Bears 'killed in record numbers'
21/04/2009 10:33 - (SA)

Hunters are killing grizzly bears in record numbers around Yellowstone National Park and researchers say the once-endangered predator is expanding across the region.

Bears are being seen - and killed - in places where they were absent for decades.

Researchers suspect climate change is wiping out one of the bear's food sources and they worry the trend will continue as the animals roam farther in search of food.

Yellowstone's 600 grizzlies were removed from the endangered species list in 2007, following a recovery programme that cost more than $20m.

If the death rate stays high for a second consecutive year, that would trigger a review of the bear's endangered status.

"Last year may have been one of those fluke years," said Chuck Schwartz, a bear biologist with the US Geological Survey.

"Last year could be the beginning of a trend."

Federal officials say 48 bears were killed by humans last year, out of 71 total deaths.

At least 20 of the bears died at the hands of hunters who shot in self-defence or after mistaking them for other animals.

"It's kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing. All you see is a big bear coming at you full speed," said Ron Leming, a Wyoming elk hunter who said he survived an attack from a 225kg male grizzly after his father shot it dead with an arrow.

"If you play dead he might sit there and eat you," Leming said.

Wild card

Schwartz and other biologists who study grizzlies insist the population in the 38 850km² Yellowstone region of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming remains strong for now, growing on average 4 to 5% a year.

Yet they acknowledge climate change could prove the wild card that puts that growth in check.

An epidemic of beetles in Yellowstone's high country has laid waste to tens of thousands of acres of whitebark pine trees, which have seeds that some grizzlies rely on as a dietary staple.

Beetle epidemics are cyclical in the Northern Rockies. The latest one has been prolonged by several consecutive winters in which subfreezing temperatures did not last long enough to knock back the infestation.

If a warming world leads to less whitebark pine, environmentalists fear grizzlies will become more aggressive in challenging hunters - contests that bears usually lose.

Endangered species list

"The prospect is that every year is going to be a bad food year because of what's happening to whitebark," said Doug Honnold, an attorney for the group Earthjustice.

Citing dying pine forests as a major threat, Honnold's group sued the federal government in an attempt to get Yellowstone grizzlies back on the endangered species list.

Christopher Servheen, bear recovery coordinator with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said his agency is closely monitoring the population and already crafting a plan to stem the death rate.

Meanwhile, conservationists are trying to encourage hunters to use mace-like bear spray as a non-lethal alternative to keeping them at bay.

Other measures being considered are stepped-up public education efforts and restrictions on livestock grazing, to prevent bear attacks on sheep and cattle.

Gregg Losinski, an education specialist with Idaho Fish and Game, said promoting the possibility of future grizzly bear hunts might convince more people to buy into bear conservation.

Competing for space

Even with those measures, researchers say bear deaths are inevitable as the animals return to a different landscape than that occupied by their ancestors.

Before early European settlers drove bears to near extinction, there were an estimated 50 000 grizzlies in the western half of the United States.

Yellowstone's bears are among about 1 500 that have since repopulated the Northern Rockies. They must compete for space with several million tourists, and property owners.

"Some people say, 'This is terrible, there's more bears killed now than in many years,"' Servheen said. "Well, there's more bears now."

More "Global Warming" bullshit.
Why not just say the bears are expanding their range and have little or no respect for humans? Instead we must somehow tie it all to global warming, what bullshit. You can't tell me that the beetle kill (that the article also ties to global warming) is affecting their food source that dramatically, bears are omnivores and if the seeds from the pine trees aren't available there are innumerable other things for them to eat. Besides the beetle is killing pine forests that have had fires and logging suppressed for the last 100 years (mismanagement), when forests grow into this "monoculture" with nothing but pine as far as you can see then the beetle takes hold and fixes the problem all natural, not global warming after all.
I could go on but frankly I'm not in the mood.

The bear population is very strong and their range is growing. This combined with the growing popularity of bowhunting and hunting general is what is causing more and more bear encounters.

My group has had 4 grizzly encounters the last 3 years. Two were with a sow and cubs, the other 2 were with boars who didn't seem to care. The picture below is one of the boars, from last year, taken from about 30 yards.

I have other friends and acquaintances who have been charged and used pepper spray. The encounter I have heard the best account of, or remember more vividly, was a friend and his hunting partner last year who came upon a sleeping bear at 20 feet. The bear woke up and charged. He said he sprayed the bear as he was falling backward. The bear took off. He said if his first instinct would have been to draw his gun, he feels the bear would have gotten them.



A track in the a couple days later, in a different area.

montana thought they had 300 bears living outside the yellowstone eco system until a 2 yr hairtrap/dna study identified almost 800 individual bears.
YNP claims 600 inside yellowstone
wyoming has no pop. estimates, but i have seen 16 in one evening from the highway and 3 yrs ago when i had my sheep tag i counted 47 in 3 months of hunting.
7 in 6 days of hunting 2 yrs ago.
seems to be a strong G-bear population
snellstorm, a well known fact in my area of N.W. wyoming
when the pine cone crop and berries fail,the bears are MUCH more aggressive and less tolerent
during encounters.
the grizzlies at least in my area are very habitual/seasonal feeders.
after waking from hibernation they come down into river and creek bottoms to feed on new grasses and winterkills,in june they feed on spawning native trout,move up thru the elk calving grounds to the rock slides above timberline to feed in the moth fields in july and august,september they actively prey on rutting elk and are eating berries and the
whitebark pine cones,and finish out the year before hibernation cleaning up gutpiles and anything else,i've been told a fall bear will consume 25,000 calories a day if they can find that much.
i concur with the global warming farce though.

