idea? We have an obligation and a responsibility - ethically and legally - for the bear's survival, and for those reasons we must make educated decisions. Bears have learned to live around us; we need to be able to help them live, using the tools of the modern world. True, some bears die in traps, from the tranquilizers, from transport, but those deaths are far fewer than poachings and illegal killings and road deaths, and research data tells us something about the rates of road deaths and illegal killings. Grizzlies are also trapped for conflict control, which means that during a case of livestock depredation by a bear - the evidence being tracks, scat, or the body of the sheep or calf shows the typical kill methods of a bear - the bear needs to be trapped and relocated. Or, if the bear has too many strikes against him or her - typically two for a female, one for a male - the bear goes to a zoo or research facility, or is euthanized. Those are difficult choices, and among all the bear biologists I have talked with, no one likes for the situation to come down to that last one. Among the different traps used, culvert traps are popular, and they are just what they sound like: big pieces of metal culvert pipe turned into a trap, with the back end closed off and a front door that will drop via a trigger. You can see these hauled around Montana behind FWP trucks, sometime with a bear in them, headed toward the relocation area. The trick with a culvert trap is to get a bear to enter the trap, something a wary bear will not do, even to get at a nice smelly combination of treats like half-rotten meat and donuts that baits the trigger. Foot snares are used very often: they're small, versatile and they are almost invisible to a bear. Snares are easy to place, but not easy to place well. A good snare set requires a combination of woodcraft, bear psychology and intuition, something like being able to think like a bear. Mike Madel is the Grizzly Bear Management Specialist for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks along the Front, and I rode around with him for a day one spring while he set snares to radio collar grizzlies for the population trend study. The bait, in this case, were winter killed cows gathered from local ranches. That's one of his spring jobs, anyway: relocating carcasses into the foothills and drainages of the Front so emerging bears can find easy protein and stay away from the ranches for a while longer each spring. He plots out the data he has gathered on natural die off areas, and randomly selects carcass sites each spring so that bears don't get habituated to certain areas. That April day, we bounced back along two tracks roads into the Blackleaf WIldlife Management Area, closed to everyone else early in the spring. It was windy and threatening to hit 70, way too hot too early; then it was blizzarding at six the next morning (but that's another part of the story.) We checked a number of carcass sites, he looked in on a forest service employee who was testing electric fences for backpackers, checked other sites for tracks, figured out where to place other carcasses with his assistant, phone calls (on few hills where there is cell coverage), radio calls and a lunch break; basically, he put in a 12 hour day, starting at six, but typical for the spring season. The snare set I describe below was placed on a small plateau, dry and windswept and peppered with limber pines but traveled by bears on their way down from the mountains in the spring. To the west were the reefs of the Front, just a mile or so away; to the east lay the prairie, divided into sections of dryland farms and scattered with buttes as far as we could see in the haze. What follows is part of that day: a walk through of setting a snare. This snare is set at the entrance to a small wood coral built from deadfall and branches. Inside is the coral is the carcass of a dead cow, mostly eaten but very ripe in the warm day. The bears have already cleaned out hundreds of pounds of meat and guts. The bears will return to crawl back inside the ribcage and rip out the meat that's left. That won't be a pretty sight, but I'd still like to see it. Mike has checked the tracks around the carcass and the tracks that lead back to and under the barbed wire of a fence. He figures there's a good change the grizzly will be back, as opposed to a black bear, which he doesn't want. if he snares a black bear, he'll have to tranquilize it anyway to get it out of the snare and release it. Mike eyeballs the narrow openings in the wood corral. I want to stay quiet and watch what he does, but I ask him what he is looking at. "Bears are very visually oriented and they can tell when something has changed," Mike says. "I keep the same openings so the bear can get in, but make it narrower to have a better chance of the bear stepping in the snare." He grabs some dead limbs nearby. "Let's build this up a little," he says. I follow his example and drag some wood in and lean it against the side of brush wall, and then we pull in a small dead tree and fit it into the long wall next to the snare. The idea is to channel the bear into the openings it already knows, Mike says. "We want to make it feel comfortable when it comes back, so when it detects changes, it won't shy away." He gets a handful of wire snares from the wood box in the back of the truck, and carries them and tools over to the corral. He kneels down to work, and right away I make a mistake: I sit down nearby in the shade on a patch of kinnikinnick to watch and take notes. "You shouldn't sit down, since you'll leave scent on the ground." "Oh shit," I say. "Sorry." I get up. "I always use a tarp to kneel on." Now