It’s Back to Berries for Yosemite’s Bears

The alert went out as darkness enveloped Yosemite Valley. “Bear in campground, moving toward the orchard,” said a voice on the radio.

By the time wildlife technician Joe Madison arrived, the offending bruin was gone. That was unfortunate. If the chance had presented itself, Madison would have shot the bear with a beanbag to deliver a painful but necessary message: Go back to the woods. Now.

Nowhere else do the lives of so many people and black bears intersect as in Yosemite National Park. Each year, 3.6 million people visit the park, which is home to about 350 to 500 bears.

Keeping them away from each other has become one of the park’s most all-consuming tasks. The challenge centers around food. People have it--in cars, backpacks and pockets--and bears want it. Even if humans don’t have it, they often smell like they do. That’s all it takes to attract a bear.

The problem reached its peak in 1998, when a record 1,590 “bear incidents” were reported in Yosemite, according to the National Park Service. Bears broke into 1,143 cars, causing $659,000 damage, and also wreaked havoc in the back country, ripping into backpacks to get food. Seven people suffered minor injuries trying to protect their food from bears. Three bears that had become overly aggressive were euthanized.

“The bears were everywhere,” said Kate McCurdy, a wildlife biologist at the park. “They were in the campgrounds getting into cars, into the trash; they were learning it from each other. My boss and I would drive all over the valley at night and you would just see the bears scatter.”

But three years later, biologists in Yosemite are encouraged as most park bears seem to be acting like wild animals again. Armed with an annual appropriation of $500,000 from Congress, secured by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), the park has mounted an aggressive program to wean Yosemite’s bears from human food.

As a result, the number of bear incidents has dropped steadily since 1998 and is on a record-low pace this year. Through early September, bears had broken into 64 cars, and bear sightings in Yosemite Valley had declined sharply. About 50 park employees now work on bear management, up from just five in 1998.

The success of the new program came when biologists finally realized they had to get into the trash-management business, McCurdy said. That meant dealing with those who created the mess: people.

On a warm night recently, an earnest young ranger named Jeffrey Trust cruised one of the valley’s campgrounds. His mission, he said, was to “educate” campers about proper food and trash storage. Such patrols, once a rarity, are now common.

At one site, occupied by a family with three children, Trust delivered his stump speech and then spotted something on the ground: a box of moist towelettes. “If you can put it in your mouth or on your skin, it goes in the bear box,” he reminded the family.

Until recently, no one was delivering that message to park visitors, at least not on a daily basis.

Bear-Proof Food Lockers Installed

Over the years, park employees and visitors came to accept bears gravitating toward human food. Although various halfhearted attempts were made to stop the problem, it wasn’t until 1991 that the park received money in its budget to install bear-proof food lockers known as “bear boxes” at every campsite.

Because this took so long to accomplish, Yosemite’s campgrounds were for decades a smorgasbord for bears, which apparently found it took a lot less effort to raid coolers than it did to forage for berries, insects or acorns.

In the wild, bears tear apart downed logs looking for insects. But over time, Yosemite’s bears had come to see cars as little more than mobile logs with windows. Instead of peeling bark, a hungry bear would insert a claw between the door and the vehicle’s frame and peel.

Weaning the bears off human food is a long process that begins and ends with retraining people.

Every night, park rangers make the rounds of Yosemite’s parking lots. Ranger Greg Webb was doing just that one night not long ago when he shined a flashlight into a minivan parked at the Curry Village lodging and retail enclave and spotted a head of lettuce and a loaf of bread in plain view on the front seat. “Oh, boy,” he said with a sigh.

Ten feet away was a large sign that read: “DO NOT LEAVE FOOD IN CARS.”

Under the park’s new bear program, Webb could have had the van towed to a bear-proof impound lot surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. To get the vehicle back, the owner would have had to pay a small fee as well as endure what park officials call “re-education”--a sternly worded lecture about bears.

But Webb was in a charitable mood. All he did was take the van’s license number. The owner would be roused from bed and ordered to store the food.

As park rangers Trust and Webb patrolled the valley, wildlife technician Joe Madison prepared a bear meal. Donning gloves, he reached into a garbage bag and assembled a combo plate that included leftover prime rib from the park’s Ahwahnee Hotel, watermelon rind, rotten banana and old cheese. Somehow, he managed not to gag.

Madison put the meal inside a bear trap set in a culvert. The idea, he explained, is to trap as many bears as possible in Yosemite Valley and put radio collars on them, allowing researchers to track their movements. Before releasing captured bears, Madison shoots them with a beanbag, the price the bear pays for its attraction to human food. “We’re not trying to haze bears from the valley,” he said. “We just want them out of the developed areas.”

The trapping has another purpose. For all that’s known about Yosemite’s bears, many facts remain elusive. No one knows how many of the park’s bears eat human food or how many live in or make visits to Yosemite Valley.

While some park visitors regard the trapping and hazing as intrusive, or even mean-spirited, wildlife biologists say they are trying to protect the bears from their own worst instincts. In the last four years, the park has euthanized 15 bears that were so relentless in their pursuit of human food that rangers feared they posed a threat to people. Madison said he would rather have a scared bear than a dead bear.

Euthanizing Bears a Difficult Choice

Both Madison and McCurdy, the wildlife biologist, have had to kill bears. To them, it’s the ultimate betrayal of their profession and the national park system, which was created in part to protect nature and wildlife.

“We’ll sit around a table trying to decide if we should give this animal one more try,” McCurdy said, describing how a decision is reached to euthanize a Yosemite bear. “But then you lie in bed at night and say, ‘Is this the night the bear finally rips through a tent and our lives are changed forever because we made a wrong decision?’ ”

Sitting in her office at 10:30 p.m. after another long day, McCurdy points out another pressing, if less obvious, problem. The park’s wildlife staff is so busy dealing with bears--and trash management--it has little time to work with species struggling to survive in the park. The list now includes several types of amphibians, great horned owls and bighorn sheep.

At the same time, McCurdy is encouraged by the success of Yosemite’s bear-control program. Some people, she said, had predicted that the park’s bears would starve if they were denied access to human food. But most of them appear to have returned to their natural diets, perhaps deciding it’s less taxing to wade into a berry patch than to try to steal a six-pack of beer--an old bear favorite--from a campground.

“If you follow the bears around long enough, you can learn a lot from what they know,” McCurdy said. “They are literally our secret agents. They’ll tell us where our problems are. They’ll show us where people are being slobs. Because if it’s out there, they’ll find it. You can’t hide things from bears.”