Between the bears and the wolves my elk hunting area is getting to be pretty slim pickings.

quote:

Hunters are killing grizzly bears in record numbers

Where do I get a tag?

Just like the "hunters" shooting wolfs out of helicopters in Alaska.

"Hunters" get the bad name and I cant get a tag.....

Morons writing shit like that should be sent to Singapore for caning...

Is this some foreign report, as the weights and distances are in metric quantities?

The one that get's me is they said 20 bears were shot when they charged hunters. Regardless of if the bear is endangered, they'll still be shot if they charge. That's self defense, not hunting.

Oh how I hate the media.

"Hunters are killing grizzly bears in record numbers around Yellowstone National Park and researchers say the once-endangered predator is expanding across the region."
The article is from AP's Mathew Brown.

That first sentence makes me wonder just how bad they would have expanded if it hadn't have been for the hunters. Actually, the article is very misleading in that it can only "fault" hunters for the deaths of 20 bears out of the 71 that died and yet insists on leading off with the "Hunters are killing grizzly bears in record numbers ...

Regarding the numbers of grizzlies counted I remember talking with the Craighead brothers back when they could only account for 61 bears in the entire Yellowstone ecosystem and Frank Craighead said that the system could only support 250 bears. Was he wrong then or are the numbers wrong now?

I really don't want to turn this into a political thread, but since it happens I see eye-to-eye with several others here...what I keep wondering is when a serious, well funded national effort will finally be started to counter the lies concerning the climate?

This stuff has gone way far enough and is endangering our own personal freedoms and liberties. Look all around and all you see are people, particularly the young, naive and vunerable, falling easy prey to the demagogue socialist controlled media.

It is very reminiscent of the Dark Ages when people believed the sun revolved around the earth (there was actually a name for that belief, which maybe one of you can come up with). Or maybe like all the gods the Aztecs and who knows all else did human sacrifices to appease.

If you ask me, all that is starting to sound a little too familiar.

First, they get away with global warming, that worked pretty well. Then we get human activity the culprit. People rolled over for that. Then we get CO2 and the whole U.S. industrial base the next villain. It's not just one lie, it's a whole layering of lies, like a bunch of nachos.

Unlike more harmless nonsense, the Sasquatch, extra terrestrials, crop rings etc etc, this one is the most odious, dangerous, backward belief system seen in hundreds of years because it has become a primary base of political power sought by the wrong sort.

Shack,

The word you're looking for is "geocentric."

I don't want to hunt bears in general, but I'd be happy to see a tag out there for lower 48 Grizzlies.

This article looks like an Al Gore special. Everything is blamed on global warming and now the bears leave their "boundaries" due to global warming. Did anyone tell the bears to stay on the reservation. Maybe we could get PETA to herd them back into the park!

quote:

"Some people say, 'This is terrible, there's more bears killed now than in many years,"' Servheen said. "Well, there's more bears now."

Servheen is right about that. I had a little chat with a ranger down in the Thoroughfare (SE corner of YNP) 5 years ago or so. They were going about doing DNA hair samples and counting bears. At that time, their count was over 220 individual bears just in the southeast corner. Duh..........every elk hunting guide on Shoshoni or Bridger-Teton National Forest could have told them that.

I have seen more damn grizzlies in more different places outside of the the Park in the last 5 to 10 years than I've seen in the past 40. It pays to keep your eyes peeled out in the woods any more.

If those bureaucrats find a bear that doesn't have a color around his neck they have an orgasm and start writing grant proposals to study something else about the creature. It never ends.

If grizzlies don't have pine nuts or cut worm moths to munch or spawning cuttthroat trout in Pelican creek, well hell they'll just mosey down to Cody or Red Lodge and grab a poodle or a hamburger.

It is easier to see a grizzly than a black bear these days. Grizzly are becoming more common in black bear baiting areas to. There are twice as many grizzly now, than there was when Wyoming and Montanta had grizzly seasons.

Hmm, Record numbers ay? As compared to what??


Since Grizzlys were listed as endangered in the lower 48 for several decades, just how difficult would "record numbers" be to achieve?

Sounds like typical liberal playing on words to advance their hatefull agendas.

quote:

Originally posted by boerbokrib:
Bears 'killed in record numbers'
21/04/2009 10:33 - (SA)

An epidemic of beetles in Yellowstone's high country has laid waste to tens of thousands of acres of whitebark pine trees, which have seeds that some grizzlies rely on as a dietary staple.

Beetle epidemics are cyclical in the Northern Rockies. The latest one has been prolonged by several consecutive winters in which subfreezing temperatures did not last long enough to knock back the infestation.

If a warming world leads to less whitebark pine, environmentalists fear grizzlies will become more aggressive in challenging hunters - contests that bears usually lose.

This tripe comes from the same assholes that are dead set against targeted logging (or logging of any kind) to control bark beetle and red rot disease in forests.

Global warming my ass!!

Ive seen the devastation that these diseases do to forests and yet, just like offshore drilling, the libs consider it unethical to go there. Period!

They talk out both sides of their mouths and ignore/HATE any opposing opinions whatsoever..

I am Soooo done with democrats!!