Author of the article:Rob GowanPublishing date:Jun 03, 2021 • 1 day ago • 4 minute read • Join the conversation
A black bear that made its way into Owen Sound in May 2015. PHOTO BY SUN TIMES FILES
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Georgian Bluffs is informing its residents about bears after sightings of the animals in the municipality this spring.
The municipality intends to post some information on its website about what people should do when encountering the animals and how to prevent bear encounters. The move comes after the animals were spotted in the municipality in recent days, particularly in the northern areas around Lake Charles, Kemble, Big Bay and beyond.18 best online deals in the Canadian retail space right now about:blankhttps://c5x8i7c7.ssl.hwcdn.net/vplayer-parallel/20210408_1900/videojs/show.html?controls=1&loop=30&autoplay=0&tracker=dd232393-332c-4f91-a9f7-ab0b8af74069&height=300&width=529&vurl=%2F%2Fa.jsrdn.com%2Fvideos%2Fcdgv_nationalpost%2F20210604054241_60b9bb8242865%2Fcdgv_nationalpost_trending_articles_20210604054241_60b9bb8242865_new.mp4&poster=%2F%2Fa.jsrdn.com%2Fvideos%2Fcdgv_nationalpost%2F20210604054241_60b9bb8242865%2Fcdgv_nationalpost_trending_articles_20210604054241_60b9bb8242865_new.jpg
Clerk Brittany Drury said during Wednesday’s council meeting that staff had reached out to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry about best practices pertaining to bear sightings. They have received some messaging that will be posted on the municipality’s website.
“We see this regularly every spring so we try to do a spring reminders commentary section on our website,” Drury said, adding they hope to have the information posted this week.
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Among the steps people are reminded to take are storing garbage in a bear-proof location until it is time for pickup, cleaning barbecues and grease traps, putting away bird feeders until winter months and keeping pet food indoors.
Mayor Dwight Burley reminded residents in rural areas to place their garbage out or in the bin at the end of their laneway on the day of pickup only.
“A bear tends to want to go where the foodsource is and if there is garbage sitting in their bins for quite a while it will probably attract them,” said Burley.
Council discussed the possibility of signs informing residents of numbers they could call to report bear sightings and damage or in the event of an emergency.
It was suggested that the municipality could include information on its digital signs at its municipal office in Springmount and at the Shallow Lake Community Centre.
On Monday, a bear was also spotted on Owen Sound’s west side. The animal was not acting aggressively and was last seen wandering into the bush area of the escarpment.
The public is reminded that should they see a bear they should not approach it or feed it. Remain calm as the bear is often just passing through and will move on if no food source is found. Pets should be kept inside if a bear is spotted and if personal safety is at risk, 911 should be called.
If a bear slowly approaches, a person is advised to slowly back away, watching the bear. Do not turn and run – make noise, throw rocks or sticks and make yourself appear as big as possible.
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The MNR says bear attacks are rare, however if a bear does attack do not play dead unless you are sure it is a mother bear attacking you in defence of its cubs. Fighting back is the best chance of discouraging a bear from continuing to attack, so use a large stick, a rock, or anything else that you can to deter the bear.
If a bear is wandering around checking garbage or knocking down bird feeders, the public should call the administration line of their local police department or the Bear Wise reporting line at 1-866-514-2327.
More information on what to do if a black bear is encountered and how to prevent such encounters, visit ontario.ca/page/prevent-bear-encounters-bear-wise.
Large herbivores, such as deer and wild horses have over evolutionary time evolved to control and maintain the grass and brush that is ubiquitous across the landscape. The now prodigious grass and brush that has resulted from a significant decline in our native herbivores is fueling and kindling catastrophic wildfires, makes them abnormally hot, resulting in the incineration of everything in their path.
And as these devastating wildfires burn for weeks and months at a time, the air quality in many areas reaches a ‘hazardous’ level due to extreme particulate concentrations combined with gaseous toxins that are deadly.
During this 2020 wildfire season, the air quality in many areas of California and Oregon (and elsewhere in America) reached levels where people are made seriously ill, while others who are exposed to this deadly air are then preconditioned and made more susceptible to a myriad of health issues down the road, and that is especially true for our children.
As a result of the ongoing mismanagement of large herbivores, this letter was penned to the Bureau of Land Management managers in the Medford, Oregon District offices by William E. Simpson II, a naturalist-researcher who studies the effects of herbivores (specifically wild horses) on wilderness landscape and wildfire.
TO: Elizabeth Burghard – BLM District Manager Medford, OR
Lauren P. Brown –
Manager – Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument
CC: Et. Al.
