The bear cubs were fighting in the trap-and-release cages when conservation officer Dean Miller stopped his truck on the side of the forest service road. It wasn’t a serious fight – more like a scrap between kids – but their ferocity shook the entire truck.
“Look at that power,” Miller said. “You’ve got to remember these are wild animals. You’ll need to stay behind me when I open the cages.”
Miller had driven far out into the backwoods to release four bear cubs on May 11. Another conservation officer had released two others earlier that day at a different location on the Sunshine Coast, but Miller asked that the whereabouts be kept a secret.
“It gives the bears a better chance of survival from potential hunting,” he said. “Also to keep the public safe from any concentration of bears that we release.”
The cubs are coastal black bears. About a year and a half old now, they were orphaned last fall and taken to Critter Care in Langley for rehabilitation after finding their way into populated areas on the Coast.
“They weren’t leaving,” Miller said. “They were relying on human garbage and birdfeed and whatnot because they were just too young to survive on their own.
“Critter Care takes the bears off our hands and feeds the bears until a point where the mother – the sow – would typically kick out the bears naturally,” he said.
Angela Fontana, the senior animal care supervisor with Critter Care, said staff take as many precautions as they can to limit the cubs’ exposure to humans.
“There are only certain people who work with the bears and that’s it,” Fontana said. “We make sure they’re not exposed to a lot of people. When we go in they get locked out. We hide their food and then they’re let back in so they can forage for it on their own. We keep the contact to an absolute minimum.”
The hope is that the cubs will find enough food in the wild and won’t be tempted to return to feeding off human garbage, but Miller said that it’s a serious concern.
“We’re not even sure of the effectiveness of rehabilitation – whether you can take these wild animals that are fairly intelligent and basically try to mimic their food intake and life cycle with a mother, and then put them into the wild and assume that they’re going to initiate wild habits afterwards,” he said.
Fontana was a bit more optimistic about the bears’ chances of survival.
“There have been a lot of studies on it in the U.S. and most of the research that has come out of that is that they do fairly well,” she said. “Pretty much they have the same survival rate as they would if they were in the wild.”
However, this assumes that the bears stay away from human populations. That isn’t always the case.
“What we find is that if we translocate bears into different areas – like a hundred kilometres away, a thousand kilometres away – quite often they’ll come back to their territory. They’ve got an uncanny ability to locate their homes. We’re not too sure how they do that,” Miller said. “We’ve taken bears as far up as Mission to give them another chance, but they somehow make it back to the Sunshine Coast.”
Miller said he couldn’t make a very accurate assessment of how many bears there are on the Sunshine Coast, given the geography and physical connection to the mainland.
“You could do a judgment of how many conflicts we have,” Miller said. “Basically we’re between 600 and 1,200 reported black bear conflicts on the Coast per year. One bear could generate 30 to 40 reports, but I don’t believe the population is anywhere near being fragile. Grizzly bear populations are quite fragile on the Coast.”
Bears typically come into conflict over territory. According to Miller, the high number of conflict reports could be because the population of black bears is higher than what it should be. This leads to food scarcity.
“The message here to the public is not that rehabilitation and translocations are the best option. The best option for the public is really, just keep your attractants away from these bears. That way we won’t have habituated cubs or habituated bears,” Miller said. “If people really want to invest themselves into protecting wildlife, then they need to keep their lives as separate from wildlife as possible. Especially bears – especially a highly intelligent, adaptive animal like a black bear.”
Two of the bear cubs were out and gone into the woods as soon as the cage doors were opened, but the other two hung back, uncertain about venturing into their new habitat. They’ll be eating salmon berries and grubs until they’re big enough to go after deer, but there are no second chances for rehabilitated bears – if any of them return to their old habits of relying on human garbage, they won’t be making another trip into the woods.
