I was the bear control wildlife manager for the WFPA and Weyerhaeuser for over a decade based in the Snoqualmie Wa. region. However I travelled to where issues came up.
A consideration for folks that may be unaware. These areas were tree farms, not parks or wilderness areas. They were farms just like corn, or potatoes, onions, whatever. Its confusing because the crop looks like a park not a vegetable. Bears in this habitat struggle with the rain volume during the early spring warm up. This begins flooding dens and areas they would normally still be sleeping in late march or April. Bear in this habitat are a bit migratory. Not horizontally as most migration is seen but vertically due to temperature and snow pack. They get flooded out and go straight down in elevation to find something to eat. Not much available this early. The trees however have been sucking up water for a month now and that cambium layer is thick soft and functional as food. Unfortunately for the tens of thousands of trees the farm planted,.... every one of them is the same exact age. Unlike a natural forest with trees of every age. So when a bear gets into a 10-12" DBH forest ( Diameter Breast height) these are ripe for the peeling. One bear peeling 20-30 trees a day for nutrition might squeak by. Thats 900 trees a month. Now lets say its 8-12 bears in the same tree farm area. That is pushing 10,000 trees a month for one spring season. This 10-12" DBH size last 2-3 years. (springs) now what have we got? 30-50 thousand dead trees in a few square miles. This was a 55 year investment by the lumber company. Consider they also did commercial thinning at 8-10 years and this entire acreage is now a total loss.
Put this into perspective. If a farmer was losing this much of his crop he is bankrupt, now if he lost this much after a 12 -15 year long investment like an orchardist, that is well beyond bankrupt when you also consider the financial investment and taxes, fire prevention spraying fertilizer and the massive cost of road building and removal the countless appliances, tires rubbih and cars abandoned and dumped.
The bears in Aberdeen Wa. area were taken out in large numbers. I don't recall there being a reduction year over year. For 20 years hundreds were removed and then they replenished and we had the same amount the next year over and over. They were rather small on average usually 150lbs or so. Once in a while we took a big one out that was 300. In the cascades is was different. Sizes were much bigger. Average 225, plenty 300-400 and with a few that would push 500. One at 509 actually!
Skulls were small, not a single 21" skull in many hundreds of bears removed. Quite a lot in the 19" range but mostly 17-18.5" was about the biggest you could hope for. Many of my client hunters looked at me as a rather lucky guy with this job. They seemed to have a fun level of jealousy joking about it and that I had this job. It actually seemed cool to be viewed in this light as a professional bear hunter. However as with many things that you start out enjoying as exciting and fun. It became a bit of a stress to me over time. When I filled out log books and filed the info with F&G the WFPA and Weyerhaeuser it became grotesque. I was killing bears at a volume that was embarrassing and emotionally difficult for me to deal with at times. Make no mistake, I was very experienced at this by now. Nobody was better at finding and killing bears than I was. On the surface that sounds boastful. However in my heart it was not at all. Sure I could state numbers that nobody would believe and instantly lose my credibility in a conversation as fantasy or boastful, even "liar". That really hurt me. Not only was I already feeling this in my heart but other sportsman and the environmentally challenged people would say it to me, or with the advent of this internet forum format write the most hateful things about me. Either,.... That there was no way I was doing this at the volumes stated, or that I actually was doing it and I should be struck by lightening for that!
Either way, it was a no win for me in this field. So another fella ( Ralph for those that knew him) and I took it upon ourselves to try a program that would feed bears an alternate food source for the first month of spring. It was a booming success that went from a few tons of Land O Lakes Bear feed we developed with Wa. F&G biologists. That wa had manufactured in Oregon, to over 90,000 lbs the last year of the program. There was no middle ground with this. Either we killed bears as fast as we could or we fed them to the point the cub population had no more natural mortality, (too big a topic to cover here). This grew a population of bears nobody could have imagined. I was killing problem bears that had been on a feeding station that would be less than 8 years old an over 450-500 lbs. Nearly unheard of in nature, at least in the PNW. Food volume was increasing every year by 10-20% that cost was unmanageable and tree damage was starting back up where food was unavailable. We now had both problems.
So if you folks can open your minds to the challenges of a FARM not a forest and realize that this was not a boastful hero status event for me, but rather an exciting thing for a 30 year old guy to be offered at the time. I do understand the farm challenge and the business model, as well as the difficult ugly situation and the public view. It was a very difficult almost bipolar experience as the guy actually doing this work!
Yeah I know what kills bears, I know how they live, how to find them, I lived this life for a good portion of my adulthood. It is not something people would believe me about the stories, or if they do they condemn me for it. It was a job, it ended with investor challenges and property reallocation. There are some pockets of this going on in both USA and Canada. I still get calls to discuss solutions and options they have. I've not killed a bear in a damage control program for a long time. My last was a predatory bear on calves not trees. Its a huge topic with one of the most diverse animals in the world. Think about this one issue and there are many more. Its named after a colour, yet they are in more colours than any wild animal I can think of. Thanks for the time here to explain this better.
I have Ralph Flowers book so I understand the deal.
