Food, cars pose hazards to Yosemite’s black bears

In Yosemite National Park, humans are bad news for bears.

Last year alone, drivers in the park struck more than two dozen black bears — most of which likely died.
  

Still others were euthanized because they were becoming too hostile, or too accustomed to stealing poorly stored human food from cars and campgrounds.

Last year, the park logged 535 incidents involving bears, according to a park report. That’s up from 422 in 2008, which may, in part, be due to higher attendance, said park spokesman Scott Gediman.

The 2009 incidents caused more than $80,000 in damage, most of it to cars in parking lots.

“We had a lot of bear activity last summer and into the fall,” Gediman said. “It’s always the same problem — improper food storage.”

Public-information campaigns, signs posted within the park, and bear-proof food-storage lockers in camping areas provide ample warning to travelers about how to avoid close encounters of the ursine kind. Yet, the message doesn’t always get through.

Enforcement efforts attempt to put teeth behind the rules.

Yosemite’s Interdivisional Bear Team conducted 210 night patrols in 2009, inspecting 38,573 vehicles and 4,607 campsites. They mitigated 7,862 food storage violations, wrote 1,954 food storage warnings, gave 1,065 verbal warnings, and impounded food 54 times.

“We constantly strive to educate the public, but it’s hard,” Gediman said. “Yosemite sees close to 4 million visitors a year, and we can’t talk to all of them.”

The park attempts also to deter food-scavenging bears from breaking into cars and campgrounds.

Methods include “aversive conditioning” — that is, yelling and screaming, and shooting darts — and relocating the bears, Gediman said. The latter is rarely successful, as bears quickly learn where to go for easy food.

The Bear Team last year set 239 bear traps, captured 21 bears, and placed radio collars on 12 more.

When those efforts repeatedly fail to keep bears at bay, or when bears become too aggressive, they’re euthanized. Over the past nine years, an average of five bears a year have been put down, Gediman said.

“Bears are really afraid of people unless they become habituated to them,” Gediman said. “Our goal is to not have them associate cars and campsites with food.”

After contact with campgrounds and parked cars, moving vehicles are a leading threat to the 750,000-acre park’s estimated 300 to 500 black bears.

Last year, 25 were hit by vehicles, according to the report.
 

The park doesn’t have accurate figures on the number that actually die, Gediman said, as most limp off into the woods and expire later.

While the numbers in 2009 are up from 2008, the overall trend in bear incidents is down.

The bears are less aggressive than they were about 10 years ago, when the park began a campaign to keep them wild, Gediman said.