Posted on 04/02/2007 8:59:21 PM PDT by Dacb
Juanita Neidrauer got into the alpaca and llama business to feed her gentle art of weaving and spinning. Little did she know that six of her native South American animals would meet a violent end, victims of a male grizzly bear's one-night killing rampage on B.C.'s central coast.
"What alpacas and llamas do, if there is a danger, they run towards it," explained Neidrauer, a 68-year-old resident of Hagensborg in the Bella Coola Valley. "They sort of attack it."
That tactic might work in the high reaches of the Andes. But on the grizzly-laden B.C. coast? Not so much.
"They attacked that bear and it probably made him mad," Neidrauer said. "This guy must have been pretty persistent to kill them all -- the last one a real fighter. He didn't eat them, didn't do anything, just plainly killed them."
The Vancouver Sun learned about Neidrauer's case based on freedom-of-information documents related to the number of grizzly bears shot in 2006 in defence of people and property.
Typically, private individuals or provincial conservation officers kill 50 to 60 such grizzlies per year.
Neidrauer said the bear gutted the alpacas and llamas or broke their backs before realtor Leon Barnett -- a friend who was boarding them in a fenced 100-by-300-metre pasture on his property -- shot it dead.
The experience last June cost Neidrauer close to $30,000 and reinforced her opinion that the Bella Coola Valley, 450 kilometres west of Williams Lake, is overrun with grizzlies and something has to be done.
"We have to be reasonable," she said. "We just can't go out and shoot, shoot, shoot the bears. But there are too many grizzly bears for this area."
Grizzlies are shot around B.C. for clawing their way into chicken coops, wandering into fish farms, pilfering from residential garbage cans, and raiding aboriginal smokehouses and remote hunting and fishing camps.
Humans often have no one to blame but themselves for such dangerous encounters, including carelessly leaving out attractants. That's often the case with hunters: they may fail to store their game out of reach of bears, and instinctively reach for a gun instead of pepper spray, or fail to use inexpensive portable electric fences.
The Ministry of Environment estimates B.C. has 17,000 grizzly bears, officially a blue-listed "species of concern." Try telling that to 2,000 residents of the Bella Coola Valley on B.C.'s central coast.
"We are living in a siege mentality," protested Gary Shelton, a long-time Bella Coola Valley resident and author of three best-selling books on bear attacks. "The bears have taken over, it's that simple. We used to go out and do things. Now people need to have a dog with them, bear spray, a firearm."
In 2005, 74-year-old Jack Turner lost his ear during a grizzly attack as he walked to his daughter's house to feed her dog, also at Hagensborg. Also in the Bella Coola Valley last October, a grizzly was shot after killing and burying a roping horse worth $15,000.
Shelton said he has counted 15 different grizzlies in one season feeding on spawning salmon at a small creek on his 15-hectare property. "You need to come live here for a year. You just haven't got a clue."
Instead of going after the bears, he said, the government tells people what to do. "I'm not supposed to feed my dog on my porch, we can't have bird feeders, you can't cook bacon on Saturday morning with the window open.
"This is bullshit. People have a right out here to live as they want to live. At no time in history have grizzly bears and humans ever lived together in any kind of complacency. It's ridiculous."
It turns out the environment ministry also suspects something should be done.
"We know this is a chronic conflict area and we're going to take a look at it," Tony Hamilton, the province's carnivore specialist, said Friday in Victoria. "I'm committed to take a look at this. The idea of managing a (grizzly) population at saturation density in a community just doesn't make sense to us."
The Bella Coola Valley is home to an estimated 60 resident grizzlies, a figure that could exceed 100, including cubs, in late summer and fall when the salmon runs draw bears from other nearby areas.
Hamilton doesn't believe grizzly bear numbers are up, per se, in the Bella Coola area, but feels that loss of habitat as a result of clear-cutting in the area and a major forest fire in 2004 in Tweedsmuir Provincial Park may be driving more of them into the settled valley bottom.
The erection of electric fencing in 2004 at the Bella Coola landfill also had an impact on the bears. Conservation officers shot and killed 14 grizzlies thought to be conditioned to garbage and unlikely candidates for relocation.
Hamilton said bear viewing in Tweedsmuir also may be habituating the bears to people, and potentially making them bolder around sport fishermen. Park staff are using rubber bullets to keep the bears wary.
Hamilton agreed that while humans are often to blame for bear encounters in B.C., that doesn't seem to be a major factor in the Bella Coola Valley. "There's a lot of bears around, including adult females showing up in the community and literally defending things like fruit trees. That's indicative of a saturation density."
The number of limited-entry hunting permits in the management sub-zone that includes the Bella Coola Valley is being increased to five spring hunts and as many as 17 fall hunts in 2007, up from one spring and three fall limited-entry hunts in 2006, Hamilton said.
But that may not make much difference in the Bella Coola Valley. Past experience shows that hunters prefer to kill a grizzly in wilderness portions of the sub-zone located away from the populated valley.
The success rate on limited-entry grizzly hunts is also extremely small, in part because hunters who win the permit do not always
follow through with their hunt as planned or just don't find a bear.
