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Thursday, April 29, 2004

Trash Bins Can Keep Bears Out

By Kathy Louise Schuit
Mountain View Telegraph
    Any day now, spring temperatures will rouse hungry bears on the Sandia and Manzano Mountains from their winter's sleep. Many of the older bears already know that the path to easy pickings lies behind the scent of human trash.
    Traditional trash containers with easily removed lids or no lids are a temptation bears cannot resist, said Jan Hayes, founder of Sandia Mountain BearWatch.
    Humans who live in bear country and dispose of their solid waste in a conventional manner are luring bears into a death trap, Hayes said.
    Motivated by her years-long devotion to East Mountains bears and their survival, Hayes spent much of 2003 researching Web sites, catalogs and leads and has finally discovered a way for bears and unsuspecting humans to escape from the trash trap.
    Bear-resistant trash containers, now available at Davis True Value Hardware in Cedar Crest, have been Alaskan grizzly bear-tested and will withstand the impact of .22-caliber gunfire, said Russ Selleck, an employee at the store.
    By neglecting to properly store their trash and collect ripe and rotting fruit in the fall, people unwittingly draw bears into situations that can only end with dead bears, Hayes said.
    Proper trash storage can mean a bear-proof container or a secure shed or garage, she said.
    Most residents who call the New Mexico Game and Fish Department to relocate bears from digging in conventional trash receptacles, snuffling around their homes and pulling down bird feeders believe the bears will do fine if moved to another, less populated area, Hayes said.
    It's a sentiment that feels good but is not the reality, she said.
    In 2003, Hayes said, 28 East Mountains "nuisance" bears suffered the trauma of being trapped and relocated. Most of them— 70 percent by official Game and Fish count— won't survive a year in the new territory.
    Relocated bears will literally go "over the mountain"— and the cliff and the freeway if necessary— to get back to their home range, Hayes said.
    Many bears removed from the Sandias to the Manzanos, she said, are killed crossing Interstate 40 to get back. Others die on the railroad tracks or in fierce territorial battles with other bears in the new location.
    "We're convinced that what's going to destroy the (bear) population on the Sandias is not the hunting, it's the trapping," said Hayes. "You can't just trap 28 bears out of this small population."
    No Sandia bears died last year as a result of hunting, she said.
    Game and Fish reports estimate that about 123 bears likely survived last year's hunt, nuisance trappings and natural depredation to re-emerge in the East Mountains— Sandias and Manzanos— this spring.
    The bears' survival as a species may well depend on the cooperation of residents, Hayes said, emphasizing that every person living in the Sandias and Manzanos has taken away a piece of what was once bear habitat.
    Using a bear-resistant trash container is a small consideration for usurping the free range of the area's largest native mammal, she said.
    "The population is being diminished quickly," she said.
    The ability of bears in the East Mountains, and most of New Mexico, to survive is diminished even without the human element, Hayes said.
    Most female bears in other states have their first cubs at around age 3. But due to New Mexico's sparse vegetation and the bears' physiology, which prevents them from becoming pregnant until they attain a certain weight and quality of health, East Mountains bears on average reach nearly the age of 6 before becoming mothers for the first time, said Hayes.
    "There's not any other species out there that is almost 6 years old before it has its first baby," she said.
    Coupled with the fact that most area bears do not survive past the age of 10, said Hayes, that leaves only four reproductive years for the average East Mountains-area bear.
    It's not enough to compensate for the losses, she said.
    With most of those losses resulting from bear relocations— which stem largely from resident calls for their removal— Hayes believes the bear-proof trash containers could be a boon to everyone and every bear.
    The bear-resistant containers come in two sizes— 65 gallons and 93 gallons— and cost $200 and $220, respectively. They are constructed of heavy-duty plastic with metal reinforcement, locking lids and sturdy wheels.
    Davis Hardware is the only place in the state that has them, Hayes said, adding that the store's price is just over the wholesale cost.
    To prove their resistance to hungry bear raids, the cans' inventor locked himself inside one with a salmon and a steak, Selleck said.
    After being placed to catch the attention of a wild Kodiak grizzly, the container was subsequently investigated, clawed, gnawed, tumbled, smashed and finally deserted by the puzzled and frustrated bruin, Selleck said.
    "He (the inventor) compared it to being a tossed salad," he said.