As many of you know, this year has been a wild year for the bears visiting urbanized areas in search of food. The drought has caused them to look elsewhere (like your trash can) to find means of survival. They have been sighted breaking into people’s homes, we even had one in our very own kitchen. It’s time for residents to be proactive and responsible in dealing with the current situation.
Today we had a visit from our local bear expert Carl Lackey with the Nevada Division of Wildlife. He dispelled two rumors about Bears in our community…1. There are more bears in NV than in recent past years. According to Lackey this is untrue…NV has about the same number of bears (between 200-400) for the past 20 years. He did admit that it is hard to say they are NV bears over CA bears as we are right on the border and they do roam. So, even if you took away (somehow) all the bears from NV today, in two weeks that number would be back up again because they travel. Rumor 2. The bears are relocated to other places when they are found to be a nuisance. This also is false as history and research has shown that the bears know exactly how to get back to where they were. Sometimes they even beat the trucks (who delivered them to the new area) home. They once tracked a bear that they relocated many years ago over 250 miles. Guess how long it took that bear to find it’s way ‘home’? Two weeks. That is amazing!
The NV Dept of Wildlife takes a different approach to bears in urban areas…they chase them back into areas that they should be in with dogs and rubber bullets. Research has proven that this method actually taught the bears something and hopefully, should you find one of these bears in your kitchen, when you yell at it and make noise, it will want to run away.
One of the Realtors in our forum asked, “Why doesn’t the Forest Service just feed them in designated spots so that they do not try to come down into urban areas for food?”. Carl pretty much said it would cost far to much money and aside from that it would just be irresponsible. Nature sets a course for these animals and it actually helps in keeping the number of bears in control. IF we did dump food for them they would just keep expecting it and regardless of the weather and drought circumstances they would survive instead of keeping themselves in check.
Did you know that over 55 bears alone were killed by people this year? That is up from 32 last year. Over 30 of those bears were killed by automobile accidents (wow…that would put a dent in things), 7 of them were destroyed by professionals due to multiple nuisances and 3 were killed illegally by people who were not dealing with the issue at hand and taking matters into their own hands. What is worse about that is that NV has such poor laws against these kinds of acts that probably none of the three will be prosecuted.
So, in order to do our part, we all need to be more proactive about what is going on with the bears, lock up our garbage so they cannot get into it and stop feeding the bears. A sign on one dumpster in town reads…”A fed bear, is a dead bear!”
For more information on the bears or Carl Lackey go to http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/TD/20070416/NEWS/104160028/-1/REGION
