November 23, 1999 Missoulian article By MICHAEL JAMISON: Whitefish area growth may be funneling grizzlies into town.

WHITEFISH - Wildlife managers believe they may have solved the riddle, "Why did the grizzly cross the road?"

"To avoid the subdivision," answered Tim Manley, a bear management specialist who has been working with Flathead-area landowners and bears for years.

CAG Comment

There may be another reason the bear crossed the road.  He is living in an environment that does not provide him with his requirements and he crosses the road to find food. In fact if we are to believe some of the other stories we have seen coming out of the Whitefish area they don't avoid the subdivision -- or the main town, for that matter.

CAG has no idea how Whitefish will be able to solve their problem with grizzly bears but we are sure of one thing, and that is that it would not be wise for the federal government, whose agencies have been captured by environmental interest groups that have been granted immunity by the present administration, to reintroduce grizzly bears into the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Wildernesses and create the problems that now exist in the Whitefish area.

Lance Craighead, of the Craifhead institute, points out that 1,000 to 3,000 grizzly bears are needed in order to protect the gene pool. When you add all the bears together in Montana they don't come anywhere near 1,000 let alone 3000. 

All this shows the problem is probably going to get worse if we try to maintain grizzly bears in close proximity to humans, especially in environments that are not the grizzly bears natural  home; rivers out across the great plains were where Lewis & Clark had far more trouble with grizzly bears than in the mountains of Montana.

The government has come up with a plan where the grizzly bears will be able to travel through corridors from Glacier National Park via the Cabinet Yaak to the Selway Bitterroot on south to the Tetons and eventually Yellowstone National Park in Montana and Wyoming.

This points out what future generations here in Montana have to look forward to. Wildlife will have the "right of way" and humans will have to move aside.  Michael Coffman in his article, GLOBALIZED GRIZZLIES,  that appeared in the New American a few years ago, was not far wrong when he said that us humans will be locked off the land.   Kathleen Marquardt in her book, "Animal Scam, the Beastly Abuse of Human Rights confirms his suspicions.

End CAG Comment

Manley has spent much of the past several months chasing bears out of the residential neighborhoods that line Whitefish Lake. And part of the reason the bruins have ambled into town, he said, is a new 840-acre private golf community being carved from the forested flanks of the Big Mountain.

The Iron Horse development is about one-third the size of the entire city of Whitefish, and includes 325 lots and an 18-hole golf course.

"That's a big chunk of country that's changed," Manley said. "Basically, you've slapped a very large subdivision into the middle of some pretty good wildlife habitat. From the ski runs on the top to Iron Horse at the bottom, Big Mountain is entirely developed. It's a huge landscape change, which means it's a huge change for the wildlife that uses the landscape.

"You can really see it from the air," he continued. "The entire mountain face is open; there's no tree cover until you hit the valley floor in Whitefish. What was a huckleberry landscape is becoming a household landscape."

Grizzly bears, Manley said, historically have been primary users of that huckleberry landscape, walking across the toe of the Big Mountain on their way from Haskill Basin east of town to Hellroaring Basin on the mountain's western flank.

As the bears amble across the mountain's lower face, Manley said, they now encounter the paved roads and clearings and bulldozers and dump trucks and chain saws of the developing Iron Horse resort community. To avoid contact with the construction confusion, he said, the bears turned to the forested fringe, skirting the edges of the development.

But by sticking to the uphill strip of forest, the bears encountered existing development at the Big Mountain village. The downhill forest,however, provided a long forested corridor that funneled grizzlies into the lush habitat of the valley bottom. "Unfortunately, it also funneled into lakeshore neighborhoods."

But developer and Iron Horse president Pat Donovan questions Manley's scenario, and wonders why the bears would avoid an unfinished subdivision only to wander into the chaos of downtown. It just doesn't make sense," he said, "If these bears are so shy, what are they doing in town?"

The answer, Manley said, is that bear behavior, like human behavior, evolves over time. The bears have been approaching town ever since Iron Horse development began in 1995, he said; but it took some years for them to feel comfortable enough to enter existing lakeshore neighborhoods.

The reason the bears finally were emboldened to go closer to town, Manley said, is that they discovered new food sources such as fruit trees and garbage cans. And the reason they found those new foods is because of the habitat fragmentation that changed their travel patterns.

The bears changed their travel patterns in part to avoid Iron Horse, he said, and that change pushed them into the fringe. The fringe, in turn, led them to town, and town led them to trash. After they found the new food sources, they were emboldened to stay, completing the chain of events 'that began, in part, because of those changed travel patterns around the development.

That evolution, Manley admits, is something of a best guess scenario, based in large part on his longtime involvement and knowledge with bears and their behaviors.

"Of course, we're not absolutely. 100 percent sure," he said, "because we don't have a lot of historical data on these bears."

But he does know that of the six grizzlies found in or near Whitefish this fall, at least five walked along the fringe of Iron Horse to get there, following the tree line around the subdivision. Three, he said, were reported being seen by Iron Horse workers.

Donovan, however, says his workers have not seen a lot of bear or wildlife activity, and insists his development, while admittedly large, is but a drop in the Flathead's forest wilderness bucket. And, he said, with large tree covered lots of one-half acre to 12 acres in size, Iron Horse poses no barrier to bear travel.

"It's not like we've taken their last home," Donovan said. "There are millions of acres, lots of directions for the bears to go. They're going to town because they like the food in town. They like garbage. Period. I really don't think it has much to do with Iron Horse."

Whether the bears have lots of directions from which to choose is debatable, Manley said, as urban growth continues to spill across former wildlife habitat. And while the fact that bears like garbage is undisputed, Manley wonders how they ended up in neighborhoods and their garbage to begin with.

"The more the habitat is fragmented, the more likely it is that the bears will change their habits," Manley said. "It's getting. harder and harder for wildlife to travel from one place to another without encountering a development?'

But Iron Horse certainly isn't the only reason the bears funneled into Whitefish, Manley said, and it certainly is not the only development carved from ages-old wildlife habitat. It is, however, one of the largest new projects in grizzly country and, as' such, is receiving a fair share of attention in regard to the Whitefish bears.

The issue, Manley said, is not Iron Horse or Whitefish, but ' rather the big picture of habitat fragmentation and its possible contribution to the increasing number of bear-human conflicts in rural Montana.

Instead of debating bear habits and the relative value of private resort communities, Manley and Donovan hope to find some common ground, meeting to talk about bear-proofing the new neighborhood with special trash bins and community education. Both men are prepared to sit down and discuss ways to make Iron Horse ' a home for people and critters alike.

"We're just seeing the tip of the iceberg right now," Manley said. "Unless we get in there and  do something, we're going to see ' nothing but more bear and wildlife problems at Iron Horse and other developments.

"We're going to have to work with developers, and there's a lot of work to do. If we get in there early, I hope we can make Iron Horse a model of how to live with wildlife. The people aren't going away, and I hope the bears aren't going away. So now's the time to talk."

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