RE: Who Should Americans Blame For Incinerating Flames And Deadly Smoke From Wildfire?
Dear Ms. Burghard and Ms. Brown:
Enjoying our “hazardous air”? It stems from obtuse management policies that fail to observe the reality of science instead of politics, egos and money.
The following statement is relevant in regard to the removal of wild horses from the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument and areas surrounding the Monument, like the Soda Mountain Wilderness Area and the Pokegama Herd Management Area, where the BLM is idiotically rounding up wild horses (aka: large herbivores) this coming week.
Jozef Keulartz:
“The removal of large herbivores has adverse effects on landscape structure and ecosystem functioning. In wetter ecosystems, the loss of large herbivores is associated with an increased abundance of woody plants and the development of a closed-canopy vegetation. In drier ecosystems, reductions of large grazers can lead to a high grass biomass, and thus, to an increase in the frequency and intensity of wildfires. Together, with the loss of a prey base for large carnivores, these changes in vegetation structures and fire regimes may trigger cascades of extinctions (Bakker et al., 2016; Estes et al., 2011; Hopcraft, Olff, & Sinclair, 2009; Malhi et al., 2016).” http://oxfordre.com/environmentalscience/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.001.0001/acrefore-9780199389414-e-545
We all need to keep in mind that ‘administrative policy’ does not supersede established law or Acts of Congress, which represent the will of the American people as a whole, as opposed to the whims of some administrative fiefdom and it’s ruler (dictatorship), as has been the case at the BLM.
The corruption and malfeasance at the BLM now seems to arguably top any other government agency… here are just three of many examples, one concerns a BLM employee from the Medford District Office:
3) The BLM make a material misrepresentationto the Congress of the Unites States of America in their 2018 Report To Congress ‘Management Options For A Sustainable Wild Horse And Burro Program’, where on page-1, paragraph 5 of the Executive Summary they wrote: “Wild horses and burro have no natural predators...”. That statement is false in the face of wildlife ecology and evolution. Mountain lions, bears, wolves, and coyotes kill and eat the foals and adults as their natural prey.
A security official moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a World Health Organization team arrived for a field visit in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021 to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.PHOTOGRAPH BY NG HAN GUAN, AP
Newly reported information has revived scrutiny of this possible origin for the coronavirus, which experts still call unlikely though worth investigating.BYJILLIAN KRAMERPUBLISHED JUNE 4, 2021• 7 MIN READ
Months after a World Health Organization investigation deemed it “extremely unlikely” that the novel coronavirus escaped accidentally from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the idea is back in the news, giving new momentum to a hypothesis that many scientists believe is unlikely, and some have dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
The renewed attention comes on the heels of President Joe Biden’s ordering U.S. intelligence agencies on May 26 to “redouble their efforts” to investigate the origins of the coronavirus. On May 11, Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, acknowledged he’s now “not convinced” the virus developed naturally—an apparent pivot from what he told National Geographic in an interview last year.
Also last month, more than a dozen scientists—top epidemiologists, immunologists, and biologists—wrote a letter published in the journal Science calling for a thorough investigation into two viable origin stories: natural spillover from animal to human, or an accident in which a wild laboratory sample containing SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released. They urged that both hypotheses “be taken seriously until we have sufficient data,” writing that a proper investigation would be “transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight,” with conflicts of interest minimized, if possible.
“Anytime there is an infectious disease outbreak it is important to investigate its origin,” says Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security who did not contribute to the letter in Science. “The lab-leak hypothesis is possible—as is an animal spillover,” he says, “and I think that a thorough, independent investigation of its origins should be conducted.”
Unanswered questions
The origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 and has infected more than 171 million people, killing close to 3.7 million worldwide as of June 4, remain unclear. Many scientists, including those that participated in the WHO’s months-long investigation, believe the most likely explanation is that that it jumped from an animal to a person—potentially from a bat directly to a human, or through an intermediate host. Animal-to-human transmission is a common route for many viruses; at least two other coronaviruses, SARS and MERS, were spread through such zoonotic spillover.
Other scientists insist it’s worth investigating whether SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory that has studied coronaviruses in bats for more than a decade.
The WHO investigation—a joint effort between WHO-appointed scientists and Chinese officials—concluded it was “extremely unlikely” the highly transmissible virus escaped from a laboratory. But the WHO team suffered roadblocks that led some to question its conclusions; the scientists were not permitted to conduct an independent investigation and were denied access to any raw data. (We still don’t know the origins of the coronavirus. Here are 4 scenarios.)
