Missoula News

hey, joan, there's a bear on the porch

Keeping Bears and Ranchers Happy on the Blackfoot

By Dana Green, 5-26-06

Concerns over bears in the Blackfoot began to build in the late ‘90s, when grizzly activity – and conflicts between the big bears and humans – took a sharp jump in the watershed.

The Blackfoot is just the southern tip of a huge bear ecosystem – grizzly roam across the Flathead, Swan and Mission Valleys, tracking across the Glacier Park, the Bob Marshall and Scapegoat wilderness areas, and even moving into Canada. But the Blackfoot is critical, low-elevation lands within that bear habitat.

The increase in bear/human conflicts worried some locals: Those worries hit a peak with the death of Great Falls hunter Timothy Hilston in 2001, who was killed by a grizzly while dressing a fallen elk in the Blackfoot’s block management area.

That’s when the Blackfoot Challenge decided to step in. In the ‘70s, private landowners in the Blackfoot Valley loosely organized to proactively try to maintain the valley’s scenic beauty and ranching history. The group has since become a template for other rural communities seeking to manage growth pressures.

Community leaders put their heads together with fish and wildlife officials and wildlife groups; they decided to contract with Dr. Seth Wilson, a wildlife researcher with Yale University, to help minimize problems between landowners and bears.

For Wilson, the Blackfoot was the perfect place to try to work with local landowners – because they were already organized and open to communicating with officials and federal agencies.

“The Blackfoot was the perfect place to get ahead of the conflict ‘curve,’” Wilson said. “You have landowners who have a vision for the future. Those longtime connections (exist) to a level I haven’t seen in many communities in the West.”

Ranches can be like a huge magnet for hungry bears: from newborn calves, garbage, and spilled grain to livestock carcasses, beehives, and bird feeders, bears are strongly attracted to human activity.

“Bears are inquisitive, and they spend their waking moments looking for food,” Wilson said. “They’ll eat up motor oil on the ground … they’ll claw the seat of an ATV. The conflicts weren’t surprising.”

In the core area where bears had been most active, Wilson worked closely with about 20 landowners. They put up electric fences around calving pens and beehives, made sure there wasn’t garbage left out, took down bird feeders during the spring and summer, and arranged to have carcasses hauled off ranches twice each week instead of dumped in pits.

Some died-in-the-wool, old-school ranchers are still skeptical, but most of the 45 or so landowners in the watershed have been enthusiastic, in Wilson’s view.

David Mannix, whose family has ranched for four generations on more than 12,000 sprawling acres in the Blackfoot Valley, said the carcass pickup has helped local ranchers change old patterns.

“We just piled ‘em up before,” he said. “But those carcasses attracted animals close to buildings. It keeps the bruins from getting near calving grounds.”

The program’s results have been pretty dramatic – initial numbers indicate that conflicts between humans and bears have sharply dropped – by more than 50 percent in just over a year.

“Ranchers are pragmatists,” Wilson said. “These are practical tools to keep bears out of backyards. They key is that we can have different opinions, and still work together on this.”

Deadly conflicts between big predators and humans have been making the evening news in the last month, including a mountain lion attack on a boy in Boulder, and a severe mauling by a black bear of a family in Tennessee.

With such conflicts (while still rare) on the rise, there has been strong interest in the Blackfoot program in other Western states. Wilson was asked to give a talk in Cody, Wyo., where conflicts with grizzly bears has deeply divided the rural community.

Wilson – and others in the Blackfoot – are hoping to change human and bear behavior before such conflicts turn deadly.

“We don’t want bears associating ranches with food,” Wilson said. “You get a cycle of conflict that’s bad news for landowners and for the bear.”

But rural communities have to step up and police their own behaviors in bear country, Wilson believes.

“Ranchers need to talk to newcomers .. the people who live there need to take responsibility for their own actions,” Wilson said. “That’s what the Blackfoot is doing, and that’s why it has been a success.”

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