Hamilton said the Bella Coola Valley -- including the key tributary, the Atnarko River -- is heaven on earth for bears: strong spawning runs of all five Pacific salmon species, and a highly productive flood plain that includes not just natural vegetation, but also fruit trees, compost, and livestock.
"You name the ecosystem and the Bella Coola's got it in abundance," he said. "No wonder we have conflicts."
The freedom-of-information documents also led The Sun to Mark McCutcheon, who was a foreman with Nechako Reforestation last May on the Malaput forest service road, about a 2.5-hour drive south of Vanderhoof.
He described how a young grizzly kept showing up for more than a week and causing a nuisance. It chewed up some of the tree boxes carried by tree planters but never showed any direct interest in humans. "We had encounters, 10 to 15 feet away. A couple of people were standing there and looked up and it was right there and not aggressive."
Still, the bear was shot as a precaution when it stole a backpack and went into a patch of trees where it was surrounded by at least five planters. "A bear surrounded by people can be quite a hazard," he said.
McCutcheon estimates he's had more than 500 bear sightings over 15 years in the tree planting business, but this is the first time he's seen one shot, evidence that bears usually keep a safe distance from people.
Another incident in the documents occurred last July at a scenic spot known as Alan's Lookout, on the Alaska Highway, near the one-horse town of Fireside just south of the Yukon border.
A bicyclist who stopped to pick berries found himself in a confrontation with two bears.
"The bears knocked over the bike and came after him," the conservation officer's report read. "Luckily, a camper spotted them and drove between the biker and the bears and let him climb aboard. . . ."
Several days and a few kilometres away later, the same two bears found the carcasses of two bison that had been dumped at an old gravel pit, where they chased away the driver of a Northwest Tel truck.
The bison had been killed in highway accidents and had unfortunately been "dragged and dropped" there by seasonal provincial park staff and volunteers, the report said.
One of the more dramatic hunting incidents listed in the documents involved two hunters at Aylard Creek near Williston Lake north of Chetwynd in September.
"A grizzly bear jumped up from approximately 25 feet away from both individuals," the conservation officer's report reads. The bear charged and the hunter "raised his bolt action rifle and pulled the trigger but the round misfired. . ." The hunter "tried to reload but was only able to pull the bolt halfway by the time the bear got to him. . . ." That's when the hunter "lunged the barrel of the rifle into the bear's mouth." The hunters managed to kill the bear without suffering injury to themselves, and later discovered the bear had a food cache 15 metres down the trail.
Guide-outfitting camps also took their toll on grizzly bears last year.
Gundahoo River Outfitters, operating in the Muncho Lake area of the Northern Rockies, reported to conservation officers shooting a grizzly in September that "trashed one of our camps and has charged our workers."
In October, Larry Warren of Tuchodi River Outfitters, also in the Northern Rockies, wrote in an e-mail to conservation officers: "We've had a young grizzly hanging around base camp here. The dogs have chased it out of camp the last three nights. Last night he showed up again and proceeded to tear into our cape shed [where skins of trophy animals killed by hunting clients are stored]. I shot it, a young male, 200 pounds approximately."
In early September, a hunting guide and his Alberta client were at the Gatho River in the process of removing the cape (skin) from an elk when they spotted a grizzly on the trail coming towards them, the documents report.
The guide waved his hands, and the hunter fired a warning shot, but the bear only approached faster.
At the guide's urging, the hunter fired repeatedly at the grizzly, which "wandered off to the side." Then a second grizzly emerged. The guide yelled again, and the bear stopped and went towards the first bear. The hunter and guide went in the other direction, and left the elk carcass behind.
They returned the next day and found the dead bear and chewed-up carcass.
lpynn@png.canwest.com
Llamas are vicious and fearless, so it’s no surprise to read they ran towards the bear.
In the upper Fraser Valley (around Vancouver), the sheep farmers use llamas to keep the wolves away; they make great guardians and have no interest in the sheep. One farmer cut his annual losses from 15 sheep/year to just one.
Was he wearing a porkpie hat with an upturned brim? And did he have a smaller companion with him wearing a bowtie? Did you hear anything like the words "pic-a-nic basket"? Just curious.
“”black bear”
Was he wearing a porkpie hat with an upturned brim? And did he have a smaller companion with him wearing a bowtie? Did you hear anything like the words “pic-a-nic basket”? Just curious.”
No....read it AGAIN....
He was not JUST a black bear, but a black muslim bear called Mullah Bubba Yogi....and he DID have a little companion wearing a bowtie and shouting “allahu akbar” named Calypso Louis Bear....!!!
Read “Mark of the Grizzly”, by Scott McMillion...
You’ll NEVER go outside again.
No barrels under 120mm ie 4 inches, otherwise it is perfectly fine... but good luck with the carry permit back home in Canuckistan..
People in the big cities in Canada truly are clueless about the wilderness, most of us from the rural areas know damn well that firearms are a tool that is to be respected...
I didn’t think that such a useful and practical tool would be welcome in Canada, I was thinking more in terms of defense against the occasional errant American bears (apologies to Grizzled Bear, recognizing that most bears are indeed fine neighbors and are upstanding members of the community)
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