On March 30, when the WHO released its report, its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called for further studies. “All hypotheses remain on the table,” he said at the time.
Then on May 11, Fauci told PolitiFact that while the virus most likely emerged via animal-to-human transmission, “it could have been something else, and we need to find that out.”
Recently disclosed evidence, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, has added fuel to the fire: Three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell sick in November 2019 and sought hospital care, according to a U.S. intelligence report. In the final days of the Trump administration, the State Department released a statement that researchers at the institute had become ill with “symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.”
Most epidemiologists and virologists who have studied the novel coronavirus believe that it began spreading in November 2019. China says the first confirmed case was on December 8, 2019. During a briefing in Beijing this week, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, accused the U.S. of “hyping up the theory of a lab leak,” and asked, “does it really care about the study of origin tracing, or is it trying to divert attention?” Zhao also denied the Wall Street Journalreport that three people had gotten sick.
Lab leak still ‘unlikely’
Some conservative politicians and commentators have embraced the lab-leak theory, while liberals more readily rejected it, especially early in the pandemic. The speculation has also heightened ongoing tensions between the U.S. and China.
On May 26, as the U.S. Senate passed a bill to declassify intelligence related to potential links between the Wuhan laboratory and COVID-19, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican who sponsored the bill, said, “the world needs to know if this pandemic was the product of negligence at the Wuhan lab,” and lamented that “for over a year, anyone asking questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been branded as a conspiracy theorist.”
Peter Navarro, Donald Trump’s former trade adviser, asserted in April 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 could have been engineered as a bioweapon, without citing any evidence.
The theory that SARS-CoV-2 was created as a bioweapon is “completely unlikely,” says William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. For one thing, he explains, for a bioweapon to be successful, it must target an adversarial population without affecting one’s own. In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 “cannot be controlled,” he says. “It will spread, including back on your own population,” making it an extremely “counterproductive biowarfare agent.”
The more plausible lab-leak hypothesis, scientists say, is that the Wuhan laboratory isolated the novel coronavirus from an animal and was studying it when it accidentally escaped. “Not knowing the extent of its virulence and transmissibility, a lack of protective measures [could have] resulted in laboratory workers becoming infected,” initiating the transmission chain that ultimately resulted in the pandemic, says Rossi Hassad, an epidemiologist at Mercy College.
But Hassad adds he believes that this lab-leak theory is on the “extreme low end” of possibilities, and it “will quite likely remain only theoretical following any proper scientific investigation,” he says.
Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to report back with their findings in 90 days, which would be August 26.
Based on the available information, Eyal Oren, an epidemiologist at San Diego State University, says it’s apparent why the most accepted hypothesis is that this virus originated in an animal and jumped to a human: “What is clear is that the genetic sequence of the COVID-19 virus is similar to other coronaviruses found in bats,” he says.
Some scientists remain skeptical that concrete conclusions can be drawn. “At the end, I anticipate that the question” of SARS-CoV-2’s origins “will remain unresolved,” Schaffner says.
In the meantime, science “moves much more slowly than the media and news cycles,” Oren says.
Security analysts from the University of Minnesota warned the U.S. Agriculture Department in late May about a growing danger — a cyber crime known as ransomware that could wreak more havoc on Americans’ food sources than Covid-19 did.
A week and a half later, the prediction became reality as a ransomware attack forced the shutdown of meat plants that process more than a fifth of the nation’s beef supply in the latest demonstration of hackers’ ability to interrupt a critical piece of the U.S. economy.
The hack of the global meatpacking giant JBS last weekend is also the starkest example yet of the food system’s vulnerability to digital threats, especially as internet technology and automation gain an increasing role across farmlands and slaughterhouses. But federal oversight of the industry’s cybersecurity practices remains light, despite years of warnings that an attack could bring consequences ranging from higher grocery prices to contaminated food.
Virtually no mandatory cybersecurity rules govern the millions of food and agriculture businesses that account for about a fifth of the U.S. economy — just voluntary guidelines exist. The two federal agencies overseeing the sector include the USDA, which has faced criticism from Congress for how it secures its own data. And unlike other industries that have formed information-sharing collectives to coordinate their responses to potential cyber threats, the food industry disbanded its group in 2008.
National security threats to the agricultural supply chain haven’t received enough attention across the entire federal government, argued Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.), who serves on both the House Intelligence and Agriculture committees.