I know why he has been using a piece of black tarp under his knees and legs. I think he figured I could see that, but I didn't. His real work has begun, and I hope I haven't already screwed up the snare site. I walk back to the truck and watch and take notes, but he says I can stay closer if I don't sit down. Mike selects a steel cable for the snare loop, according to the size of the bear he thinks will come back, and a few more cables to anchor the snare loop to a tree. The cables are aircraft quality, one quarter inch in diameter with a swaged loop on both ends. He runs a block of wax along the length of the cables to make the wire slide easier. He shows me how he slides one end of a cable through the end loop to make the loop snare. "I can tell from the tracks that this bear has smaller feet, so I want the loop smaller," he says. "To make it throw short." He wraps another cable around a stout tree at the edge of the corral, (the coral's placement next to a substantial tree is obvious now) then daisy chains another cable to the corral opening where he will set the snare loop. The attachment to the tree will anchor the snare - and the bear - when the bear tries to leave. The snare itself is called an Aldrich snare, patented in 1960 by Jack Aldrich. It's the spring assembly that, when tripped, throws an arm that takes up the slack in the loop cable, drawing it tight around the bear's wrist. It's simple, just a spring arm that kicks up out of a trigger and tightens the wire noose, but they work well. (If you're really interested, here the. patent application; illustrations below taken from patent.) I'm seeing that setting snares is part biology, part grizzly psychology, part woodcraft. Mike concentrates so much on setting this snare I think he could be involved in some sort of voodoo ceremony performed with gloves, steel cables, various twigs, his Leatherman tool, and a hatchet. The biology of a snare set concerns the habits bears have: when they approach a carcass to feed again, or return to a kill they have made, they walk in their old foot prints. Bears are careful of their feet, and if they see their - or another bear's footprints - they will follow them again to keep from stepping on pebbles, twigs and anything that might hurt or cut their feet. The shrink part is to - hopefully - make bears feel comfortable even though they see something has changed, and defuse their wariness if they smell humans. The Falls Creek bear was famous for being able to detect humans and their scents. The woodcraft is making the snare set out of whatever wood is around with tools at hand and what is carried in the truck. As for the voodoo: I think it's learning enough about bears over the past 22 years to be able to think like they do. That's why Mike stands back and just stares at a snare site for a minute or two. I think he is thinking like a bear, but I don't ask - it's got to be something that can't be put in words. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's old saying must hold true here: If a lion could talk, we couldn't understand what it is saying. If Mike could put into words how he knows bears, I couldn't understand what he would be saying. Mike decides which of the three coral openings to work with, and then hammers the vertical tines of the Aldrich snare into the ground. The tines anchor the snare. He then cocks the spring arm, and clips on the safety so it doesn't trip while he works. The trigger is now at ground level, and he's ready for the next step. (figure 1; snare is not cocked). He takes a small spade and cuts the earth under the trigger bar of the snare like he's cutting a cake, carefully and precisely. He makes a hole a little smaller than a soccer ball - the hole allows the trigger part of the snare to drop into the ground when the bear puts weight on that foot. When the trigger is depressed far enough, the spring is released, and that tightens in a flash the cable around the bear's wrist. But it isn't that simple. Once the hole is dug, Mike whittles pencil thin short twigs and wedges these in place in the hole, pointing up and touching the trigger bar. These act as braces, weak bits of support that will hold the weight of the bear for a split second. But that's all that's needed. Bears feel the firmness of the ground with each foot for a split second before they put their full weight down. The twigs will give just enough support for the bear to feel confident that he or she has a solid paw on the ground. The bear can't react in the split second after the twigs give way, though, and by that time, it's too late. (You'll have to imagine all the woodcraft in the snare illustrations). Once the trigger bar is supported with twigs, Mike brings the cable over from the tree and attaches that to the snare cable. This looped cable runs around the top edge of the hole, and this is the snare cable that actually tightens around the wrist. (Figure 2; snare is cocked and cable is run to the tree, but the hole under trigger is not shown). He trims and whittles four little "Y" shaped twigs to carry the loop of the cable an inch above the ground, all around the hole. The twigs support the cable just enough off the ground to make the cable loop take up fast around the bear's wrist. Now, the snare is set: the trigger bar is in place and supported by twigs, the cable loop is ready to take up, and the anchor cable is looped around the tree. This all has taken an hour. It's getting warmer out here, and the flies buzz around the cow carcass. The smell almost makes me never want to eat steak again, while ravens have been arguing with us, waiting for us to be done so they can feed. Mike drinks some water. He tells me that Chuck