I don’t normally do this, but this week’s final thought and this week’s final shot are linked.
If you haven’t seen this week’s final shot, take a gander at the final shot posted. It’s okay. I’ll wait.
I don’t know about you, but for me, this image stirs up a lot of feelings. Fear being one of them. Annoyance being another.
I love the fact that we live in a place where you can have wildlife encounters simply by walking out your front door. (I’ve told the story before of a friend of mine who moved to Tumbler Ridge with me back in the eighties. He was heading out for a walk. “There’s a grizzly out there,” my sister warned him. “Thanks,” he said, walking out the door. A moment later he came barreling back into the house. “There’s a bear out there,” he said, panting. “That’s what I said,” said my sis. “But right there,” he gasped. “On the front lawn.”)
This close connection to nature is what makes Tumbler Ridge such a special place for me. I mean, I don’t want to encounter grizzlies every time I try to walk to dogs, or any time I try to walk the dogs, for that matter, but I appreciate the fact that the possibility is there. There are deer that wander through my front yard on a regular basis, and jays—gray, blue and stellar—are all seen here. I have yet to see a moose in town, but you don’t have to go far to find them.
So last week, when a family of bears decided to move into the tree next to the apartment building where my wife sits on the strata board, it wasn’t unusual. It wasn’t unexpected. It was interesting, and, when I drove down to the apartment to work on the modem, I used a zoom lens to take a bunch of photos of the bears as they tried to square their understanding of how the world worked with what was happening around them.
A person walking to the apartment building well away from the bears was cause enough for mom to shoo the two cubs up into a tree. They watched nervously as cars drove along the road.
But then a couple kids on bikes came barreling down the path, past the group of kids that were standing at the top of the hill, watching the bears from a safe distance, past the bear in the area sign and past the bears standing beside the tree. Mom didn’t even have time to send the kids up into the safety of the branches before the pair raced by, one waving at the bears and saying “hey bears,” whether in greeting or to warn them of his presence, I’m not sure.
Rather than try to ascribe motivation, I wanted to celebrate the fact that this was the best possible outcome.
Not just in that situation, but overall.
Of the three species of bears in Canada, black bears are the least dangerous, comparatively. Compared to Polar Bears, whose diet is almost 70 percent meat, or grizzly bear, who can eat up to 50 percent meat, a black bear’s diet is usually less than 15 percent meat. Because of their size and body type, black bears generally favour eating vegetable matter, though they are opportunistic omnivores, eating meat when the opportunity presents itself.
Black bear attacks on people are rare and fatal attacks are even less common. A couple years ago, a backpacker in Monkman park surprised a female grizzly and it’s cub. The bear attacked the hiker and tore his backpack to shreds to protect its cubs.
Meanwhile, when people got too close to this bear and her cubs, she sent her cubs up the tree, and, if the human got too close, she would also climb the tree.
But to say that attacks are rare does not mean they don’t exist, and even a well-fed black bear (like this one was) can attack if it is feeling threatened and stressed out. Maybe one too many people have gotten too close.
Indeed, about 25 years ago, a group of five kids in town were attacked by an angry black bear after a group of people on motorized tricycles had been harassing the bear earlier. Too much attention, too many close encounters with humans, and a black bear’s patience can run out.
Fortunately, this bear never lost its patience. Nor did it find any source of food other than crab apples. It didn’t discover the grand buffet that can be an overturned trash can.
Because, while we worry for the kids getting too close to the bear, we know that in 99 percent of negative interactions between bears and humans, it is the bear that loses.
And I know there are people out there who think the only good bear is a dead bear. While they are welcome to their erroneous opinions, the majority (I hope) of people who live here are in favour of non-lethal encounters with wildlife.
Yes, if the bear is being aggressive, the bear is the one to go. Bur in all my non-motorized wildlife encounters, neither I nor the wildlife has died. (Okay, that’s not quite true. I shot a sparrow once when I was maybe ten years old, but I was different person back then.)
And I’ve had a fair number of encounters. I nearly rear ended a black bear while biking along the Kettle Valley Railway. I’ve had a grizzly get a little too curious for comfort as I tried to wave down help after my car broke down on the Redwillow-Hiding Creek Road.
And most of the time, a bear that stays in town? Will get destroyed. There’s a very specific list of qualifications that make a bear worth the effort to relocate, otherwise, it gets moved.
And even when a bear is relocated, it’s chances of survival are reduced. Imagine how you’d fair if someone shot you with a tranquilizer dart and you woke up without your phone or any credit cards in a city where you didn’t speak the language and wearing gang colours of the gang from one city over. That’s what relocating a bear can be like.
But this time—at least for now—we have had the best possible outcome for both the town and these three bears.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