“Too often agriculture is dismissed as: ‘It’s important but it’s not that big a deal,’” Crawford said in an interview. “If you eat, you’re involved in agriculture. We all need to recognize that it’s a vital industry and this [incident] illustrates that.”
The North American Meat Institute, which represents meatpackers, declined to comment on the state of the industry’s cybersecurity measures or potential changes following the hack.
“Fast-spreading ransomware attacks could simultaneously block operations at many more plants than were affected by the pandemic,” the institute warned in its May 18 filing, noting that Covid-19 last year forced a shutdown of slaughterhouses that prompted fears of meat shortages and price spikes.
It was just the latest in a series of warnings from national security and law enforcement agencies, private cybersecurity companies and academic researchers.
In November, the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said in a report that its threat-hunting service had witnessed a tenfold increase in interactive — or “hands-on-keyboard” — intrusions affecting the agriculture industry over the previous 10 months. Adam Meyers, the company’s senior vice president of intelligence, said that of the 160 hacking groups or gangs the company tracks, 13 have been identified in targeting agriculture.
The industry also offers plentiful targets: As the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber agency notes, the ag and food sector includes “an estimated 2.1 million farms, 935,000 restaurants, and more than 200,000 registered food manufacturing, processing, and storage facilities,” almost all under private ownership.
For decades, however, most farmers and foodmakers have prized productivity over all else, including security — trying to eke out profits in an industry with chronically narrow margins and meet the growing global demand for food. In the quest for efficiency, meat plants are ratcheting up their processing line speeds and investing in robotics to more quickly carve up carcasses. Farmers are adopting high-tech innovations like drones, GPS mapping, soil sensors and autonomous tractors, with vast data behind it all.
All that connectivity and automation comes at a cost.
Video: Alarming rise of ransomware attacks (ABC News)Play VideoAlarming rise of ransomware attacks
“This is part of the downside of having an enormous technology, enormous capacity to turn a lot of data and become more efficient,” Vilsack said. “There are risks associated with that.”
‘No industry is off limits’
The disruption to JBS, which controls nearly a quarter of America’s cattle processing, has raised concerns mainly about the impact on meat markets. USDA data shows wholesale beef prices have steadily ticked higher each day since the hack, with choice cuts climbing above $341 per hundred pounds as of Thursday morning.
Higher prices are just one of many potential consequences. Cyberattacks could also lead to the sale of tainted food to the public, financial ruin for producers, or even the injury and death of plant workers, according to the Food Protection and Defense Institute, a DHS-recognized group.
In its public comments to USDA, the institute highlighted gaping holes in the industry’s preparedness, including a general “lack of awareness throughout the sector” and scant guidance from government regulators. It also noted that large parts of the industry rely on decades-old, custom-written software that is essentially impossible to update, along with outdated operating systems like Windows 98.
“The agriculture industry probably lags behind some of the other industries that have been hit harder by cyber crime” like the financial sector, which has long been a prime target for criminals, said Michael Daniel, president and chief executive of the Cyber Threat Alliance, a nonprofit organization.
However, the JBS hack, just like the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in May and the ensuing gasoline-buying panic, shows that “no industry is off limits,” he added. Ransomware operators “are going to go wherever they think they can extract money.”
Daniel, a cyber coordinator during the Obama administration, said he would recommend that industry executives take basic steps like assessing their companies’ digital preparedness and reviewing federal security guidelines.
“What I would be telling them is: You really need to be thinking about how you manage your cybersecurity risk, just like you manage commodity price risk, just like you manage natural disaster risk, just like you manage legal risk,” Daniel said.
The White House similarly advised all companies on Thursday to harden their defenses, including by installing the latest software updates and requiring extra authentication for anyone logging onto their systems.
Meyers, from CrowdStrike, said seriousness with which cybersecurity is regarded varies “depending on who you’re talking to in the ag industry.” He said multinational conglomerates that have intellectual property worth protecting make it a priority, but “as you get down the food chain, so to speak, they probably think about it less seriously.”
The JBS hack “is the big wake-up call for all these small, medium and large businesses. You can’t stick your head in the sand, and hope it’s not going to happen to you because it is,” Meyers said. “You need to be prepared, and you need to get yourself ready to fight. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be paying a ransom and somebody’s going to be eating your lunch.”
A call for Congress to act
Congress may need to step in to help fix the situation, said Crawford, the House member from Arkansas, who reintroduced legislation earlier this year that would establish an intelligence office within USDA. The office would serve as a conduit for the department to keep farmers informed of threats to their livelihood, including espionage and cyber operations by malign actors.
