Subject: Re: Bird-related Contents of Journal of Wildlife Management, Vol 60,
Date: Apr 27 10:46:42 1996
From: Don Baccus - donb at Rational.COM


>Having just found homes for three Yellowstone, "three strikes" bears for the
>second time in the past four years I think there might be something to
>this one.

So far, it's still controversial among griz bios, even if one discounts
the conservation community. This past fall/winter saw several killed,
as I understand it primarily sows with cubs. Some biologists are
concerned that sow mortality is too high. Among other things, I
believe that they are spending more time outside the park since the
fire, leading to a higher rate of conflicts with hunters, which is
with whom most of the recent sow/human conflicts have taken place.

There was also a big outcry over the killing of a couple? few?
bears who'd taken a small number of cattle during a study on
griz/cattle interactions, on NF land. The outcry came about
due to the fact that a few outside griz bios felt that killing
the bears in essence ended the study, which had been intended
to attempt to measure the scale of bear predation on free-roaming
cattle near the park, before enough data to be of use had been
gathered.

There's still a lot of uncertainty about bear numbers. Unfortunately
the number of habitual offenders isn't necessarily related in any
way to the number of bears, so I wouldn't pay too much attention
to the number of bears which need relocation into captivity as any
kind of indicator.

The fact that biologists disagree is good news in one sense, at
least. Unlike salmon, there's no unified view that the population
is in the toilet, but rather controversy over whether or not
the population is healthy enough to move forward with plans to
delist (which will control the population, indirectly, as strict
controls on killing bears outside the park would be eased as part
of this). It's the fact that sows in their prime suffer the
highest mortality from humans (in recent years, at least) that
concerns the biologists who feel it is too early to be speaking
of delisting.


- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>
Nature photos, on-line guides, at http:://www.xxxpdx.com/~dhogaza