Jonkel taught him how to set snares on the Border Grizzly Project in the 1970's, the first program to begin studying grizzlies in Montana, outside of Yellowstone National Park. I think most of the working bear biologists in the state learned from Chuck. "This has to be done right," he says. "Hope this isn't boring to you." "No way, this is what it is all about - the details." "Well, the next step is to hide the snare." Mike lays more twigs, longer this time, bridging over the hole and trigger bar, and then covers the twigs with his secret weapon: paper plates. The plates cover the twigs, snare and hole. Then he carefully sprinkles fine, dry dirt over the plates, from a bucket he carries in the truck. I think of joking about Martha Stewart and her ideas of decorating with festive brightly colored paper plates, but I don't. The snare is now set and covered, and all the shiny bits of cable and white paper are hidden. It looks like a bare piece of ground, like a bears' foot pad mark, which happens to be right in the middle of the corral opening. Hopefully, the bear will think it is one of his/her's old tracks, and is safe to step on. "Almost there," he says. The next to last step is to narrow the opening in the corral where the snare is set, so Mike whittles sharp ends on bigger sticks and hammers these into the ground like short fence pickets. These will guide the bear on the path to step in the snare. "That's it?" I ask. "Not yet," Mike says. "I have to make the trail." He explains the last thing to do is arrange sticks and rocks in the ten feet or so approaching toward the snare in order to get the bear into a certain pace. Bears are as careful with their feet as ballet dancers, and part of that care is that they make a habit of stepping in the same footprints each time they walk down a well-used trail. This is what we saw at the first carcass site we saw earlier. With his eyes, Mike measures the pace of the bear, and arranges pebbles and sticks in the approach to the opening of the corral - and the hidden snare - so that a bear has only a very few places to put its paw. These nice soft places to step put the bear into a pace that will have it step into the snare with its left foot. Mike snips off seedlings at ground level and brushes away pine needles to bare earth, and when he is done, he has what looks like a bear trail, leading right into the carcass. He makes these comfortable foot steps both outside and inside the corral. Coming or going, the snare is set. The last thing he does is release the safety on the spring of the snare. He cuts a pine branch and sweeps away his footprints from the dusty trail beyond the bear trail and from where I have been walking. He stands for a minute, just looking at everything. I eyeball everything, too, visualizing the steps in the process again, wondering if I could set a snare. I figure I could, but whether it would be good enough would be up to the bear; I don't think it would be good enough to fool a bear. Mike told me later in the truck on our way to the next carcass site that it wasn't the best snare set, taking into account the location and all the people who were around. It might take a few days before the bear comes back. It might shy away the first day. The rain predicted for tomorrow might help clean the human scents away. But at the time, he stood back and said, "I'll take it." And that meant it was done. February: Bear stories
≈ March ≈ April If you like what you have read, consider a tax-deductible contribution to me
for a tire fund for my truck, as I've punched out three good radials on the back roads on the Front so far.
A rifle apparently doesn’t work as well as a cannister of red pepper spray. Dr. Smith and colleagues report in the Journal of Wildlife Management that in encounters during the past three decades where humans used the spray against black, brown and polar bears, the spray stopped the bears’ “undesirable behavior” more than 90 percent of the time — and in none of the incidents did any person suffer serious injury.
The easements, recorded in the Teton County Clerk and Recorder's office on March 5, increase by 45 percent, the number of acres along the front that have conservation easements. The estimated total of 64,095 acres is mostly held by the Conservancy, but four other easement holders are also involved in the "one of the most powerful, effective tools available for the conservation of private lands," according to the Conservancy Web site.
...“My clients have never seen a grizzly bear on their property and they've never had any problems,” Orr said. “The linkage zones don't reflect where the bears go. The bears are all over the place in the Swan.”
...Scientists identified these grizzly corridors more than a decade ago, Servheen said. Directing development to places outside these areas maintains the opportunity for wildlife movement, he said.
“It’s the early stages of a new ecosystem,” he said, “one that hasn’t been seen here before.”The plant, Canada thistle, provides food for grizzlies in more than one way but may also be squeezing out native plants that cannot compete.
...Charles C. Schwartz, leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, said his agency had no way to tell whether there were more bears in the valley. “I think what he’s seeing is real,” Dr. Schwartz said of Dr. Crabtree. “It wouldn’t be surprising to see individuals shift and take advantage of an abundant food supply.” Whether the changes last over the long haul, he said, is another question.
The conclusion:
....guns are not banned from national parks; they are not confiscated at entrance stations. They just have to be stored and unloaded. That seems reasonable and prudent.