A key reason the industry isn’t prepared against dangers like ransomware is that the U.S. intelligence community hasn’t considered the national security threats to agriculture as much as it should, Crawford argued.
He added that communication must go both ways: Companies need to have their cyber experts share what they see with their government counterparts. No such requirements exist for the food and ag industry.
“What I would advise the private sector to do is be proactive on these things as possible,” according to Crawford, who is organizing a “business intelligence and supply chain integrity” forum this summer that will feature cybersecurity experts, government officials and representatives from the clandestine community to educate local businesses about digital threats.
USDA has not proposed any significant policy changes following the JBS attack, instead asking food and agriculture companies to take voluntary steps to safeguard their IT and infrastructure from cyber threats. Vilsack on Thursday pointed to guidelines from DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that companies can adopt for their own protection.
There’s no shortage of policy recommendations from experts in the field. Most proposals involve educating industry leaders and employees, setting minimum standards for cyber safety or improving coordination between companies and agencies.
Another step recommended by the Food Protection and Defense Institute: USDA and DHS should work with the industry to create a cyber threats clearinghouse — known as an “information sharing and analysis center” — to collaborate on studying and addressing digital risks.
Other critical industries, including the electricity and financial sectors, already have their own ISACs, but the food industry does not. Instead, some food and ag companies have joined a broader information-sharing group that covers the information technology industry, said Scott Algeier, executive director of the IT-ISAC.
“They wanted to engage with other companies but did not have an ISAC. So they applied to us,” said Algeier, whose organization also provides a threat-sharing forum for the elections industry.
The nonprofit Internet Security Alliance has called for federal grants and other incentives for food companies to step up their cyber defenses.
“Increasing cybersecurity will cost money, and finding the additional funding will not be simple for the sector since it is governed by tight margins and faces a highly competitive world market,” the group wrote on its website.
Helena Bottemiller Evich contributed to this report.
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CHARLESTON, W.Va. (KDKA) – West Virginia Governor Jim Justice’s office announced they are expanding the state’s vaccination lottery to include several prizes including hunting rifles.
During a Tuesday briefing, Justice announced those vaccinated would be entered to win hunting rifles, a $1.588 million grand prize, a $588,00 second-place prize, full scholarships to any higher education institution in West Virginia, custom trucks, weekend vacations at state parks, and lifetime hunting and fishing licenses.READ MORE:Child Tax Credit: When Monthly Checks Start And Other Important Info
By Ula Chrobak3rd June 2021FromKnowable MagazineEmissions of the greenhouse gas commonly known as laughing gas are soaring. Can we cut emissions from its greatest anthropogenic source?I
In the world’s effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the source of our food is coming into the spotlight. There’s good reason for that:Agriculture accounts for 16 to 27% of human-caused climate-warming emissions.But much of these emissions are not from carbon dioxide, that familiar climate change villain. They’re from another gas altogether: nitrous oxide (N2O).
Also known as laughing gas, N2O does not get nearly the attention it deserves, says David Kanter, a nutrient pollution researcher at New York University and vice-chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative, an organisation focused on nitrogen pollution research and policy making. “It’s a forgotten greenhouse gas,”…
Sea ice across much of theArcticis thinning twice as fast as previously thought, researchers have found.
Arctic ice is melting as the climate crisis drives up temperatures, resulting in a vicious circle in which more dark water is exposed to the sun’s heat, leading to even more heating of the planet.
The faster ice loss means the shorter north-eastern shipping passage from China to Europe will become easier to navigate, but it also means new oil and gas extraction is more feasible.
Calculating the thickness of sea ice from satellite radar…
This is the first of a two-part essay on the famous bear matron of Jackson Hole, Grizzly 399, and the mounting threats she and other grizzlies face. Part 2 will focus on a path forward.You might also want to listen to a fascinating Grizzly Times podcast (2 episodes) with renowned photographer Tom Mangelsen, who waxes eloquent about his 15-year relationship with this special bear and his advocacy for the wild.
Few if any animals have been more celebrated than 399, the matron grizzly bear of Grand Teton National Park. Each year, families flock to Jackson Hole hoping to catch a glimpse of her shepherding her latest brood – now four irrepressible yearlings. Her grown-up daughter, Grizzly 610, accompanied by two pre-adolescent cubs now as large as she is, generates almost as much excitement. Today, about 10 grizzlies of 399’s lineage make their living along Jackson Hole’s roads in the company of people.
