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Bear Man — Page 4
We hop into his new Toyota Tacoma, pulling off the highway
at Function Junction south of Whistler, passing by framed
townhomes for the Olympic Village. We’re headed
back to his old stomping grounds. Though the landfill’s
been closed for two years, there’s the unmistakable
pong of garbage in the air. We park, and as we trudge
along a snow-packed trail out of the Whistler Demonstration
Forest I catch it again, a flash of Allen as a bear—the
powerfully rounded shoulders, the gait, the gloved hands
hanging pawlike. When I’d confessed to Allen’s
colleague Allana Williams my tendency to ascribe ursine
qualities to him, she recalled the time he gave a presentation
at the Millennium Centre. This was before he had a car.
She’d dropped him off afterward, not noticing
that he’d left his bag in the back seat. The next
day, she said, Allen must have hitched out to her neighbourhood,
having only a general idea of where she lived, and wandered
the area until he recognized her car. He’d gone
into the back, grabbed his bag, and left, leaving the
door open. “Just like a bear would!” she
said, laughing.
We stop to put on snowshoes and head up into the trees.
We follow his tracks from the previous week, when he
came to check on some dens further up the mountain.
The route winds through western hemlock and fir, between
the clearcut and the old growth of the ravine. He stops
to point out where he watched two cubs, yearlings, repeatedly
sliding down a slope. They discovered Allen, perhaps
still smelling of the pizza he’d eaten earlier,
and clambered over him like kittens, stepping on his
face. The sow looked on unperturbed. He realized that
this was not a precedent he wanted to set, left, and
never let it happen again.
Food and habitat are where the needs of humans and bears
intersect. Whistler’s ski runs and three golf
courses provide attractive tracts of grass for the bears
to graze on. However, resort development steadily encroaches
on bear habitat, crowding bears together, stressing
them out. And what habitat they do have sees more and
more human activity. “May and June, bikes and
bears are really close together. It’s not the
best situation, mountain bikes whizzing down right through
the clover where bears are feeding,” says Allen.
“We’re not competitors, but we both need
our space. Thankfully the bears have adapted to the
bikers.”
And some bears have become accustomed to encroaching
on human habitat, down in the valley. As they do, they
develop a taste for what humans leave out. A bear will
feed for about 15 to 16 hours a day, eating up to 50,000
berries in that time to gain weight for winter. Pasta
with cream sauce from a dumpster, or even pet food,
packs far more bang for the bite. A single bird feeder
can provide a bear with a half-day’s worth of
calories. When there’s a bad berry crop, as there
was last year, habituated bears will come down into
the valley seeking calorie-rich, efficient food sources.
Along with the garbage they’ll also ingest crushed
glass and huge amounts of plastic. To get what they
seek, they’ll tip over “bear proof”
containers, climb up the side of hotels to get in through
patio doors, break into houses, and enter garbage sheds.
Although a Whistler black bear has yet to injure or
kill a person recreating in its habitat, humans have
far less tolerance for a bear feeding around their homes.
As they say, a fed bear is a dead bear. Leaving space
and corridors for the bears to roam is important, but
absolutely critical to our peaceful coexistence with
bears is taking control of our communities’ garbage.
As we descend into a gully, Allen tells me not to stray
from his narrow track, which follows the trunk of a
tree lying across a jumble of car-size boulders beneath
the two-metre snowpack. We’re visiting the first
occupied den Allen ever found (one of 320 he’s
located). Fourteen winters ago he was snowshoeing down
this very gorge when a black head with pricked ears
popped into sight. The den opens through the base of
a 30-metre-tall red cedar sprouting from the 40-degree
slope. From the den’s vantage point you can see
clear across the Cheakamus River and down the valley
to Sproat Mountain. I could write this real-estate listing
in my head. As it turns out, though, this prime- view
bear condo is empty.
I ask where Jeanie is denned. He knows where she is,
of course: buried deep beneath the snow in a den on
the north side of Whistler. At about the time this story
is published, she and her remaining cub will emerge
from their den and head down into the valley, to the
nearest skunk-cabbage swamp. Black bears mate on a two-year
cycle; they give birth in January, during hibernation,
and keep their cubs for about 18 months before chasing
them off in June. This is the year she’ll turn
her cub out. The next time she has cubs, especially
if there’s another bad berry crop, she’ll
probably turn to garbage again. However many friends
she may have, old habits die hard, and Jeanie’s
will probably only die when she does.
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