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YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK More bears means park must 'manage people' By MICHAEL MILSTEIN Gazette Wyoming Bureau YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK - For many decades lasting through the 1960s, the so-called "roadside bears" that took food handouts from Yellowstone National Park visitors became one of the park's most popular attractions, so popular that even presidents Harding and Coolidge happily fed the begging bears.
 Gazette photo/MICHAEL MILSTEIN Visitors to Yellowstone National Park often congregate in areas where wildlife are commonly seen. But beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1970s, as park managers shifted toward a more natural scene in Yellowstone, they cracked down on bear-feeding and closed down the park garbage dumps that kept many park bears fat and happy. Soon bears were no longer roadside attractions and repeat visitors complained that one of the park's greatest spectacles had disappeared. Now, some 20 years later, roadside bears are again becoming a common sight in Yellowstone, but instead of taking handouts, they are seeking natural food along road corridors that may be some of the last vacant bear habitat left in the park. "It's getting to the point where visitors now have a high probability of seeing bears again," park grizzly bear biologist Kerry Gunther said. "In this case, the bear is not eating marshmallows - it's killing an elk or feeding naturally." Park biologists count about four grizzly bears and five to 10 black bears that are now spending much of their time along roadsides, attracting crowds just like the old roadside bears. And today's resulting "bear jams" present just as much of a challenge for park rangers, who try to accommodate the public fascination with bears while also keeping people a safe distance from the impressive carnivores. "Roadside bears used to be just here and there," Gunther said. "Now it's fairly predominant. There's a burnout factor for the staff, but the public loves it, and it's one of the reasons they come to Yellowstone." Park officials plan next year to begin including an article in the informational tabloid distributed to park visitors discussing Yellowstone's rising number of roadside bears and how to observe them safely, he said. The resurgence in roadside bears arises from several factors, biologists said. First, many but not all biologists believe that the number of grizzly bears in the Yellowstone ecosystem is increasing, with the most recent estimate putting the number at somewhere between 280 and 610 bears. The rising numbers are pushing bears into roadside habitats that they might otherwise have shied away from because of the traffic and people. "As we see more and more bears on the roadsides, it may be suggesting that it's the last open habitat, good habitat, to be occupied," Gunther said. Secondly, park managers have backed away from their previous strategy of capturing and moving bears that linger around roads and other areas of high human use because many such bears simply returned to where they had been captured in the first place. Biologists also had an increasingly difficult time identifying vacant bear habitat where they can safely release such bears without dropping them into another bear's territory. Aversive conditioning - shooting bears with beanbags or rubber bullets to frighten them away from peopled areas - also met with mixed success. "Now our management has evolved," Gunther said. "Moving bears hasn't always seemed to work. Aversive conditioning wasn't as successful as we had hoped. Now we're tending toward allowing the bears to use the roadsides. Instead of managing bears, we're trying to manage the people." Managing people may not always be a whole lot easier. It typically requires stationing park rangers along the roadsides to keep motorists from parking on the roads themselves and to make sure people do not approach bears. In one spot between Mammoth Hot Springs and Norris, where a female grizzly with two cubs has roamed regularly this spring, rangers took to flagging down traffic, asking drivers if they would like to view the bears and then directing them to park in established turnouts and walk ahead to see the bears. "It is a much more proactive approach," Yellowstone spokeswoman Marsha Karle said. "We're trying to do what we can to make it work for both sides. It is important for people to get to see the bears, but it's also important to let them be bears." When such bears approach people - for example, to cross a road lined with people - rangers try to split the crowd, creating a path through which the bears can cross. The strategy appears to work - no park visitors have been injured in such situations. If a bear were to turn aggressive, officials would take action and try to move it or, as a last resort, remove it from the population, Gunther said. In one case, the grizzly now frequenting the Mammoth-to-Norris route happened onto food left on the road by a photographer. Rangers fired cracker shells at the bear to scare it off, so it would associate human food with a negative experience and would not go after human food again - which it has not done. Such action, along with strict enforcement of food-storage regulations mandating that food remain out of reach of bears, has kept park officials from having to remove bears in recent years. Park officials often call upon volunteers and ranger-naturalists to help manage traffic and the resulting "bear jams," which can take a toll on park staff that sometimes spend eight to 12 hours a day directing traffic and controlling crowds. There have been cases in the Tower Falls area of as many as five bear jams at once, Gunther said. While many of today's roadside bears may be "habituated" to people - that is, used to their presence within a certain distance - they are not conditioned to eating human food like the bears that once fed at park garbage dumps and the roadside bears of the past, he said. Bears using roadside habitat tend to be female bears with cubs and younger bears that may be searching for territories of their own. Because bears in general prefer to avoid areas of high human use, females with young and juvenile bears may find less competition from larger, male bears along the roadsides, Gunther said. Biologists acknowledge that any bears that linger around people are more likely to eventually run into conflicts with people - by coming across human food or other means - than bears that stay away from populated areas. A recent study found that 64 percent of all grizzly deaths in the Yellowstone ecosystem from 1959 to 1998 occurred within two kilometers of roads and within four kilometers of major developments. "Anytime a bear starts spending time around people, it's more likely to get into trouble later on," said Barrie Gilbert, a professor at Utah State University. In parts of Alaska, people view grizzlies where the bears gather to feed on salmon; the people remain in defined areas where the bears have learned to tolerate them. Although far fewer people watch bears in Alaska than in Yellowstone, rangers in Yellowstone hope to follow the same example by keeping visitors from intruding on bears, Gunther said. "The bears know that on roads there are going to be hundreds of people, but they're OK out in the meadow," he said. "They've learned to live with us. If we can behave, we can live with them."
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