November 2007 — VOLUME 5 ISSUE 11
Awareness
key to healthy bears
Under the grey October clouds, a heaviness hung over Sun Peaks after a family of bears—a sow and her cub were destroyed.
The incident has left the community reeling and its mark in history—the bears are the first to be shot since the area opened as a ski hill over 40-years ago.
Christopher Nicolson, president of Tourism Sun Peaks says it’s tragic and has saddened the whole community. He hasn’t met one person within the community, he says, who wasn’t touched and disappointed with the occurrence.
The bears were shot Oct.1 after breaking through the side of a garage to get to garbage contained inside, at a house on Mountain View Drive—it was to be their last supper.
Kamloops Conservation Officer, Kelly Dahl, who put the bears down, believes they had been exposed to garbage on that street or at that residence before, noting the forest adjacent to the home where the bears were shot was scattered with garbage.
“There was more than quite a bit of litter, there was a lot of garbage bags back there,” he observes, saying destroying animals, especially cubs which is rare, is the most undesirable part of his job. But in this case they had no choice.
“The cub spent the summer with the sow finding garbage and that becomes ingrained, eliminating the cub as a rehab candidate,” adds Dahl.
Jacques Drisdelle, provincial coordinator for Bear Aware, an educational community-led program designed to prevent bear-human conflict, describes food habituated bears as similar to a child who has always been fed candy. Try one day to give the kid broccoli, he says, and they’re not going to eat it.
“It’s the same with bears. High protein, high carb foods are found in garbage, and after surviving on this the bears don’t want to eat grass,” he verifies.
The food habituated bears and their eventual demise has opened up conversations in Sun Peaks where concerns are growing this could happen again, especially as the resort expands. Cameron Matches, owner of the home the bears broke into, which at the time was occupied by a tenant, says the community has to learn from this.
“We have to question how we deal with resident bears, because there’s going to be a whole lot more,” comments Matches, who believes the solution is creating a bear protection plan at the resort.
Currently there isn’t an official co-ordinator or bear education program in place at Sun Peaks. But whose responsibility is it? Nicholson believes it falls to everyone living and working in the community.
“The sense is most people living here are aware, concerned and bear savvy—it’s the people who aren’t engaged who we need to get to, and right now as a community it lays on all of our shoulders,” he says.
Although there’s upward of 400 year-around residents at Sun Peaks, being a resort means, in essence, a transient community. And Drisdelle agrees with Nicolson saying getting the message across to non-residents is the pertinent problem and education, he says, is key.
“In a place like Sun Peaks, that’s fairly transient you have to keep the message out there. It’s ongoing, you have to keep telling people—people moving out, new people moving in and young people growing up,” he confirms.
The first place to start, is establishing some form of education program, perhaps on a volunteer basis to begin with, suggests Drisdelle, explaining some funding is available from Bear Aware, which falls under the B.C. Conservation Foundation to set up the approximately $20,000 a year program. An office has to be made available at the resort to service the program and after three years the financial responsibility of running it falls to the community.
No matter what the cost though, it seems Bear Aware provides the answer, and according to Drisdelle the system has a sound track record. He cites Revelstoke, where the Bear Aware program first started in 1995, as an example. Having a Bear Aware program there has made the difference between 40 bears being shot each year to an average of only two a year now, he says.
He believes initiating a Bear Aware program at Sun Peaks is the long-term solution—having this in place, he says, will help the community to avoid destroying more and more bears in the future and instead will help the community to coexist harmoniously with them.
“[Having a Bear Aware Program] you can be proactive in reducing the potential threat bears pose to human safety and reduce the numbers of bears that will eventually become habituated, food conditioned and destroyed—that’s the key,” he says.
Visit www.bearaware.bc.ca for more information.
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