With a global fan club, Grizzly 399 is an ambassador for grizzlies everywhere. Her tolerance for people is legendary. To cross a road, she is known to look both ways before threading through parked cars and mobs of delighted onlookers, as doors slam and kids shriek – placidly returning to fetch a cub still wrestling with a road cone. Who could still cling to the myth that grizzlies are vicious man-eaters after beholding the ways of 399?
But as the fame of these roadside grizzlies had grown, so have the crowds. Current systems to keep visitors and grizzlies safe are breaking down. As summer tourist season begins with a vengeance, officials are often either nowhere to be seen — or they are firing projectiles at bears in a cruel, disorganized, and futile effort to haze grizzlies rather than manage people.
Not long ago 399 and her four youngsters were swarmed by 300 people – with no Park Ranger in sight. And 610, known as an especially protective mom, bluffed charged two tourists out of a mob of 150 who got too close. East of the park, 863 (aka “Felicia”) and her adorable new cubs face a tsunami of people, cracker shells fired by state managers, as well as semis barreling down the adjacent highway at 70 miles an hour.
Anywhere grizzlies are visible we are seeing scenes of bedlam and terrifying close calls – and tourist season has just begun. Last year, record numbers of people — throngs numbering as many as 1000 — gathered any time 399 or other roadside grizzlies appeared. The spectacle lasted from Memorial Day to New Year’s Day, when 399 broke trail for her youngsters through chest-deep snow to reach her den.
Caring citizens, most of them veteran photographers and wildlife watchers, are doing what they can to keep tourists from crowding Jackson Hole’s grizzlies. Last year these citizen volunteers saved the lives of 399, 610 and other grizzlies many times. So did Wyoming Game and Fish biologist Mike Boyce, who spent long days and nights trying to keep 399 safe as she ventured south of the town of Jackson onto private lands.
But these efforts are a drop in the bucket of a sea of need. This summer we can expect another valence shift in tourism as pent-up families seek beauty, solace and adventure in our National Parks. With ever more airlines servicing the Yellowstone and Grand Teton region, another record-breaking year of visitation is virtually guaranteed – and with it, more pressure on the region’s world-class wildlife.
When I asked veteran Jackson News and Guide reporter Mike Kosmrl what he thought this summer would bring for Grand Teton’s grizzlies, he offered one word: “chaos.”
This chaos surrounding 399 and her offspring highlights the threats posed by so many people, compounded by long-neglected deficiencies in grizzly bear management. Courageous government action is urgently needed – on behalf of not just grizzlies, but also on behalf of the multitudes who care about these wild animals.
Grizzly 399’s Unique Strategy: Depending on the Kindness of Strangers
Grizzly 399 makes her living near people, teaching generations of cubs how to live amicably along roads and around recreation areas. Her main reason for settling into these human-impacted environments is to keep her cubs safe from aggressive male grizzlies—known as boars—that often prefer to hang out in more remote areas.
For her and other female grizzlies who frequent roadsides, staying near people is a better bet than mixing it up with boars who can and will kill cubs. Every day, these females and their offspring literally depend on the kindness of strangers, to borrow from Blanche Dubois’ famous line in A Streetcar Named Desire.
To these grizzlies, people are allies – even, at times, babysitters. This should not surprise us given the stories told for millennia by Native Peoples throughout the Northern Hemisphere about humans living among bears, saved by bears, even marrying bears.
We know more about 399 than most grizzly bears because she has lived her long life so close to us. Tom Mangelsen, a world-famous photographer, has photo-documented his 15-year relationship with this special bear, co-writing a lovely book about her.
A successful and attentive mom, 399 is the quintessential mother with muffins in the oven. She birthed and successfully raised three sets of triplets. And last year, she performed a miracle when she emerged with quadruplets at the age of twenty-four – ancient for a mother bear. Her feat is especially noteworthy given that only eight litters of quadruplets have been documented in the Yellowstone ecosystem since 1983.
We cannot forget the difference that one good mom can make. All existing Yellowstone grizzly bears are the decedents of perhaps only 50 females alive during the early 1980’s. Every mom matters. And a female such as 399 is an Olympian.
But despite her competence as a mother, so far 399 has raised only two females who have also had cubs, Grizzlies 610 and 962, the latter just appearing with a new cub. The reasons are straight-forward. Grizzly bear birth rates are inherently low and many of 399’s offspring have been killed by humans.
But humans can be benevolent. There is no doubt that 399 would not still be with us were it not for the dedication of the Park Service. Indeed, a past superintendent of Grand Teton Park, Mary Scott, spared 399’s life when, as a young mom with cubs, she mauled a jogger who came too close as she fed upon a dead elk. Since then, with the help of volunteers who comprise its Bear Brigade, Grand Teton Park has tried to ensure that everybody — bears and humans — stays safe.
