The ‘bear’ necessities of life in the Valley
March 19, 2008
By Ed Farrell
In many ways, the deck has long been stacked against the grizzly bear, at least in terms of the average human’s perspective.
Even its Latin name, Ursus arctos horribilis, sounds as much as the hulking, 15-foot, man-pursuing and eating creatures popularized in low-budget Hollywood productions.
In fact, changing most of what the average person knows – or think they know – about grizzly bears is the prime goal of what Julie Hayes, a biologist with the Grizzly Bear Outreach Project, hopes to accomplish with her presentation of Grizzly Bears 101, set for 7 p.m. Friday at Meadowbrook Farms in North Bend.
“There’s a deeper biological fear involved,” Hayes said Friday, while talking with a visitor about her love of the misunderstood creatures. “Humans need to learn to understand them on (the bears’) terms.”
The long-term goal of the GBOP is to help create and foster a viable grizzly bear population in a number of federally-identified habitat areas, including a large area in north-central Washington known as the Northern Cascades.
The boundaries of the Northern Cascades grizzly bear recovery area stretch from north of the Canadian border into British Columbia to Mt. Baker and the Snoqualmie National Forest to the west, to the I-90 corridor and the eastern border of the Wenatchee/Okanogan National Forest and the Loomis State Forest.
Inside that approximate 10,000-square-mile habit area are believed to be between five and 20 grizzly bears.
No one knows for sure, Hayes said, because credible sightings are few and far between; the last verifiable sighting of a live grizzly in Washington occurred in 2003.
Biologists rely primarily on other types of evidence, such as footprints or scat.
In the Snoqualmie Valley, however, there are numerous sightings of black bears, and reports of close encounters with the smaller bears are growing more common by the day as human development continues to encroach into the black bear habitat.
Hayes estimated that Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife officials receive 350 or more calls a year about black bears in Issaquah, Snoqualmie and North Bend alone.
While very different in both biology and manner, in terms of human interaction, the safest recourse while dealing with both varieties of bears is similar in nature, Hayes said.
“Be aware of your surroundings,” is the No. 1 rule when in bear habitat, she said, closely followed by taking measures to announce one’s humaness to the bears and other wildlife.
Bears of any variety will take great pains to avoid contact with humans, Hayes said.
And given their great intelligence and uncanny sensory abilities – a bear’s sense of smell is superior to a that of a dog – most humans will never know how close they came to an encounter with a bear.
It’s that reluctance to interact that makes it difficult to ascertain exactly how many grizzly bears are actually in the Northern Cascade area.
Hayes said, while there might be three dozen or more reported “sightings” of grizzlies a year, few are given a good deal of credibility. And, given limited resources and the difficulty of the terrain involved,
the ability to verify such reports is nearly impossible.
“It’s very difficult to search for something that’s making every effort to avoid you,” Hayes said.
But try as they might, there’s no getting around contact with the far-more populous black bears in the area.
Hayes estimated the Washington black bear population at 25,000 and growing.
Meanwhile, the bears’ habitat is constantly being reduced by new development, making close encounters between bears and humans inevitable.
“We want people to know they’re out there,” Hayes said of the black bears.
“And in this area, sightings are far more common in the suburban neighborhoods than in the woods.”
Therefore, educating both humans and bears is critical.
“Having them cut through a neighborhood to their natural habitat is one thing,” Hayes said, “but we don’t want them to stop in the neighborhood for food. Co-existing with bears does not mean having them raiding garbage cans.”
Using bear-proof garbage cans, participating in “bear alert” programs, and just learning about the creatures that share our area are important, Hayes said.
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