10A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2015
Bears: ‘We’re dealing with really smart animals’
Continued from Page 1A
Last week, Nevada wild-
life officials were forced to
euthanize a young problem
bear at the lake — the third
offspring killed from the
same litter born to the mama
bear known by her tag num-
ber, Green 108.
“She’s just kind of a
chronic,
nuisance-type
bear,” said Carl Lackey, a
wildlife biologist for the Ne-
vada Department of Wild-
life. “She’s always been get-
ting into trash, always been
in the same area. We’ve cap-
tured several litters of hers.
We’ve captured her several
times.”
Lackey co-authored a
2008 study published in
the Journal of Mammalogy
about the role of genetics in
bear conflict behavior.
“We sort of concluded
that genetics alone could not
explain a nuisance behavior
in black bears,” Lackey said
about the research led by
S.W. Breck and C.L. Wil-
liams at the USDA’s Nation-
al Wildlife Research Center
in Fort Collins, Colo.
A study led by Nation-
al Park Service researchers
first suggested in 1989 that
problems with Yellowstone’s
grizzly bears were a function
of behavior passed from
mother to offspring and suc-
cessive generations, but it
didn’t determine whether it
was learned or inherited.
Another 2008 study by
Rachel Mazur and Victoria
Seher, researchers at Yosem-
ite’s Division of Resources
Management, documented
bears “actively tutoring”
their cubs to find food in
human environments. They
concluded that food-con-
ditioned foraging is a skill
passed from older bears to
the young.
“We have observed sows
pushing cubs into buildings
and vehicles to retrieve food
rewards,” they wrote.
Lackey said several bears
that have been caught at
Tahoe multiple times and
released back into the wild
“won’t go into a trap any-
more.”
“They send their cubs
into the trap or cubs into
homes to get food,” he said.
Nevada Department of
Wildlife spokesman Chris
Healy witnessed something
similar last summer at a trap
set in Reno.
“Cubs showed up curi-
ous about the trap, and the
sow we caught a year before
would sit there and growl
at the cubs to scare them
away,” Healy said.
“We’re dealing with re-
ally smart animals that be-
come habituated to food,”
he said. “If you want to
solve the problem, you have
to change the way you deal
with garbage.”
National parks across
the West long have utilized
bear-proof trash containers.
Several communities in the
Canadian Rockies started
requiring bear-proof garbage
cans as early as 1999. A few
U.S. towns have made them
mandatory, including parts
of Boulder, Colo., last year.
But others — including Lake
Tahoe — have rejected at-
tempts because of costs and
opposition to government
regulation.
Mazur and Seher exam-
ined in 2008 whether the
bears simply were adapt-
ing to their environment,
or whether “previously
adaptive behavior” became
counter-productive, putting
the animals in the way of
harm by increasing contact
with humans. While the
garbage provides high-en-
ergy food, those bears were
5.6 times more likely than
cubs of wild sows to be hit
by cars, hunted or killed for
safety reasons, they found.
In the end, the bears fall
into an ecological trap, they
wrote.
In 2004, Green 108 was
first captured in Tahoe,
tagged and released. Since
then, she’s been trapped four
times, most recently in July
2012.
“We don’t euthanize
bears just for getting in trash
when that’s all they’re do-
ing,” Lackey said. “But that
conflict behavior escalates
from tipping over trash cans
to breaking into homes, and
that’s when we have to euth-
anize them.”
So is society ultimately
to blame for problem bears
like Green 108 and her cubs?
Lackey thinks so.
“If we could have waved
a magic wand and bear-
proofed Tahoe years ago,
you wouldn’t see the number
of bears getting into these
conflict situations,” he said.
Healy said Tahoe never
had a serious bear problem
until the early 1990s when
food sources dwindled in the
mountains during extended
drought.
“That drought drove
bears out of the back coun-
try, and a lot of them never
left,” he said.
Reno news crews
watch in the moun-
tains above Lake
Tahoe Sept. 2, as
Nevada Department
of Wildlife officials
release a mother bear
and cub trapped the
day before on the
lake’s north shore
near Crystal Bay,
Nev. The vast major-
ity of problem bears
trapped at Tahoe are
returned to the wild,
but repeat offenders
are euthanized when
they lose their fear of
humans.
Jack Kreamer
Nevada Department
of Wildlife
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