But the crush of park visitors is overwhelming agency capacity. Despite clear warning signs that this year would see record tourism, government agencies are again on their back heel. They have also failed to adapt to the tangible impacts of a warming climate, which is prompting bears to be up long before the Brigade is typically assembled and long after it disbands for the season.
Moreover, when 399 steps outside the borders of the National Parks, she enters a more dangerous world.
The Perils of an Olympian Mom
Much of 399’s home range lies outside the protected landscapes of Grand Teton Park. She dens and forages on Bridger Teton National Forest lands that abut the park. The Forest is a deadlier environment because it is managed for “multiple use,” meaning mostly for the benefit of hunters, ranchers, off-road vehicle users and increasingly, mountain bikers. Not surprisingly, one of 399’s cubs, Grizzly 587, was killed by managers after depredating cows on a Forest Service grazing allotment, where notoriously anti-grizzly ranchers dominate management of public lands that are ostensibly owned by all citizens.
399 must also dodge poachers who often are undeterred by the hefty penalties that can be levied under the Endangered Species Act — but too often are not. Indeed, one of her daughters, Grizzly 615, aka Persistence, was gunned down illegally as she ate a moose carcass on National Forest land close to the Park border.
She and other bears such as Grizzly 863 must also avoid being splattered on the roads as trucks and tourists speed to their next destination. And even inside Grand Teton Park, roads are dangerous. Two of 399’s cubs have been killed by vehicle collisions.
399 must, moreover, navigate private lands, dogs, compost piles, beehives, garbage and more. Even in Jackson, where wildlife is abundant, too many people still unthinkingly contribute to destroying bears by poorly managing food and garbage. One woman has continued to feed grizzlies and other wildlife despite government efforts to dissuade her. The results are predictable. One of 399’s cubs, Grizzly 964, developed such a bad garbage habit that she was relocated last summer to the north end of the ecosystem.
And now 399 and other roadside bears must dodge projectiles fired from shotguns, part of an ill-conceived, haphazard and doomed effort by the Park Service to haze her and other grizzlies away from the roadside environment they depend on.
Of Riot Control and Half Measures
With the Park Service understaffed and its Bear Brigade not fully assembled, the agency is floundering to deal with crowds gathering long before Memorial Day, the traditional kickoff date for summer tourist season. But instead of expanding its program and more aggressively managing the people, government officials are taking out their anxiety on innocent bears by shooting them with rubber bullets and rock salt or dosing them with bear spray when they near roads. The effort is erratic and disorganized, with contradictory messages to the public about what the agency is doing and why. (The Park Service did not respond to an interview request by deadline).
Such riot control tactics will fail, even as they harm the bears. Roadside females are more terrified of male bears in the backcountry that might eat their cubs than they are of the poorly implemented and ill-thought-out hazing efforts. Grizzlies such as 399 and 610 have long relied on limited roadside habitats and cannot—more importantly will not—just pick up and relocate.
Many roadside bears would rather suffer the punishment of rubber bullets, no matter how severe, than mix it up with aggressive bears that can be a mortal threat. Proving this point, years ago one black bear was actually bludgeoned to death by rubber bullets while cowering along a narrow strip of habitat along a road in Yellowstone Park. And hazing is deeply stressful and confusing to the animals. As anyone who has trained or rescued a dog knows well, stress and fear can make animals more unpredictable and aggressive towards people.
Furthermore, an effective hazing program is extraordinarily difficult to implement. Negative experiences need to be unrelenting and consistent if bears are to learn to avoid specific environs such as roadsides. Execution of such a program requires resources, discipline, and skill on the part of managers—something that has never been achieved before. Without this mix of ingredients, hazing programs devolve into little more than the gratuitous infliction of pain on targeted bears. And bears are intelligent, which makes the job even harder. In Yellowstone, grizzlies targeted for hazing quickly learned to disappear when the green Park Service trucks arrived and return to the roadsides when they left.
The Park Service is hardly the only agency failing these bears and the broader public who care about their well-being. Others with authority over grizzlies include the state of Wyoming, Bridger Teton National Forest, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Wyoming Department of Transportation, and Teton County.
Importantly, the state of Wyoming dictates wildlife management on nonpark lands. State managers have long been hostile towards large predators such as grizzlies, seen as competitors for elk and moose. In the zero-sum calculous of state managers, any elk or moose killed by a predator translates into lost hunting-license revenues. As problematic, those predators that managers do allow to live are seen as little more than grist for the mill of trophy hunting. It is no surprise that state managers resent celebrity roadside grizzlies because, beloved by nonhunters, these bears represent an alien and even existential threat.
