June 7, 1999 Missoulian article: Roadside bears return, seeking food in Yellowstone. by Michael Milstein
WEST YELLOWSTONE - For many decades lasting through the 1960s, the so-called "roadside bears" that accepted food handouts from Yellowstone National Park visitors became one of the park's most popular attractions, so popular that two former U.S presidents, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge happily fed the begging bears.
But beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1970s, as park managers shifted to foster a more natural scene in Yellowstone, they cracked down on bear feeding and closed down the park garbage lumps that many park bears used for foraging. Bears no longer were roadside attractions and repeat visitors complained that one of the park's most fascinating spectacles had disappeared.
Now, some 20 years later, roadside bears again are becoming are common sight in Yellowstone However, instead of taking handouts, they are seeking natural food along road corridors that may be some of the last vacant bear habitat left in the park.
"It's getting to the point where visitors now have a high probability of seeing bears again," park grizzly bear biologist Kerry Gunther said. "In this case the bear is not eating marshmallows - it's killing an elk or feeding naturally."
Park biologists count about four grizzly bears and five to 10 black bears that are spending time along roadsides, attracting crowds just like the former roadside bears. And today's "bear yarns" present just as much of a challenge for park rangers, who try to accommodate the public fascination with bears while keeping people a safe distance from the impressive animals
"Roadside bears used to be just here and there," Gunther said "Now it's fairly predominant. There's a burnout factor for these tails but the public loves it and it's Yellowstone."
Next year park officials plan to include an article in the informational brochures distributed to park visitors discussing Yellowstone's increasing numbers of roadside bears and how to observe them safely, he said.
The resurgence in roadside bears arises from several factors, according to biologists. First, many but not all biologists believe the number of grizzly bears in the Yellowstone ecosystem is increasing, with the most recent estimate putting the number somewhere between 280 and 610 bears. The increase in numbers is pushing bears into roadside habitats they might otherwise have shied away from because of traffic and humans.
"As we see more and more bears on the roadsides, it may be suggesting that it's the last open habitat, good habitat, to be occupied," Gunther said.
Second, park managers have backed off their previous strategy of capturing and moving bears that linger around roads and other areas of high human use because many such bears returned to places where they were captured in the first place. Biologists also had an increasingly difficult time identifying vacant bear habitat where they can safely release such bears without placing them in another bear's territory.
Aversive conditioning - shooting at bears with beanbags or rubber bullets to frighten them away from populated areas - also had mixed success.
"Now our management has evolved," Gunther said. "Moving bears hasn't always seemed to work. Aversive conditioning wasn't as successful as we had hoped. Now we're tending toward allowing the bears to use the roadsides-. Instead of managing bears, we're trying to manage the people.
Managing people may not always be a whole lot easier. It typically requires stationing park rangers along the roadsides to keep motorists from parking on the roads themselves and to make sure people do not approach bears. in one spot between Mammoth Hot Springs and Norris, where a female grizzly with two cubs has roamed regularly this spring, rangers took to flagging down traffic, asking drivers if they would like to view the bears and then directing them to park in established turnouts and walk ahead to see the animals.
"It is a much more proactive approach," Yellowstone spokeswoman Marsha Karle said. "We're trying to do what we can to make it work for both sides. It is important for people to get to see the bears, but it' 5 also important to let them be bears."
When such bears approach people - for instance, to cross a road lined with people - rangers attempt to split the crowd, creating a path through which the bears can cross. The strategy appears to work no park visitors have been injured in such situations; If a bear were to become aggressive, officials would take action and attempt to move it away from the population, Gunther said.
In one case, a grizzly frequenting the Mammoth-to-Norris route happened onto food left on the road by a photographer. Rangers fired cracker shells at the bear to scare it off, so it would associate human food with a negative experience and would not go after human food again - which it has not done. Such action, along with strict enforcement of food-storage regulations mandating that food remain out of reach of bears, has kept park officials from having to remove bears in recent years.
Although many of today's roadside bears may be "habituated" to people - that is, used to their presence within a certain distance - they are not conditioned to eating human food like the bears that once fed at park garbage dumps and the roadside bears of the past, he said.
Bears using roadside habitat tend to be female bears with cubs and younger bears that may be searching for territories of their own. Because bears in general prefer to avoid areas of high human use, females with young and juvenile bears may find less competition from larger, male bears along the roadsides, Gunther said.
Biologists acknowledge that any bears lingering around people are more likely to eventually have conflicts with people - by coming across human food or other means - than bears staying away from populated areas. A recent study found that 64 percent of all grizzly deaths in the Yellowstone ecosystem from 1959 to 1998 occurred within two kilometers of roads and within four kilometers of major developments.
"Any time a bear starts spending time around people, it's more likely to get into trouble later on," said Barrie Gilbert, a professor at Utah State University. In parts of Alaska, people view grizzlies where the bears gather to feed on spawning salmon; the people remain in defined areas where the bears have learned to tolerate them. Although far fewer people watch bears in Alaska than in Yellowstone, rangers in Yellowstone hope to follow the same example by keeping visitors from intruding on bears, Gunther said.
"The bears know that on roads there are going to be hundreds of people, but they're OK out in the meadow," he said. "They've learned to live with us. If we can behave, we can live with them."