The fundamentally antagonistic view of Wyoming Game and Fish towards these bears and their fans has been on full display on Togwotee Pass in recent days, where officials are exploding cracker shells at Felicia and her newborns and imposing erratic constraints on viewers. (Wyoming Game and Fish did not respond to an interview request by deadline). Wyoming Game and Fish large carnivore specialist Dan Thompson, who is in charge of these efforts, made his view clear several years ago, saying: “Habituation towards people and the roadside bear situation, it’s not something that we’re supportive of.”
Gutted by budget cuts, the Bridger Teton Forest is also ill-equipped to manage mounting numbers of recreational users on forest lands near Grand Teton Park, even as the agency continues to shirk its legal duty to conserve wildlife. Similarly, Teton County has struggled to ensure meaningful sanitation on private lands. And Wyoming Department of Transportation has done precious little to improve safe passage for wildlife, in contrast to successful systems of overpasses and underpasses built in Montana’s Flathead Valley and in Canada’s National Parks.
But the agency with the clearest legal authority to help these bears is the one that is most conspicuously absent: the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The Endangered Species Act charges FWS with recovering threatened species, using the best available science in decision-making, and ensuring that federal and state agencies take a precautionary approach in decisions affecting protected species. Despite this duty, the FWS has done little lately other than sanction the killing and relocating of grizzlies that are increasingly deemed to be “surplus” by FWS managers.
Thankfully, citizen volunteers have been stepping into the breach.
Into the Breach
In recent years, concerned citizens, most of them photographers, have been helping manage tourists at often understaffed wildlife jams – and they are up to their eyeballs this spring. Too numerous to count, citizens routinely step in to slow traffic and keep tourists from getting too close, literally saving not only people who are careless, but also the lives of roadside bears. Any time a person gets injured, the involved bear almost invariably pays the ultimate price.
Recognizing the scale of the need, last winter, photographers Jack and Gina Bayles created Team 399 to raise money through donations and the sale of merchandise to help support Grand Teton Park’s Wildlife Brigade, through the Park’s nonprofit arm, Grand Teton Park Foundation. They are hoping that contributions from these bears’ enormous social media following can be channeled into work to help keep them safe.
This summer Team 399 is also partnering with Friends of the Bridger Teton National Forest, the nonprofit private adjunct of the Forest, to sponsor additional seasonal staff to help educate and manage roadside throngs of bear-watchers in Felicia’s haunts along Highway 287 on Togwotee Pass. After a successful foray last year, Friends of the Bridger Teton has again hired two roadside bear ambassadors to help manage viewers along this hazardous stretch of highway.
Meanwhile, other local organizations are engaged in complementary work. The Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation is working with Wyoming Department of Transportation to improve signage along area roads. Greater Yellowstone Coalition has been working with the Bridger Teton Forest to increase the number of bear-resistant storage boxes at campsites. Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, Wyoming Untrapped and Cougar Fund work to raise awareness of the value of large carnivores, especially grizzlies, wolves and mountain lions. And Friends of 760, named for a grandson of 399 who was killed as a result of government bungling, is working to make sure similar mistakes do not happen again.
But while citizens and nonprofit groups can help immeasurably, they lack legal authority and anything close to adequate resources to tackle the crisis facing grizzlies around Jackson. The government must step in — immediately and in a much bigger way — on behalf of the public trust and threatened grizzlies that will always depend on the kindness of strangers.
Part 2 outlines a path forward to ensure that 399 and the other grizzlies of Greater Yellowstone flourish.
Louisa Willcox is a longtime grizzly bear activist and founder of Grizzly Times. She lives in Montana.
BLOOMINGTON –A two-day trial in Monroe Circuit Court last week, cleared hunter Michael Nanny, of Gosport of any wrongdoing.
Nanny was accused of two counts of criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon.
Nanny was accused of firing his New England-brand 12-gauge shotgun while turkey hunting just before dawn on Sunday, April 29, 2018, leaving two other Gosport men injured.
According to Indiana Conservation officers the victims, a 43-year-old man, and a 48-year-old man were turkey hunting around 6:40 a.m. on private property in northwest Monroe County.
As they hunted, another hunter was walking along the field line when hesaw and heard what he thought to be a turkey, and fired in the direction ofthe two men.
Officials said the men were struck but neither man’s injuries…
